Description
Book SynopsisOrignally published in 1979. Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience, only within an illusionary context. But the illusion should not be taken lightly as a false substitute for reality. It is itself a real and positive force: it is what we see and, as such, is constitutive of our reality, even if our critical faculty de-constitutes that reality by viewing it as no more than an illusion. The coupling of poetic presence and poetic illusion serves to describe the relationship between poetry as metaphor and the reader's sense of personal and poetic reality. Krieger examines the workings of selected Renaissance and contemporary poems with regard to this dual nature and evaluates the work of literary critics (himself included) who have been concerned with this doubleness. Poetic Pres
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Part I. Critical History
Chapter 1. Poetic Presence and Illusion I: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor
Chapter 2. Jacopo Mazzoni, Repository of Diverse Critical Traditions or Source of a New One?
Chapter 3. Shakespeare and the Critic's Idolatry of the Word
Chapter 4. Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson's Criticism of Shakespeare
Chapter 5. "Trying Experiments upon Our Sensibility": The Art of Dogma and Doubt in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Chapter 6. The Critical Legacy of Matthew Arnold; or, The Strange Brotherhood of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Northrop Frye
Chapter 7. Reconsideration-The New Critics
Chapter 8. The Theoretical Contributions of Eliseo Vivas
Chapter 9. The Tragic Vision Twenty Years After
Part II. Critical Theory
Chapter 10. Poetic Presence and Illusion II: Formalist Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor
Chapter 11. Literature vs. Ecriture: Constructions and Deconstructions in Recent Critical Theory
Chapter 12. Literature as Illusion, as Metaphor, as Vision
Chapter 13. Theories about Theories about Theory of Criticism
Chapter 14. A Scorecard for the Critics
Chapter 15. Literature, Criticism, and Decision Theory
Chapter 16. Mediation, Language, and Vision in the Reading of Literature
Chapter 17. Literary Analysis and Evaluation-and the Ambidextrous Critic
Index of Names
