The Muses on Their Lunch Hour

By Marjorie Garber

As a break from their ordained labors, what might the Muses today do on their lunch hour? This collection of witty, shrewd, and imaginative essays addresses interdisciplinary topics that range widely from Shakespeare, to psychoanalysis, to the practice of higher education today. With the ease born of deep knowledge, Marjorie Garber moves from comical journalistic quirks (GÇ£Fig LeavesGÇ¥) to the curious return of myth and ritual in the theories of evolutionary psychologists (GÇ£Ovid, Now and ThenGÇ¥).
Two themes emerge consistently in GarberGÇÖs latest exploration of symptoms of culture. The first is that to predict the GÇ£next big thingGÇ¥ in literary studies we should look back at ideas and practices set aside by a previous generation of critics. In the past several decades we have seen the reemergence ofGÇöfor exampleGÇötextual editing, biography, character criticism, aesthetics, and philology as GÇ£hotGÇ¥ new areas for critical intervention. The second theme expands on this observation, making the case for GÇ£cultural forgettingGÇ¥ as the way the arts and humanities renew themselves, both within fields and across them. Although she is never represented in traditional paintings or poetry, a missing MuseGÇöwe can call her AmnesiaGÇöturns out to be a key figure for the creation of theory and criticism in the arts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780823273720

Marjorie Garber

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers and Shakespeare After All, as well as of books on cultural topics ranging from dogs and real estate to cross-dressing, bisexuality, the use and abuse of literature, and the place of the arts in academic life. A member of the American Philosophical Society, she was the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Reviews for The Muses on Their Lunch Hour

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A collection of Garber’s essays on the humanities and Shakespeare in particular. The distinctive contribution of literary scholarship, she argues, is a way of asking questions “about the way something means, rather than what it means, or even why.” This requires “close and passionate attention to the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action.” On change over time, she argues that older authors read a “canon,” the works of accomplished predecessors, while more recent ones read “episodically and in a non-linear or non-historicized fashion, in part because there’s so much to read and ‘sampling’ it has no compelling direction.” Twentieth century authors read their peers, not their predecessors. Her discussion of the anxiety of influence, which might also be the anxiety of impotence, is too complex to summarize, but thought-provoking, bringing in big data and the lack of anxiety many authors have about the past. Garber also discusses theater and postmodern theory as linked in their resistance to the idea of a full, complete character, rather than a fragment of identity, and then connects that to “projective identification” in current political thinking and the paranoid style. This discussion leads her, in her allusive way, to the current valorization of STEM fields over the humanities, as colleges’ ways of projecting that which is abject onto a small part of what is in fact the educational project as a whole. The humanities, “already prone to self-doubt and self devaluation (they are ‘useless,’ they are ‘old,’ they are ‘light,’ they are speculative rather than empirical, they take too long to produce degrees, they are hermetic rather than accessible), become readily complicit in the fantasy of the university that none of these attributes attach to it.” She ends with discussing “Shakespeare” as the representative of these attitudes towards the humanities. Shakespeare is now understood as themes and plots, not language; the plays are “owned” by the humanities in general, not English departments. Garber urges a variant of “strategic essentialism” for the humanities, what she calls “strategic generalization”—affirmatively using the power of the best broad-based lecture courses (like hers, of which I am a veteran) to defend the value of the humanities. The Shakespeare lecture has, she contends, for a century been a central, memorable place for lectures and thus it is a site from which we can defend the pedagogical project of the humanities at large. (Garber recognizes that her history is a history of Harvard Shakespeare lectures, not community college or other lectures, but she sees it as a model to aspire to.) Some best practices of the past, she argues, should be understood as current best practices as well: “asking students to read the text twice through before, or perhaps instead of, reading critical essays; the memorization and recitation of passages; vivid classroom performance (by the instructor and not just the students); and indeed philology, if by that we might mean, today, among other things, an acquaintance with word history and derivation through the OED.” Grabbing onto the podium is literally a way to retake prominence in the coversation about good education. Today’s students “are often engaged by performance, more so sometimes than they are willing to admit. When performance is combined with personal commitment, an intimate knowledge of the work under discussion, and a manifest respect for intellectual exchange, the effects can be exhilarating. Add Shakespeare to the mix, and the odds for success increase, as it were, dramatically.”