5.0 out of 5 stars
Inspired and inspirational, January 26, 2013
By
This review is for: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover)
Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker's answer to
numerous requests for a one volume version of his magisterial two volume
biography of Herman Melville. Reasoning, plausibly, that the moment a
single volume appeared, no one would read the original, Professor Parker
gives us instead this splendid, wholly new book, which is actually
several books in one, among them a biography of a biography; an
autobiography of the biographer retracing all the many paths, places,
departures, travels, destinations, by ways, swings, and roundabouts,
both actual and virtual, by which writers get to know and become
intimate with their subject; an odyssey, at once intellectual,
spiritual, and deeply personal, of an esteemed literary critic and
scholar engaging, grappling, and struggling with some of the largest,
most important and central issues of scholarship and criticism of the
past century. Parker, a brilliant thinker, can match the most arcane
theorists on their own turf, but his is no dry, academic tome: written
with verve, style, breathless energy, and unflagging enthusiasm (in the
best Emersonian sense of that word), this book is also a stunning
critique and stinging rebuke to half a century of critical theory and
practice, both inside the academy and outside it in the world of book
reviewing and commentary, beginning with the New Criticism and going
through structuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, to the New
Historicism, movements that seek to strip literature and the other arts
of every human, social, cultural, and historical context except that of
the work itself as an aesthetic object or structure. Arguing against so
called "organic unity"--which, as it grew out of the New Criticism,
should really be called "hermetically sealed unity"--Parker seeks to
restore criticism and scholarship to the study of that far more human
and humane, to say nothing of real, unity: that of the artist, his
thoughts, his ideas, his feelings, his beliefs, his circumstances, his
life and times, and how he transmuted these through the mysteries of
talent, imagination, and genius into timeless works of art. Passionate,
combative, blazingly eloquent, fearlessly frank and candid, and, yes,
there's no sense using lesser words, inspired and inspirational, not
least in his celebration of the joys and rewards of old fashioned--that
is, patient, dogged, committed, tireless--research, Parker here
demonstrates once again that he is a peerless Melvillian, a standard
setting scholar, and a truly great critic.--Paul Seydor,
author of Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration
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