Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: April 15, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780230601246
Subjects: American - General; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Poetry; Literary Criticism / Poetry; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism
Description: What happened to beauty? How did the university literature classroom turn into a seminar on politics? Focusing on such writers as Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, and James Merrill, this book examines what has been lost to literature as a discipline, and to literary criticism as a practice, as a result of efforts to reduce the aesthetic to the ideological. Green-Lewis and Soltan celebrate the return of beauty as a subject in its own right to literary studies, a return all the more urgent given beauty's ability to provide not merely consolation but a sense of order and control in the context of a threatening political world.