Marjorie Garber – författare

"A Manifesto for Literary Studies," writes Marjorie Garber, “is an attempt to remind us of the specificity of what it means to ask literary questions, and the pleasure of thinking through and with literature. It is a manifesto in the sense that it invites strong declarations and big ideas, rather than impeccable small contributions to edifices long under construction.” Known for her timely challenges to the preconceptions and often unquestioned boundaries that circumscribe our culture, Garber’s beautifully crafted arguments situate “big public questions of intellectual importance” - such as human nature and historical correctness - within the practice of literary historians and critics. This manifesto revives the ancient craft whose ultimate focus is language in action. In this book, Garber passionately states that “the future importance of literary studies - and, if we care about such things, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in the world - will come from taking risks, and not from playing it safe.”

Dream is a central image for Shakespeare, encompassing at once the terrors of the irrational and the creative powers of the imagination—one's deepest fears and highest aspirations. Used in the early plays as a verbal or structural device, dream becomes, in the tragedies and late romances, a transforming experience which leads the dreamer toward a moment of self-awareness. In this illuminating study, now reissued with a new preface by the author, Marjorie Garber skillfully charts the development of Shakespeare's use of dream from the opening lines of Richard III to the magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Drawing on the works of Freud and other psychologists, but basing its argument on the language and dramatic structure of the plays themselves, Dream in Shakespeare presents a coherent and innovative reading of the plays and their developing concept of dream.

The untold story of Shakespeare’s profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group  “A spirited dance of minds.”—Chris Vognar, Boston Globe  For the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group, Shakespeare was a constant presence and a creative benchmark. Not only the works they intended for publication—the novels, biographies, economic and political writings, stage designs and reviews—but also their diaries and correspondence, their gossip and small talk turned regularly on Shakespeare. They read his plays for pleasure in the evenings, and on sunny summer afternoons in the country. They went to the theater, discussed performances, and speculated about Shakespeare’s mind. As poet, as dramatist, as model and icon, as elusive “life,” Shakespeare haunted their imaginations and made his way, through phrase, allusion, and oblique reference, into their own lives and art.  This is a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury—about the role Shakespeare played in the lives of a charismatic and influential cast, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and James and Alix Strachey. All are brought to sparkling life in Marjorie Garber’s intimate account of how Shakespeare provided them with a common language, a set of reference points, and a model for what they did not hesitate to call genius. Among these brilliant friends, Garber shows, Shakespeare was in effect another, if less fully acknowledged, member of the Bloomsbury Group.

The untold story of Shakespeare’s profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group  “A spirited dance of minds.”—Chris Vognar, Boston Globe  For the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group, Shakespeare was a constant presence and a creative benchmark. Not only the works they intended for publication—the novels, biographies, economic and political writings, stage designs and reviews—but also their diaries and correspondence, their gossip and small talk turned regularly on Shakespeare. They read his plays for pleasure in the evenings, and on sunny summer afternoons in the country. They went to the theater, discussed performances, and speculated about Shakespeare’s mind. As poet, as dramatist, as model and icon, as elusive “life,” Shakespeare haunted their imaginations and made his way, through phrase, allusion, and oblique reference, into their own lives and art.  This is a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury—about the role Shakespeare played in the lives of a charismatic and influential cast, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and James and Alix Strachey. All are brought to sparkling life in Marjorie Garber’s intimate account of how Shakespeare provided them with a common language, a set of reference points, and a model for what they did not hesitate to call genius. Among these brilliant friends, Garber shows, Shakespeare was in effect another, if less fully acknowledged, member of the Bloomsbury Group.

A world-renowned critic’s haunting and deeply researched account of the subversive acts of literary revenge performed during the Red Scare hearings of the 1950sIn the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy targeted actors, directors, singers, filmmakers, writers, and prominent scientists, accusing them of disloyalty, subversion, and treason against the United States of America. HUAC and McCarthyism ruined careers and lives. But something striking also happened during the hearings: the poems, plays, novels, and song lyrics cited in the witness testimony spoke back, offering uncanny counter-testimonies and remarkable acts of “poetic revenge.”This book is an urgent, probing exploration of the HUAC, its attempts to bowdlerize and contort facts, and the voices that rose out of history to oppose and subsume it. Marjorie Garber shows how writers versed in the literary tropes of revenge appear in the hearings: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Donne, George Herbert, Francis Bellamy, and others. But the agent of revenge is not the author of the work; it is the work itself, with all its cultural power and relevance, spanning years or centuries.In narrating the destructive history of the Red Scare, Garber powerfully illuminates the constructive force of literature in opposing political oppression.

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts – and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures – metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture. Marjorie Garber, one of the most eminent Shakespearean theorists writing today, asks what is at stake in the imputation that "Shakespeare" did not write the plays, and shows that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy.This Routledge Classics edition contains a new preface and new chapter by the author.

Ranging from classical times to pop culture, this collection will appeal to art historians, feminists, classicists, cultural critics, and anyone interested in mythology.

Ranging from classical times to pop culture, this collection will appeal to art historians, feminists, classicists, cultural critics, and anyone interested in mythology.

Coverage of such major news events as the Gulf War, the AIDS epidemic and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial is analysed by contributors who explore the languages of word and image that produce current events as spectacle.

When the American Bar Association recreated the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the fortieth anniversary of their execution, the jury acquitted the "mock Rosenbergs," finding that in today's courts they would not have been convicted of espionage.The 1950s trial of the Rosenbergs on charges of "Atomic Spying" and "stealing the secrets of the Atomic bomb" was a major event of Cold War America, galvanizing public opinion on all sides of the question. Secret Agents presents essays by lawyers, cultural critics, social historians and historians of science, as well as a reconsideration of the Rosenbergs by their younger son, Robert Meeropol. Secret Agents gives new resonance to a history we have for too long been willing to forget.

What is culture? What are cultures? Are literary texts and cultural texts different? What do literature and other fields engaged in cultural work hav in common? What can literary studies profitably do with other disciplines? What can cultural studies tell us about culture? This volume of work, fresh from the dig, presents a timely account of current thinking on central issues within and beyond the humanities today. Field Work brings together such leading figures as Sacvan Bercovitch and Helen Vendler, Anthony Appiah and Barbara Johnson, Seyla Benhabib and Norman Bryson, Martha Minow and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Marjorie Garber and Susan Suleiman, as well as scholars in areas as diverse as legal studies and Renaissance literature. From a rich variety of perspectives, these scholars excavate and explore foundational questions in their fields. Contributors: K. Anthony Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, Sacvan Bercovitch, Svetlana Boym, Norman Bryson, Lawrence Buell, Patrick Ford, Paul B. Franklin, Marjorie Garber, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Mary Gaylord, Beatrice Hanssen, Barbara Johnson, David Kennedy, Joseph Koener, Laura Korobkin, Meredith McGill, Jeffrey Masten, Jann Matlock, Martha Minow, Gregory Nagy, Stephen Owen, Judith Ryan, Elaine Scarry, Doris Sommer, Mary Steedly, Susan Suleiman, William Todd, Helen Vendler, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Irene Winter

What is culture? What are cultures? Are literary texts and cultural texts different? What do literature and other fields engaged in cultural work hav in common? What can literary studies profitably do with other disciplines? What can cultural studies tell us about culture? This volume of work, fresh from the dig, presents a timely account of current thinking on central issues within and beyond the humanities today. Field Work brings together such leading figures as Sacvan Bercovitch and Helen Vendler, Anthony Appiah and Barbara Johnson, Seyla Benhabib and Norman Bryson, Martha Minow and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Marjorie Garber and Susan Suleiman, as well as scholars in areas as diverse as legal studies and Renaissance literature. From a rich variety of perspectives, these scholars excavate and explore foundational questions in their fields. Contributors: K. Anthony Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, Sacvan Bercovitch, Svetlana Boym, Norman Bryson, Lawrence Buell, Patrick Ford, Paul B. Franklin, Marjorie Garber, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Mary Gaylord, Beatrice Hanssen, Barbara Johnson, David Kennedy, Joseph Koener, Laura Korobkin, Meredith McGill, Jeffrey Masten, Jann Matlock, Martha Minow, Gregory Nagy, Stephen Owen, Judith Ryan, Elaine Scarry, Doris Sommer, Mary Steedly, Susan Suleiman, William Todd, Helen Vendler, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Irene Winter

The symptoms of culture are the anxieties that underlie modern life: the instability of gender roles, the mysteries of female sexuality, the enigma of authority, the desire for greatness in ourselves and our heroes. From concern over fake orgasms to our worries about Great Books reading lists, from wanting God on our side at sports contests to wanting Shakespeare on our side whenever we want to sound important, we are a walking case of symptoms. Whatever the modern illness may be, the doctor locates the symptoms in a box of Jello or in Charlotte's marvelous web, on the football field or in the bedroom, in our great Mr. Shakespeare, in our classroom or the courtroom, or in a sneeze.

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts - and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written.Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures - metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture. Marjorie Garber, one of the most eminent Shakespearean theorists writing today, asks what is at stake in the imputation that Shakespeare did not write the plays, and shows that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy. This Routledge Classics edition contains a new preface and new chapter by the author.

Marjorie Garber examines the rites of passage and maturation patterns--"coming of age"--in Shakespeare's plays. Citing examples from virtually the entire Shakespeare canon, she pays particular attention to the way his characters grow and change at points of personal crisis. Among the crises Garber discusses are: separation from parent or sibling in preparation for sexual love and the choice of husband or wife; the use of names and nicknames as a sign of individual exploits or status; virginity, sexual initiation and the acceptance of sexual maturity, childbearing and parenthood; and, finally, attitudes toward death and dying.

Beginning with the bold claim, "There can be no culture without the transvestite," Marjorie Garber explores the nature and significance of cross-dressing and of the West's recurring fascination with it. Rich in anecdote and insight, Vested Interests offers a provocative and entertaining view of our ongoing obsession with dressing up--and with the power of clothes.

One Nation Under God? is a remarkable consideration of how religion manifests itself in America today.

One Nation Under God? is a remarkable consideration of how religion manifests itself in America today.

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions.

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions.

In this witty, learned, and scrupulously researched book, Marjorie Garber examines bisexuality and its many modes through a dazzling variety of critical lenses: cultural, scientific, literary, and psychological.

Written with characteristic verve, Quotation Marks considers, among other subjects, how we depend upon the most quotable men and women in history, using great writers to bolster what we ourselves have to say. The entertaining turns and reversals of Marjorie Garber's arguments offer the rare pleasure of a true essayist.

The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a book at once serious and highly readable, ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture.Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare

The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a book at once serious and highly readable, ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture.Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare

In this lively and provocative book, cultural critic Marjorie Garber, who has written on topics as different as Shakespeare, dogs, cross-dressing, and real estate, explores the pleasures and pitfalls of the academic life. Academic Instincts discusses three of the perennial issues that have surfaced in recent debates about the humanities: the relation between "amateurs" and "professionals," the relation between one academic discipline and another, and the relation between "jargon" and "plain language." Rather than merely taking sides, the book explores the ways in which such debates are essential to intellectual life. Garber argues that the very things deplored or defended in discussions of the humanities cannot be either eliminated or endorsed because the discussion itself is what gives humanistic thought its vitality. Written in spirited and vivid prose, and full of telling detail drawn both from the history of scholarship and from the daily press, Academic Instincts is a book by a well-known Shakespeare scholar and prize-winning teacher who offers analysis rather than polemic to explain why today's teachers and scholars are at once breaking new ground and treading familiar paths.It opens the door to an important nationwide and worldwide conversation about the reorganization of knowledge and the categories in and through which we teach the humanities. And it does so in a spirit both generous and optimistic about the present and the future of these disciplines.

What is the role of the arts in American culture? Is art an essential element? If so, how should we support it? Today, as in the past, artists need the funding, approval, and friendship of patrons whether they are individuals, corporations, governments, or nonprofit foundations. But as Patronizing the Arts shows, these relationships can be problematic, leaving artists "patronized"--both supported with funds and personal interest, while being condescended to for vocations misperceived as play rather than serious work. In this provocative book, Marjorie Garber looks at the history of patronage, explains how patronage has elevated and damaged the arts in modern culture, and argues for the university as a serious patron of the arts. With clarity and wit, Garber supports rethinking prejudices that oppose art's role in higher education, rejects assumptions of inequality between the sciences and humanities, and points to similarities between the making of fine art and the making of good science. She examines issues of artistic and monetary value, and transactions between high and popular culture. She even asks how college sports could provide a new way of thinking about arts funding.Using vivid anecdotes and telling details, Garber calls passionately for an increased attention to the arts, not just through government and private support, but as a core aspect of higher education. Compulsively readable, Patronizing the Arts challenges all who value the survival of artistic creation both in the present and future.