A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

Notes

n o t e s introduction Nina Levine and David Lee Miller 1. Readers may trace this publication history in detail by consulting the bibliography included at the end of this volume. 2. Contributors to the forum in Shakespeare Studies were Lynn Enterline, Marshall Grossman, Lois Potter, Angus Fletcher, and Stanley Cavell; see Leeds Barroll, ed., Shakespeare Studies: Volume XXVII, (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1999), 19–73. Michael Bristol’s assessment appeared in ‘‘Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama,’’ SEL: Studies in English Literature 1590–1900 38.2 (Spring 1998):363–409; the quoted passage appears on page 401. 3. Situated Utterances was published by Fordham University Press. Participants in the MLA panel were Patricia Parker, Maureen Quilligan, and Leonard Barkan (whose paper has been revised for inclusion in the present volume). 4. In his ‘‘Afterword’’ to the volume, Berger offers a description both of what he learned from the critical movements of cultural poetics, New Historicism , and cultural materialism, and of how his own critical project continues to resist certain key emphases of this criticism. Harry Berger, Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 5. Montrose, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Berger, Revisionary Play, 2. 6. Erickson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), xxxvii. 7. Bristol, ‘‘Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama,’’ 401. 8. As Montrose observes, this way of working, which he dubs ‘‘the Bergerian dynamics,’’ is the principal reason that much of Berger’s work did not appear in book form for several decades: ‘‘his thinking will not keep still long enough for him to ‘finish’ a book’’; Montrose, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 2, 4. Berger himself confirms this in a private communication to the editors: ‘‘When I began seriously doing this in the 50s and 60s every essay I worked on was the 281 282 Notes start of a book. There was a book on Chaucer, on Milton, on Marvell, on Frost and Yeats, on Alberti and perspective, and then more stuff on Spenser. I still keep boxes and file drawers full of the stuff because even though time slips by outside the window, inside I keep thinking once this gets done and then that and then the next, I can go back and finish what I started.’’ 9. The Web site for this conference may be consulted at http://www.cas .sc.edu/engl/Harryfest/index.html. 10. In his thoughtful introduction to Making Trifles of Terrors, Erickson discerns a moral and political purpose in the playfulness inseparable from Harry’s critical style; Erickson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xxx–xxxiii. 11. Montrose, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 2–3. 12. For a conspicuous instance of this gambit, see Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors, 250. 13. Erickson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xxxiii. 14. Grossman, Shakespeare Studies, 63. 15. Paul Alpers offers a well-informed overview of the critical tradition in Alpers, ‘‘The Bower of Bliss,’’ in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 104–107. See also David Lee Miller, ‘‘The Faerie Queene, 1590,’’ in A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, ed. Bart van Es (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 139–165. 16. Bristol, ‘‘Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama,’’ 402. 17. The quoted phrase is Nancy’s, as cited by Anderson. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 20. 18. Berger, Situated Utterances, 22. 19. Bryan J. Wolf, Review of Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance, by Harry Berger, Jr., Art Bulletin 83 (September 2001): 566–569, esp. 567. 1. enlisting in harry berger’s imaginary forces Leonard Barkan 1. Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 103. 2. Leonard Barkan, ‘‘The Theatrical Consistency of Richard II,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978):5. 3. Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 2. harry berger and self-hatred Kenneth Gross 1. See Harry Berger, Jr., Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 501–504. 283 Notes 2. Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 364. It did not entirely surprise me to learn from Berger himself that he has long been fascinated by the novels of Henry James and that...