Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations - Hardcover

Harry Berger Jr.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823224287 ISBN 13: 9780823224289

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Berger describes himself as "a reconstructed old New Critic," and his publications over the past fifty years have centered on investigations of the ways in which texts represent both themselves and their situations of utterance. The thirteen chapters of the present book illustrate the range of his inquiry across several cultures and disciplines. They also demonstrate the interpretive richness, the theoretical acumen, and the energetic prose that characterize the work of one of America's premier "close readers." Situated Utterances is divided into four parts. In Part One Berger designs an analytical model of New Criticism and shows how it was dismantled during the decades after the Second World War. He then proposes a reconstructed model in which the practice of ironic and suspicious "close reading" may be directed toward interactions among bodies, texts, and countertexts in different cultural settings. Part Two demonstrates this practice in studies of specific works in three genres: the pastoral Idylls of Theocritus, Edmund Spenser's epic, The Faerie Queene, and the Diaries of Samuel Pepys. The scope of the practice is broadened in Part Three to the connection between cultural representations and institutional change, a connection explored in four chapters that successively examine precapitalist forms of representation, the Old Testament, Beowulf, and the conflict between nakedness and nudity in Christian conceptions of the body. Part Four consists in three chapters on Plato's dialogues, which Berger interprets as critical of the general situation of utterance in a predominantly oral culture. He argues that Plato uses the resources of writing to depict the heroic pathos of a Socrates whose method and message are defeated by the politics of the oral medium. Situated Utterances concludes with "A Conspectus of Critical Moves: The Eleven-Step Program." This is a summary account of the interpretive strategies put into play by the author throughout his long career.

About this title

About the Author:

Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books include Figures of a Changing World: Metaphor and the Emergence of Modern Culture and A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice (both Fordham). Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor's Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University. Her books include Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English; Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (Fordham); and Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (Fordham).

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0823224287
• ISBN 13: 9780823224289
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 396