The Ordering Mirror: Readers and Contexts

324 Pages·1993·65.64 MB·English

by  Philip Lopate

THE ORDERING MIRROR

The
Ordering Mirror
Readers and Contexts
THE BEN BELITT LECTURES AT
BENNINGTON COLLEGE
Introduction by
PHILLIP LOPATE
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
1993
Copyright © 1993 by Bennington College
All rights reserved
LC 93-2065
ISBN 0-8232-1515-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Ordering mirror: readers and contexts I introduction by Phillip Lopate.
p. em.
Fifteen essays previously published. 1977-1992. in the Ben Belitt lecture series.
ISBN 0-8232-1515-6: $30.00
1. American literature--History and criticism. 2. English literature--History and
criticism.
PS121.073 1993
810.~c20
Printed in the United States of America
To Edith Barbour Andrews
(Bennington '41)
"And now it is my tum!"

Contents
Foreword ix
Elizabeth Coleman
Introduction: The Monologue as Conversation xi
Phillip Lopate
The Uncommon Reader
George Steiner
Divination 2 I
Frank Kerrnode
To the Tally of My Soul: Whitman's Image of Voice 42
Harold Bloom
The Politics of Modem Criticism 72
Denis Donoghue
The Making of a Critic 93
Iruing Howe
The uses of Decadence: Wilde, Yeats. Joyce I IS
Richard Ellmann
Long Work, Short Life I34
Bernard Malamud
Literature and Belief: Three "Spiritual Exercises" I47
Ben Belitt
Summations I64
saul Bellow
viii THE ORDERING MIRROR
Magic and Spells 182
Hugh Kenner
The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty 198
Richard Rorty
Collective Violence and Sacrifice in
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar 221
Rene Girard
Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics 243
Nadine Gordimer
Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas 255
seamus Heaney
What Henry James Knew 276
Cynthia Ozick
FOREWORD
"The Ben Belitt Lectureship Series is a pageant of minds, named
for a poet whose mind is a pageant."
John W. Barr
Chairman, Board ofTrustees
Bennington College
When Bennington College alumna Edith Barbour Andrews (1941)
established the Ben Belitt Lectureship Series in 1977, she called it
"a thanks for the past and support for the future," citing the
"enchantment, devotion, and love for the written word" she expe
rienced as a student at Bennington. Her passion, generosity, and
foresight resulted in a series of lectures-now a collection of
essays-by some of the keenest, most eloquent critics and writers
of our time.
In establishing the series, Andrews specified that the lectureship
be named in honor of her teacher Ben Belitt, and that publication
of the lecture chapbooks honor another Bennington teacher,
William Troy.
Troy, who taught at Bennington College for eight years
beginning in 1938, was a highly regarded critic during the 1930s
and 40s. Among the contemporaries with whom he ranks are
Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, and R. P. Blackmur. In the
preface to the 1976 publication ofWilliam Troy: Selected Essays,
edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman, Allen Tate placed Troy "among
the handful of the best critics of this century." For his teaching at
Bennington and elsewhere, Hyman cited Troy as "the greatest of
lecturers in literature."
The year 1938 marked Ben Belitt's arrival on the Bennington
campus as well as the start of a teaching career that would span
more than five decades. Over that time, Belitt gained international
recognition as a poet, critic, and translator, garnering prizes and
honors for his six volumes of poetry, culminating in a collection of
X THE ORDERING MIRROR
"new and selected poems" published in 1986 under the many
faceted tide of Possessions. His extensive translations of Borges,
Alberti, N eruda, Lorca, a:nd others, and his collection of essays
dealing with the theory and practice of translations are also well
known. His creative work, however, was always integral to his
teaching creatively; and, for Bennington, it is as a teacher that he
is held in such profound esteem.
At the 1977 inauguration of the series, Ben Belitt noted that
"the Lectureship broadens the whole base of the College's continu
ing quest for a meeting of the best minds available for the imple
menting of the study of imaginative letters .... Though the
Lectureship specifies my name, along with that of William Troy,
my former colleague and mentor, I consider the real custodian to
be the total intellectual fellowship which I have shared since 1938
in the service of a collective vision involving a community oflet
ters, sciences, and arts, and embracing all modes of study and
inquiry at Bennington."
The community of Bennington College welcomes the chance
to share that collective vision through this remarkable series of
essays.
ELIZABETH COLEMAN
President
Bennington College