Rereading
Matei Calinescu(Author)
Yale University Press
Published on 24. February 1993
Book
Hardback
336 pages
978-0-300-05657-0 (ISBN)
Description
What motivates us to reread literary works? How is our pleasure, interpretation, involvement and evaluation different when we read a literary work and when we reread it? This book focuses on the implications of rereading for critical understanding. Drawing on literary theory, cultural anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy and previous theories of reading, Calinescu describes the dynamics of rereading and explores the sometimes complementary, sometimes sharply conflicting relationships between reading and rereading. The author analyzes fictional works by Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Robbe-Grillet and Henry James among others, explaining how reading texts is related both to symbolic play or make-believe and to playing games with rules. He reviews the history of reading in modern times, discussing how the Reformation led to rereadings of Scripture and how the proliferation of books during the Enlightenment led to a shift from "intensive reading" to "extensive reading". Calinescu looks at the distinctions between reading and rereading from the perspectives of the age, situation and gender of the individual reader.
He discusses the problems raised by secret or oblique languages and codes - devised to evade censors, communicate with a secret audience of "secret sharers" or play games of hide-and-seek with the reader - and shows that they naturally lead to rereading a text. Calinescu argues that an understanding of rereading is useful in formulating both analytic strategies of practical criticism and a poetics of reading.
He discusses the problems raised by secret or oblique languages and codes - devised to evade censors, communicate with a secret audience of "secret sharers" or play games of hide-and-seek with the reader - and shows that they naturally lead to rereading a text. Calinescu argues that an understanding of rereading is useful in formulating both analytic strategies of practical criticism and a poetics of reading.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
notes, bibliography, index
Dimensions
Height: 162 mm
Width: 242 mm
Weight
660 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-05657-0 (9780300056570)
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Schweitzer Classification