Quotation Marks [Library Binding]

Marjorie Garber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0415937450 | ISBN-13: 978-0415937450

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Garber (Sex and Real Estate), "a Shakespearean by training and a critic of contemporary culture by predilection," offers an eclectic collection of scholarly essays on the power and importance of language. She examines the moments when language breaks down, leading to dissension and conflict, and insists that "no matter how unexpected its authorities, how multiple and contradictory its associations, and how circuitous its path to meaning," language must be taken seriously. The 14 essays move freely between the most insipid aspects of modern culture (like the obsession with Monica Lewinsky's lip gloss) and the Big Questions of `Who am I?' and `What am I doing here?' In "Vegetable Love," for example, Garber looks at paintings of vegetables to show how they convey sexuality. The analysis is light-hearted and witty ("These peppers are having a good time"), but Garber ultimately treats the issue as profoundly political, because, she argues, how we read sex and gender is one of the key steps for changing social ideas. In "The Jane Austen Syndrome" she celebrates Austen's presence in modern culture but laments the increasingly minor place her novels have in the larger scheme of things. And, in the final essay, she urges humanists to write openly about "human nature" and defends the aesthetic, interpretive, philosophical and intellectual activities of the humanities. Garber's style is rather schizophrenic, at times hilariously funny and based in personal narrative, at other times profoundly serious and firmly entrenched in the thorny jargon of Derrida, Barthes and other theorists. The book does not always answer its most pressing questions, but it's a useful prod to other critics who just might take them up. 8 pages of color illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The nature of quotations, fashion, work, sequels, sexuality, the abbreviation Ms., Monica Lewinsky, textural editing in Shakespeare, literature, and human nature are all discussed in this widely varied group of essays by Garber (English, Harvard; Sex and Real Estate). Garber is especially discerning in her exploration of the media's failure to discuss Lewinsky's Jewishness, paintings of vegetables and their sexual symbolism, and the relationship between literary criticism and cultural studies, and her close reading of Shakespeare includes a fine understanding of how editing has continually adapted the meaning of the literature for each generation. Exploring the worlds of literature, language, and history and proving open to contemporary experience, she invites the reader to appreciate the complexity of modern life. Garber's evenhanded, friendly tone makes this an erudite and absorbing introduction to the art of the essay and present-day literary thought. Recommended for literature collections.
Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Library Binding: 288 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415937450
• ISBN-13: 978-0415937450
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,958,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Shimmying philosopher, or Le style c'est la femme, October 31, 2011

By 

Simon G. Barrett (london, england) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Quotation Marks (Paperback)

This is a ragbag of 'think-pieces', from the scintillating (Garber as art critic) to the irritating (structuralism as the new Scholasticism, with Garber helpfully explaining that to be nonsensical is 'to create *non-sense*') to the pedestrian (Shakespeare - her specialism! - and the Janeites) in a direct line of descent from Against Interpretation.

You can't not like Garber - she finds adding 'Of' to the title of her presentations 'adds a certain clarity' ('Of Jell-O' rather than 'Jell-O', anyone?) and she scintillates where Sontag glowers - BUT - she's mighty skeered of French! She nowhere gives us Barthes' Système de la Mode's French title (she calls it his tour de force - does she mean his chef d'oeuvre?) and has him saying, mediated by Stephen Heath, that the work is the imaginary tail of the text. Now 'queue'(tail) may work in French (aboutissement?) but in English a less concrete equivalence is required - excrescence, appanage, appendage? At least the French would help us form our own judgement. Before the letter rather than avant la lettre was also a new one on me, though later on she takes the plunge. As for Garber's gloss on Buffon, I'm afraid le style c'est l'homme meme does *not* mean style is man himself (that would be lui-meme - 'the man's style is the man himself' would be better) but something like [a man's] style is the very man

I don't want to labour the point - well OK, I do, such fine distinctions being meat and drink to a semiotician like Garber, in this respect recalling our own dear demented dylanologist Sir Christopher Ricks (nice but dotty), but when she's wearing her social-historian-cum-philosopher-cum-philologist hat she's very, very entertaining. There's no headword for sport in the index, but page 62 is a delight; that tawdry tramp Monica Lewinsky gets more column inches than she's ever had in her life; and in her art critic's hat Garber kicks up a storm. Her piece on compassion is worthy of the master Geoffrey Nunberg but those on the Janeites and on character (Fatal Cleopatra) dully populist (why so coy about listing original appearances? even Plath wrote for Mademoiselle!) and not even she can inject life into the bones of fusty Shakespeare scholars, one of whom even wrote a book called Shakespeare's Bones: The Proposal to Disinter Them. Unless there's some irony that escapes me, this is the sound of old men missing the point; is it their Englishness or merely their unfashionableness that attracts Garber? Though Thomas Boston's Human Nature in its Four Fold State of Primitive Integrity, Entire Depravity, Begun Recovery and Consummate Happiness or Misery sounds like a page-turner. As for the worrying misuse of the term meretricious on p208... can she suppose it means meritoriously delicious? Rather the opposite, I'm afraid. Is sly or subversive perhaps the sense she is after, that of being something while appearing to be something else? For someone so keen on etymology this is a surprising lapse. But at least they've actually graced her, unlike Sontag, with an index

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The politicalization of Culture (and every thing else), June 11, 2008

By 

Michael Jay Sullivan (Cambridge, Ma) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Quotation Marks (Paperback)

There are at least 2 Margery Garbers: the highly innovative and esteemed
Shakespearian scholar; and the far left, somewhat superficial, cultural
critic espousing anti-totalitarian totalitarian totalitarianism. This book and her other works on Cultural Studies are superficial, dogmatic, and, imo, a general waste of time compared to her cultural studies forebearers and contemporaries (people like Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Doug Kellner, Raymond Williams..). Having sat in on a few of her classes years back I found her to be a pompous elitist, and a very rigid and radical feminist in a largely post feminist age (i. e. most of early feminist's goals have been achieved). What is worst I feel that there is subtle element of political/cultural indoctrination running through her approach that young impressionable students fail to comprehend. There is a one dimensional element to her argument relating to culture being purely a polititicalization of a hegemonic reality; a mostly neo Marxist argument (see Frankfurt School)minus the robust earlier efforts to reach out to the working class (e. g.;Paris 68).

There is a strong ideological affinity between cultural studies and political correctness(e. g. like the emphasis on race, gender, class) which like radical feminism, has done a lot of good things for our over-mediaized, consumer crazed culture. I doubt that without the efforts of the much maligned "PC" movement we would have am authentic, dynamic black man as possibly, and hopefully, our next president, with a heroic female primary opponent waiting in the wings. Moreover, if Bush had remained popular, the next thing on his neo-fascist/neoconservative agenda would be to be to wipe out cultural studies, in particular, and critical thinking, in general. However, due to it's increasing trivialization (as represented by this and other of Garber's non scholarly works), post 9/11 paranoia, and CS's disparate, exclusionary and,at times disingenuous agenda, Cultural Studies, at least its American variant. has been dying out (see Terry Eagleton's "After Theory"). This is somewhat sad, because Cultural Studies did have some good points (particularly post colonial studies and critiques of the media and the consumer crazed culture). I do hope a slightly more moderated variant of Cultural (or Critical) Studies can take it's place. Nevertheless, I find obvious elitists as Garber carrying the banner of the dispossesd as "oxymoronic" at best; and, also, realize how far her, and some of cohorts, have strayed from the dynamism of their roots in the UK Birmingham School of Stuart Hall and the writings of Raymond Williams. There just doesn't seem to be any more praxis left in cultural studies. Nevertheless there is a "small circle of friend" who still write Cultural Studies related books and articles for each other in the academy- and maybe some of these works will have some value in a larger arena. Marjorie, for her part, should stick to Shakespeare, where she is one of the best.

1 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Garber = Genius, December 24, 2002

By 

anon "Anon" (Oxford, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quotation Marks (Paperback)

To borrow from a delicious deconstructor: The intelligent ease, strength, and flexibility displayed in this book are astounding. It teaches and questions, searches and provokes, stimulates and cautions, with a sure-footedness and intellectual self-confidence that combines scholarly rigor with relaxed scandalousness. Garber is the queen - and king - of culture; and you can quote me on that!