Situated Utterances : Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations / Harry Berger.
Berger, Harry, author.; Anderson, Judith H., contributor.; Berger Jr., Harry, contributor.; Leicester Jr., H. Marshall, contributor.
2022
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Title Situated Utterances : Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations / Harry Berger.
Author Berger, Harry, author.
ISBN 9780823292592
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823292592
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright ©2005
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (396 p.)
Item Number 10.1515/9780823292592 doi
Summary 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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
Added Author Anderson, Judith H., contributor.
Berger Jr., Harry, contributor.
Leicester Jr., H. Marshall, contributor.
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823224296
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Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
Part one. Situating Utterance
One. The Interpretive Shuttle: The Structure of Critical Practice after World War II
Two. Bodies and Texts
Part two. Situating Agency: Texts against Countertexts
Three. The Origins of Bucolic Representation: Disenchantment and Revision in Theocritus's Seventh Idyll
Four. Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene
Five. The Pepys Show: Ghostwriting and Documentary Desire in The Diary
Part three. Situating History: Contexts as Countertexts
Six. From Body to Cosmos: The Dynamics of Representation in Precapitalist Society
Seven. The Lie of the Land: The Text beyond Canaan
Eight. Social Structure as Doom: The Limits of Heroism in Beowulf
Nine. Fiction and Facticity: Reflections on Christian Nudity
Part four. Situating Socrates: The Sublation of Socratic Utterance in Plato's Dialogues
Ten. Facing Sophists: Socrates' Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras
Eleven. Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscription
Twelve. The Athenian Terrorist: Plato's Portrait of Critias
Part five. Conclusion: Situating Interpretation
Thirteen. Making Interpretation Manageable: An Eight-Step Program
Notes
Index

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