The Practice of Reading

Передня обкладинка
Yale University Press, 1 січ. 2000 р. - 307 стор.
This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails by discussing texts that range from Shakespeare's plays to a novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Donoghue begins with a personal chapter about his own early experiences reading literature while he was living and teaching in Ireland. He then deals with issues of theory, focusing on the validity of different literary theories, on words and their performances, on the impingement of oral and written conditions of reading, and on such current forces as technology and computers that impinge on the very idea of reading. Finally he examines certain works of literature: Shakespeare's Othello and Macbeth, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a passage from Wordsworth's The Prelude, a chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" and "Coole and Ballylee, 1931," and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian demonstrating what these texts have in common and how they must be differentiated through a sympathetic, imaginative, and informed reading.

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Зміст

Curriculum Vitae
3
Theory Theories and Principles
20
Three Ways of Reading
34
The Practice of Reading
54
What Is Interpretation?
80
Doing Things with Words
98
Orality Literacy and Their Discontents
109
Murray Krieger Versus Paul de Man
124
Reading Gullivers Travels
165
On a Word in Wordsworth
187
The Antinomian Pater
205
On a Chapter of Ulysses
222
Yeats The New Political Issue
236
Teaching Blood Meridian
258
Notes
279
Index
297

What Happens in Othello
143

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Про автора (2000)

Denis Donoghue is University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.

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