Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill - by J Green-Lewis & M Soltan (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill is a brilliant and timely response to a serious problem in literary studies today.In recent years, literature classes at all levels, especially those concerned with pressing social, political, and historical issues, have turned attention to the content of literary works and away from the artistry and beauty of literature. This is a rich and exciting corrective that will inspire teachers and students to recognize and appreciate the aesthetic dimensions of literature once again.The authors may well change the direction of literary criticism." - Emory Elliott, University Professor, University of California, Riverside and Editor of Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age

"Soltan and Green-Lewis write beautifully about beauty in literature. They ply the critic's ancient trade in a lucid, precise, and thoroughly contemporary way, and by doing so help the reader discover the greatness of twentieth century literature." - Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University and contributor to The New Yorker

"Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan make a lovely case for teaching literature through the aesthetic lens of beauty... This text is not an average 'how-to-teach' practicum, but instead fits snugly into the humanistic tradition of positing a theory, in this case a methodology for creating a more meaningful relationship between novel and reader, and then testing the theory." - Jane Wood, Park University

About the Author

Jennifer Green-Lewis is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University. Margaret Soltan is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University.