Teaching Beauty in Delillo, Woolf, and Merrill

by Green-Lewis, Jennifer; Soltan, Margaret

• ISBN13: 9780230601246
• ISBN10: 0230601243
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Jennifer Green-Lewis is Associate Professor of English, George Washington University and is on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College. She is the author of Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism.

Margaret Soltan is Associate Professor of English, George Washington University and the author of the blog “University Diaries”.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
A Note to the Reader	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction: Teaching Beauty	p. 1
Beauty and the Emotions: Introductory Lessons	p. 15
Beauty Barred	p. 33
"Aside from a Pushing World": Making Space for Beauty in the Classroom	p. 49
"Beauty Anyhow": Reading Virginia Woolf in Vermont	p. 71
Beauty and Balance: James Merrill on Santorini	p. 95
Beauty After 9/11: Don DeLillo in New York	p. 113
Beauty's Return	p. 129
Conclusion: Falling Towers	p. 155
Notes	p. 167
Bibliography	p. 183
Index	p. 193
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