Research Catalog

Title

Sacrificing commentary : reading the end of literature / Sandor Goodhart.

Author

Goodhart, Sandor.

Publication

Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xiv, 362 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• In Sacrificing Commentary Sandor Goodhart proposes a new view of literary reading. He argues that the writing we have designated as "literary" or "scriptural" is a form of commentary. In the case of our most celebrated exemplars - Sophocles, Shakespeare, the Hebrew Bible - he suggests that we have suppressed the critical function of this writing in the act of exalting it. Constructing interpretive responses that sacrilize and mythologize its efforts, we abandon the inquiry it offers us - an inquiry, ironically, into the mechanisms of reading, sacrifice, violence, and ethical responsibility - the very processes of displacement and repetition that we experience in undertaking such a construction.
• To support his argument, Goodhart offers a close analysis of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, Shakespeare's Richard II, four passages from the Hebrew Torah (the story of Joseph and his brothers, the Ten Commandments, the story of Jonah, and the story of Job), and a talk given shortly after the war by Yiddish poet and playwright Halpern Leivick. Goodhart concludes that criticism as we know it within a formal academic humanities setting, far from expounding the critical reading a given work makes available to us, more often acts out or repeats the very structures or conflicts that are its subject matter.
• As a result, the most powerful forms of commentary upon our myth-making capacities may be found less in these critical texts in the literary texts they model and whose perspectives they would usurp.

Subject

• Criticism
• 17.82 literary criticism
• Lesekultur
• Letterkunde
• Literatuurkritiek
• Literaire kritiek (bijbelwetenschap)

Genre/Form

American essays

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-344) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Literature, Criticism, and Reading -- 1. Lestas Ephaske: Oedipus and Laius's Many Murderers -- 2. "Being Nothing": Kings, Mirrors, and Subjects in Shakespeare's Richard II -- 3. "I am Joseph": Judaism, Anti-idolatry, and the Prophetic Law -- 4. Reading the Ten Commandments: Torah, Interpretation, and the Name of God -- 5. "Out of the Fish's Belly": Prophecy, Sacrifice, and Repentance in the Book of Jonah -- 6. "The End from the Beginning": Evil and Accusation in the Book of Job -- 7. "Writing on Fire": The Holocaust, Witness, and Responsibility -- Conclusion: Reading after Auschwitz.

ISBN

• 0801850843
• 9780801850844

LCCN

95035210

OCLC

• ocm32893720
• 32893720
• SCSB-2092225

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library