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A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

Online ISBN:
9780823241071
Print ISBN:
9780823230303
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

Nina Levine (ed.),
Nina Levine
(ed.)
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David Lee Miller (ed.)
David Lee Miller
(ed.)
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Published:
2 October 2009
Online ISBN:
9780823241071
Print ISBN:
9780823230303
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Harry Berger, Jr., has long been one of our most revered and respected literary and cultural critics. Since the late nineties, a stream of remarkable and innovative publications have shown how very broad his interests are, moving from Shakespeare to baroque painting, to Plato, to theories of early culture. In this volume a group of scholars gathers to celebrate the work of Harry Berger, Jr. To celebrate, in Berger's words, is to visit something either in great numbers or else frequently—to go away and come back, go away and come back, go away and come back. Celebrating is what you do the second or third time around, but not the first. To celebrate is to revisit. To revisit is to revise. Celebration is the eureka of revision. Not only former students but colleagues and scholars come together in these pages to discover Berger's eurekas—to revisit the rigor and originality of his criticism, and occasionally to revise its conclusions, all through the joy of strenuous engagement. Nineteen essays on Berger's Shakespeare, his Spenser, his Plato, and his Rembrandt, on his theories of interpretation and cultural change and on the ethos of his critical and pedagogical styles, open new approaches to the astonishing ongoing body of work authored by Berger. An introduction by the editors and an afterword by Berger himself place this festival of interpretation in the context of Berger's intellectual development and the reception of his work from the mid-twentieth century into the first decade of the twenty-first.

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