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Benjamin DeMott is one of America's leading social & cultural critics. He has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships & is the author of thirteen books. The Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Amherst College, he has been a visiting professor of American studies at Yale & MIT & holds a Ph.D. mehr anzeigen in English from Harvard. He contributes frequently to the "New York Review of Books," "Harper's Magazine," & other periodicals. He has residences in Worthington, Massachusetts & Anna Maria, Florida. (Bowker Author Biography) weniger anzeigen

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Sons and Lovers (1913) — Einführung, einige Ausgaben9,464 Exemplare
Robert Penn Warren talking: Interviews, 1950-1978 (1980) — Interviewer — 14 Exemplare
The Best American Short Stories 1954 (1954) — Mitwirkender — 4 Exemplare
John Wilkins and Seventeenth-Century British Linguistics (1992) — Mitwirkender — 2 Exemplare
The Massachusetts review. Vol. VII, no. 1, Winter, 1966 (1966) — Mitwirkender — 2 Exemplare

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Geburtstag
1924-06-02
Todestag
2005-09-29
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male

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A dated but helpful analysis of American society and culture in terms of its phobias about dealing with the pressing matter of class and class distinctions, especially regarding the mythology surrounding the idea of "classlessness" despite the perceived "self-evident superiority" of the middle class ethos.

If one is not well versed in the politics and culture of the 1980s this book will be a little difficult to understand; nevertheless, the parallels that could be drawn with circumstances 20+ years later are quite telling. This is a subject that is still ignored at our peril. A helpful reminder that despite the myth there are classes in America, people are treated differently on the basis of class, and societal challenges will not be adequately addressed without some kind of understanding of and sensitivity to class differences and attitudes.… (mehr)
 
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deusvitae | Nov 16, 2010 |
As a teacher, I usually do not review textbooks I have not taught from. But as a teacher educator, I sometimes review them as a handbook on teaching.

Benjamin DeMott’s Close Imagining (St. Martin’s, 1988) is a fat textbook, designed for a college course called Introduction to Literature, not a BIG, fat anthology as surveys of British literature and the like usually are, but too fat to enjoy reading as one should enjoy literature. That’s only one of several reasons I would NOT have used it as a textbook. In the first place, I don’t think any college course should be called an introduction to literature — as if anyone ever reached college age without having made the acquaintance of literature. What an insult to parents, el-hi teachers, and public libraries not to mention television, movies, bookstores, the paperback industry — and the students themselves. Maybe college students are being “introduced” to literary criticism or to the scholarly study of literature or to a particular approach to textuality — but, no, not to literature.

Along with a great variety of poems and stories, DeMott’s anthology includes, in their entirety, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, Sophocles’ Antigone, Moliere’s Tartuffe, Ibsen’s Doll’s House, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. A commendable selection for such a course, but these should be read as scripts and preferably seen, at least on film, not bundled up in a fat anthology.

So, no, I would not have adopted Close Imagining as a textbook. I suspect that relatively few others did, for as far as I know it never made it to a second edition. Only fifteen “used” copies are listed in AbeBooks, ten of them for $1 each. I suspect that they are all complimentary copies sent out free by the publisher, just as mine was.

Too bad really, for DeMott’s approach deserved attention and widespread implementation. In an era in which “close textual analysis” was the method de rigueur for “introducing” college students to the study of literature, Close Imagining was an interesting and admirable departure. Its emphasis is on the reader’s personal response to literary language and on sharing responses with one another. That, after all, is what one hopes for n a lifetime habit of reading, right? It includes not only a splendid collection of poems, short stories, and drama to stimulate response, but also numerous examples of personal responses written by other students, by critics, and by the editor — models of “close imagining,” if you will. Thus, it recognizes, engages, and empowers student response.

I suspect that it was not adopted as a textbook very often for two reasons: (1) teachers of such “introductory” courses often want to choose their own texts and, hence, rely on paperbacks or a set of smaller anthologies, which are more inviting to the student reader, and (2) the reader-response approach to literary study simply never caught on in colleges and universities. The “New Criticism” of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren dominated for over half a century, and was never seriously challenged until post-structuralism achieved academic prominence, or ethnic studies and women’s studies became popular college offerings.

What deserved much wider attention than, apparently, it received was Benjamin DeMott’s design of “close imagining.” His introductory essays, his organization of the course, his editorial counsel to readers, and his practical advice (throughout the text and in a few closing comments) on writing about literature — these are the hallmarks of a praiseworthy handbook to the teaching of literature.

Let me give you just a few examples, beginning with the last item listed above: advice to writers from the editor, himself a successful writer for popular magazines as well as professional journals. Here is one of his final comments. In it, the first statement is fairly ordinary, common in “introductory” writing classes. The second raises the level to that of genuine expertise. And the third reminds the writer that one’s first obligation is to address — and interest — readers.

"Papers [I wish he had said essays or articles or written pieces, as real writers would be likely to refer to their work] that substantiate claims— that give reasons for their conclusions — are more impressive than those that don’t. So, too, are papers that work out their own contradictions and that seek to be comprehensive, taking into account both the evidence that supports the reader’s conclusions and details that inconveniently complicate the matter. Papers that are marked by genuinely personal engagement — evident strength of feeling for the pertinent issues, characters, language — obviously inspire more enthusiastic attention than do those with a distinct let’s get-it-over-with air."

In other words: (1) Give specific details to support your conclusions: that’s just good sound advice for all writers. (2) Give fair attention to readers who might find fault with your interpretation or might have alternative readings of their own. Ironically, by doing this, one is likely to make one’s case more persuasive but also to elicit a more open relationship with other readers. (3) And, finally, nobody’s going to be interested in what you have to say if you aren’t interested yourself in what you have to say. It’s as simple as that. You must somehow communicate your own personal engagement.

“Our goal as readers and writers,” DeMott concludes in his very last paragraph, “is to develop our own variousness — our capacity to adapt our sympathies and intellects to a wide range of demands.” Hear, hear. Isn’t that, after all, the bedrock of education in the humanities — and humanistic education?

The approach to teaching embodied in this text was developed in a series of experimental courses financially supported by the Fund for Improving Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE). As such, it demonstrates a heightened awareness of pedagogical issues and documents effectiveness in student achievement. The course is divided into two sections. The latter, “The Experience of Language,” is a fairly fresh approach to conventional techniques of poetry, fiction, and drama; for example, rhythm, imagery, metaphor and simile; point of view, suspense, allegory; tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy. In dealing with fiction, DeMott recognizes that our personal readings usually focus on a key passage (or two or three). We use that passage both to develop and to articulate our interpretation of the text as a whole. That’s the way “close imagining” transforms the “close reading” of poetry into a “close reading” of longer and less linguistically dense pieces of literature, like novels, stories, plays, and the like. And, by the way, that’s just the natural way we have of talking with associates about a movie we’ve just seen or a book we’ve read in common. (“Remember when this or that happened? Did you notice . . . ?”)

The former section, “Acts of Construction,” is more unconventional in its approach. DeMott recognizes at least three kinds of materials that we use to construct “a personal experience, a personal version” of the text: (1) the author’s words, images, ideas; (2) our own background — personal memories, expertise, remembered information, book learning — that the text calls into play; and (3) our immediate experience of the reading and the responses we recall after we finish our reading of the text. With this building metaphor in mind, he addresses five kinds of responses a reader may use to “construct” a version of the text; we may empathize or imagine feelings; we may identify with or imagine characters; we may observe changes in the text and in ourselves as the text develops; we may evoke ideas that challenge our thinking or ideas that confirm our own personal experience. How much simpler this is as a communal or class approach than emphasis on traditional terminology, and yet how much more realistic and practical in provoking more mature and more sophisticated responses.

And this brings us back to DeMott’s initial remarks to students. He begins with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on Highway 9
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected
And steppin’ out over the line . . . .

Here are just a few of the editor’s remarks in his introductory essay that set the tone for the course and define the practical meaning of “close imagining”:

[Of Springsteen’s lyric] "What sort of person is talking here? Only when we build up a clear idea of the human being . . . do the words begin to come vigorously alive."

"The good reader of a poem, story, or play is a full partner with the author of the work."

"But wherever we start, it’s important that we know ourselves as readers and strive for alertness to the elements of our nature, position in life, and education that are likely to shape our initial response to what we are reading. We don’t do this in order to make light of those initial responses; the strength of first reactions is the strength of our individuality and seldom warrants disrespect. We seek awareness of the influences on us because we want to be able to reach beyond our own preoccupations, standard beliefs, habitual ways of dealing with literature or with life."

"For me the phrase teaching literature means helping students grow as readers who bring poems, plays, and stories to life for themselves. ¶ A good many of the happiest moments I remember in my life have taken place — amazingly — in a classroom, as one of my students, working with a writer, brought to bear a personal response that lighted up a line or a scene or a whole story in such a way that all of us, at that moment, cold feel ourselves challenged, stretched, enlivened."

"One way of connecting ourselves with the humanity preceding our own, thereby clarifying both our location and our identity, is by having in our heads not just the news of the present age but a portion of what earlier ages regarded as interesting and ponderable."

"The very act of perception itself — taking in the reality around us — depends on our power to animate, to bring the world fully to life. 'We animate what we see,' said the great American thinker and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'we see only what we animate.'"
… (mehr)
 
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bfrank | Dec 27, 2007 |

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