Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
A rich collection of essays on reading, writing, and identity from our finest writer in English, V. S. Naipaul. Literary Occasions charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of written expression, and of fiction in particular. Literary Occasions brings together some true gems of literary criticism and personal reflection. Reflecting on the full scope of his career, V. S. Naipaul takes us through his beginnings as a writer: his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and evolution of ideas about the proper relations of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities; and his father’s influence, revealed in an intriguing preface to the only book he ever published. These moving and thoughtful pieces are accompanied by Naipaul’s profound and severe discussions of other authors, including his signal essay on Conrad, and the classic “Indian Autobiographies.” The collection is completed by “Two Worlds,” the magnificent Nobel Address, in which Naipaul considers the indivisibility of the literary and the personal. Sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions is both a subtle recollection of Naipaul’s past, and the only available organized statement of his literary ideas. A valuable companion to last year’s The Writer and the World, this is an essential volume from a man who has devoted his life to the written word.
Literary Occasions
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
A rich collection of essays on reading, writing, and identity from our finest writer in English, V. S. Naipaul. Literary Occasions charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of written expression, and of fiction in particular. Literary Occasions brings together some true gems of literary criticism and personal reflection. Reflecting on the full scope of his career, V. S. Naipaul takes us through his beginnings as a writer: his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and evolution of ideas about the proper relations of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities; and his father’s influence, revealed in an intriguing preface to the only book he ever published. These moving and thoughtful pieces are accompanied by Naipaul’s profound and severe discussions of other authors, including his signal essay on Conrad, and the classic “Indian Autobiographies.” The collection is completed by “Two Worlds,” the magnificent Nobel Address, in which Naipaul considers the indivisibility of the literary and the personal. Sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions is both a subtle recollection of Naipaul’s past, and the only available organized statement of his literary ideas. A valuable companion to last year’s The Writer and the World, this is an essential volume from a man who has devoted his life to the written word.
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
A rich collection of essays on reading, writing, and identity from our finest writer in English, V. S. Naipaul. Literary Occasions charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of written expression, and of fiction in particular. Literary Occasions brings together some true gems of literary criticism and personal reflection. Reflecting on the full scope of his career, V. S. Naipaul takes us through his beginnings as a writer: his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and evolution of ideas about the proper relations of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities; and his father’s influence, revealed in an intriguing preface to the only book he ever published. These moving and thoughtful pieces are accompanied by Naipaul’s profound and severe discussions of other authors, including his signal essay on Conrad, and the classic “Indian Autobiographies.” The collection is completed by “Two Worlds,” the magnificent Nobel Address, in which Naipaul considers the indivisibility of the literary and the personal. Sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions is both a subtle recollection of Naipaul’s past, and the only available organized statement of his literary ideas. A valuable companion to last year’s The Writer and the World, this is an essential volume from a man who has devoted his life to the written word.
Literary Occasions
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 033052934X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
A remarkable companion piece to The Writer and the World, Naipaul’s previous volume of highly acclaimed essays, Literary Occasions is a stirring contribution to the fading art of the critic, and a revelation of a life in letters. In these eleven extended pieces V. S. Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of the written word and of fiction in particular. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first youthful efforts at writing them; the evolution of his ideas about the extent to which individual cultures shape identities and influence literary forms; observations on Conrad, his literary forebear; the moving preface he wrote to the only book his father ever published; and his reflections on his career, ending with his celebrated Nobel lecture, ‘Two Worlds’. ‘He is an exceptionally good and perceptive critic – a few passages on Dickens are worth whole books by others – and when he addresses the art of fiction he not only writes beautifully (as always) but with complete humility’ New Statesman
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 033052934X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
A remarkable companion piece to The Writer and the World, Naipaul’s previous volume of highly acclaimed essays, Literary Occasions is a stirring contribution to the fading art of the critic, and a revelation of a life in letters. In these eleven extended pieces V. S. Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of the written word and of fiction in particular. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first youthful efforts at writing them; the evolution of his ideas about the extent to which individual cultures shape identities and influence literary forms; observations on Conrad, his literary forebear; the moving preface he wrote to the only book his father ever published; and his reflections on his career, ending with his celebrated Nobel lecture, ‘Two Worlds’. ‘He is an exceptionally good and perceptive critic – a few passages on Dickens are worth whole books by others – and when he addresses the art of fiction he not only writes beautifully (as always) but with complete humility’ New Statesman
Occasions for Poetry
Author: Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512827312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
How Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire Occasions for Poetry is a history of how Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman elites at the imperial court turned to poetry to craft distinctive modes of expression in order to articulate their own place within the Ottoman sultanate. Placing Ottoman court poetry in its social and historical context, Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano argues that poetry functioned as a political act. Aguirre-Mandujano examines the occasions that compelled the Ottomans to compose poetry, to present it to their superiors, to share it with their peers, and to spend considerable efforts and time to make poetry often and to make it well. He explores how scholars and bureaucrats interacted with each other through poetic imagery, revealing how literary language affected bureaucratic practice. Poetry was not only an artistic activity, but also a means to advance or save one’s own political or bureaucratic career. For the Ottoman elite, poetry was more than a creative activity or a flattering description of Ottoman power and expansion; it was a vehicle to shape and mold their social reality. The language and genres created and used by these early modern Ottomans would define both a literary tradition and the shape of imperial politics and power for almost six centuries, until the end of the empire in the twentieth century.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512827312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
How Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire Occasions for Poetry is a history of how Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman elites at the imperial court turned to poetry to craft distinctive modes of expression in order to articulate their own place within the Ottoman sultanate. Placing Ottoman court poetry in its social and historical context, Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano argues that poetry functioned as a political act. Aguirre-Mandujano examines the occasions that compelled the Ottomans to compose poetry, to present it to their superiors, to share it with their peers, and to spend considerable efforts and time to make poetry often and to make it well. He explores how scholars and bureaucrats interacted with each other through poetic imagery, revealing how literary language affected bureaucratic practice. Poetry was not only an artistic activity, but also a means to advance or save one’s own political or bureaucratic career. For the Ottoman elite, poetry was more than a creative activity or a flattering description of Ottoman power and expansion; it was a vehicle to shape and mold their social reality. The language and genres created and used by these early modern Ottomans would define both a literary tradition and the shape of imperial politics and power for almost six centuries, until the end of the empire in the twentieth century.
(Woman) Writer
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Dutton Books
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Book Description
Unpublished printer's proof of the title: (Woman writer): occasions and opportunities.
Publisher: Dutton Books
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Book Description
Unpublished printer's proof of the title: (Woman writer): occasions and opportunities.
The Fiction of Occasion in Hellenistic and Roman Poetry
Author: Adrian Gramps
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110731649
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The aim of this book is to devise a method for approaching the problem of presence in Hellenistic and Roman poetry. The problem of presence, as defined here, is the problem of the availability or accessibility to the reader of the fictional worlds disclosed by poetry. From Callimachus’ Hymns to the Odes of Horace, poets of this era repeatedly challenge readers by beckoning them to explore fictive spaces which are at once familiar and otherworldly, realms of the imagination which are nevertheless firmly rooted in the lived reality of the poets and their contemporaries. We too, when we read these poems, may feel simultaneously a sense of being transported to a world apart and of being seized upon by the poem’s address in the here and now of reading. The fiction of occasion is proposed as a new conceptual tool for understanding how these poems produce such problematic presences and what varieties of experience they make possible for their readers. The fiction of occasion is defined as a phenomenon whereby a poem is fictionally framed as part of a material event or ‘occasion’ with which the reader is invited to engage through the medium of the senses. The book explores this concept through close readings of key authors from the corpus of first-person poetry written in Greek and Latin between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, with a focus on Callimachus, Bion, Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. The ultimate purpose of these readings is to move towards developing a new vocabulary for conceptualising ancient poetry as an embodied experience.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110731649
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The aim of this book is to devise a method for approaching the problem of presence in Hellenistic and Roman poetry. The problem of presence, as defined here, is the problem of the availability or accessibility to the reader of the fictional worlds disclosed by poetry. From Callimachus’ Hymns to the Odes of Horace, poets of this era repeatedly challenge readers by beckoning them to explore fictive spaces which are at once familiar and otherworldly, realms of the imagination which are nevertheless firmly rooted in the lived reality of the poets and their contemporaries. We too, when we read these poems, may feel simultaneously a sense of being transported to a world apart and of being seized upon by the poem’s address in the here and now of reading. The fiction of occasion is proposed as a new conceptual tool for understanding how these poems produce such problematic presences and what varieties of experience they make possible for their readers. The fiction of occasion is defined as a phenomenon whereby a poem is fictionally framed as part of a material event or ‘occasion’ with which the reader is invited to engage through the medium of the senses. The book explores this concept through close readings of key authors from the corpus of first-person poetry written in Greek and Latin between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, with a focus on Callimachus, Bion, Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. The ultimate purpose of these readings is to move towards developing a new vocabulary for conceptualising ancient poetry as an embodied experience.
The Poetics of the Occasion
Author: Marian Zwerling Sugano
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719469
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
"Although Mallarme is commonly viewed as the high priest of the autonomous work of art, by far the bulk of his actual poetic writing was occasional verse. With few exceptions the works written after 1873 manifest a reinvestment in the world subsequent to the metaphysical crises of the 1860's. In addition to the "Tombeaux," the toasts, and certain of the "Eventails," Mallarme composed the Vers de circonstance, more than 450 quatrains and distichs inscribed on envelopes, postcards, calling cards, Easter eggs, small stones, photographs, and jugs of Calvados. This is the first comprehensive reading and analysis of the neglected late poetry, heretofore dismissed as of marginal interest." "This book has a dual purpose. By exploring the occasional verse of Mallarme, which itself thematizes the problematics of the occasion, the author seeks to rehabilitate such writing for critical study. She does this not by proclaiming its high seriousness, but by insisting on its casual, amenable, public nature. Unlike previous critics, who have often apologized for straying into the fringes of the canon, the author delights in the marginal, insisting that in a poetics of the occasion, traditional oppositions such as center/margin become skewed and break down." "The author's second purpose is to come to a better understanding of Mallarme in light of what he actually wrote, rather than the work projected in his correspondence and prose articles, which has claimed so much critical attention. Each of the chapters of the book highlights one aspect of occasional poetry through an investigation of representative texts, both canonical and occasional. The author also discusses the relationship between Mallarme's poetics and the plastic arts, tracing the changing conception of the representation of the monument from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as well as the correspondences between the more radical aspects of Mallarme's practice of writing and the contemporary arts." "Far more than a study of a single writer, this book is the first to propose a pragmatic definition of occasional literature, to undertake a broad study of the problem of occasion in literature, and to trace the historical trajectory of occasional writing as a specific discourse. The book is illustrated with 27 halftones."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719469
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
"Although Mallarme is commonly viewed as the high priest of the autonomous work of art, by far the bulk of his actual poetic writing was occasional verse. With few exceptions the works written after 1873 manifest a reinvestment in the world subsequent to the metaphysical crises of the 1860's. In addition to the "Tombeaux," the toasts, and certain of the "Eventails," Mallarme composed the Vers de circonstance, more than 450 quatrains and distichs inscribed on envelopes, postcards, calling cards, Easter eggs, small stones, photographs, and jugs of Calvados. This is the first comprehensive reading and analysis of the neglected late poetry, heretofore dismissed as of marginal interest." "This book has a dual purpose. By exploring the occasional verse of Mallarme, which itself thematizes the problematics of the occasion, the author seeks to rehabilitate such writing for critical study. She does this not by proclaiming its high seriousness, but by insisting on its casual, amenable, public nature. Unlike previous critics, who have often apologized for straying into the fringes of the canon, the author delights in the marginal, insisting that in a poetics of the occasion, traditional oppositions such as center/margin become skewed and break down." "The author's second purpose is to come to a better understanding of Mallarme in light of what he actually wrote, rather than the work projected in his correspondence and prose articles, which has claimed so much critical attention. Each of the chapters of the book highlights one aspect of occasional poetry through an investigation of representative texts, both canonical and occasional. The author also discusses the relationship between Mallarme's poetics and the plastic arts, tracing the changing conception of the representation of the monument from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as well as the correspondences between the more radical aspects of Mallarme's practice of writing and the contemporary arts." "Far more than a study of a single writer, this book is the first to propose a pragmatic definition of occasional literature, to undertake a broad study of the problem of occasion in literature, and to trace the historical trajectory of occasional writing as a specific discourse. The book is illustrated with 27 halftones."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Montale and the Occasions of Poetry
Author: Claire de C.L. Huffman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400855462
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
The six overlapping studies that make up this book on the poetry of Eugenio Montale analyze a large number of individual poems and, with Le occasioni (1939) as a point of reference, show how they shape and are shaped by changes and continuities that extend from the earliest poems of Ossi di seppia (1925) to the notoriously difficult poems in his culminating achievement, La bufera (1956). Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400855462
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
The six overlapping studies that make up this book on the poetry of Eugenio Montale analyze a large number of individual poems and, with Le occasioni (1939) as a point of reference, show how they shape and are shaped by changes and continuities that extend from the earliest poems of Ossi di seppia (1925) to the notoriously difficult poems in his culminating achievement, La bufera (1956). Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The Writer and the World
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330529366
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 653
Book Description
During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional and sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest pieces of reflection and reportage – many of which have been unavailable for some time – are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the prism of his experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which the world works. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul’s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding. ‘All [of these essays] are worth reading (and rereading), both for the contemporary and historical information and insight they artfully impart and for what they tell us about a uniquely complex writer’ Spectator
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330529366
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 653
Book Description
During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional and sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest pieces of reflection and reportage – many of which have been unavailable for some time – are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the prism of his experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which the world works. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul’s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding. ‘All [of these essays] are worth reading (and rereading), both for the contemporary and historical information and insight they artfully impart and for what they tell us about a uniquely complex writer’ Spectator
A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses
Author: Anne Trubek
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205812
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Book Description
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205812
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Book Description
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.
Getting Personal
Author: Nancy K. Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317960939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185
Book Description
In the era of identity politics, whose is the I of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal, Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life. Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing as a feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature. Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317960939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185
Book Description
In the era of identity politics, whose is the I of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal, Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life. Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing as a feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature. Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on.