Loaded Words

by Marjorie Garber

Overview

One of our most important cultural critics, at the top of her form, comments on a wide range of topics in both general and academic culture.

In Loaded Words the inimitable literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber invites readers to join her in a rigorous and exuberant exploration of language. What links the pieces included in this vibrant new collection is the author's contention that all words are inescapably loaded-that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming-and that such loading is what makes language matter.

Garber casts her keen eye on terms from knowledge, belief, madness, interruption, genius, and celebrity to humanities, general education, and academia. Included here are an array of stirring essays, from the title piece, with its demonstration of the importance of language to our thinking about the world; to the superb "Mad Lib," on the concept of madness from Mad magazine to debates between Foucault and Derrida; to pieces on Shakespeare, "the most culturally loaded name of our time," and the Renaissance.

With its wide range of cultural references and engaging style coupled with fresh intellectual inquiry, Loaded Words will draw in and enchant scholars, students, and general readers alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823242054
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2012
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

MARJORIE GARBER is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Among her many books are Symptoms of Culture, Quotation Marks, Shakespeare After All, and The Use and Abuse of Literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Loaded Questions
Part I
1 Loaded Words
2 Good to Think With
3 Mad Lib
4 Third Person Interruption
5 Our Genius Problem
6 Anatomy of a Honey Trap
7 Dig It: Searching for Fame in All the Wrong Places

Part II
8 Shakespeare in Slow Motion
9 Character Flaws
10 The Marvel of Peru
11 Translating F.O. Matthiessen
12 The Shakespeare Brand

Part III
13 After the Humanities
14 The Gypsy Scholar and the Scholar Gypsy
15 Radical Numbers
16 General Education

Editorial Reviews

Self-styled “peripatetic writer,” Harvard Shakespearean, and culture critic Garber (The Use and Abuse of Literature) collects loosely connected but fascinating essays (about half of them previously published in journals and books) on a range of themes. No word is more loaded than “madness,” which she considers in its ’50s and ’60s expression and incarnation in Mad magazine and Mad Libs. She considers the significance of reading “in slow motion,” focusing on the words rather than on external contexts, and the cultural implications of Shakespeare astride the literary canon. She uses the occasion of Patti Smith winning a National Book Award (Garber was on the panel that selected her book Just Kids) to meditate on celebrity lives as mythologies (like celebrities, “whatever did, they were always good copy”). And finally, she pleads for reinvigorating the humanities, which she sees as plagued by low self-esteem, through the fostering of collaboration, a new literary commitment, and a reduction of hyperspecialization and overinsulation within English departments. Scholarship cross-fertilized by a new engagement with the political world remains Garber’s vision. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A vigorous, revealing collection about the pleasures and revelations of close reading, whether it involves words, books, biographies or ideas. Renowned scholar Garber (English/Harvard Univ.; The Use and Abuse of Literature, 2011, etc.) is a deep thinker who never has to look far for inspiration--life and literature are full of untapped mysteries, and the more you slow down, the more you see. She finds large-scale drama in the small, abstract or arcane, reveling in how ordinary words keep secrets, how exclusive words (like genius) become clichés, how a rare edition of Hamlet can conceal hidden agendas and how historic figures become advertising "brands." An essay on the word mad forges a credible connection between Mad magazine, the TV show Mad Men, Hitchcock's North by Northwest and that original mad man, Hamlet. Shakespeare recurs throughout the book; as she demonstrated in her massive guidebook Shakespeare After All (2004), he's the lens through which Garber often sees the world. The same goes for the great critic F.O. Matthiessen, recalled here in a superb tribute focusing on how his background in Elizabethan studies prepared him to understand 19th-century American literature. The use of the phrase "honey trap" in newspaper accounts of Julian Assange's rape trial leads to Winnie the Pooh and the possible anti-German bias of "hunny." Tackling Coleridge's "unfinished" poem "Kubla Khan," Garber raises questions as to what it means for a work of art to be cut short. In a final essay, the author offers a stirring defense of the humanities as the division of the university that deliberately doesn't solve problems; it wrestles with interpretations, not final answers. The same goes for this intellectually generous and rewarding book. Like its many subjects, it repays the close attention it commands.

Kirkus Reviews

"Masterfully bridging the gap between high culture and low, Garber's witty, accessible essays give us surprising angles on a host of topics."-Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

"A vigorous, revealing collection about the pleasures and revelations of close reading, whether it involves words, books, biographies, or ideas."-Kirkus Reviews

"There is no one writing today who can make the dizzying leaps from the lofty summits of the academy to the down-and-dirty life in the street with such wit, clarity, and originality as Marjorie Garber does. In her latest collection of essays, Loaded Words, she takes her show to the place where it began—with language itself. She reads the words of our culture in new and explosive ways and puts them back together again so that they're never quite the same."-Leonard Barkan, Princeton University

"Marjorie Garber has crafted an impressive career built upon words. Whether looking at the time-tested plays of Shakespeare or the ephemeral discourses of contemporary culture, she takes nothing about language for granted. Spirited master of both high and low, she compellingly demonstrates that the words we thought we knew are full of unexpected turns, shifts in meaning, and double dealings. This new collection of essays is at once vintage Garber and richly surprising."-Nancy J. Vickers, Bryn Mawr College

"Self-styled 'peripatetic writer,' Harvard Shakespearean, and culture critic Garber collects loosely connected but fascinating essays on a range of themes."-Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher