A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life [Hardcover]

Arnold Weinstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2003

“For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise. But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community.... Through art we discover that we are not alone.”

So writes the esteemed Brown University professor Arnold Weinstein in this brilliant, radical exploration of Western literature. In the tradition of Harold Bloom and Jacques Barzun, Weinstein guides us through great works of art, to reveal how literature constitutes nothing less than a feast for the heart. Our encounter with literature and art can be a unique form of human connection, an entry into the storehouse of feeling.

Writing about works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Munch, Proust, O’Neill, Burroughs, DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, and others, Weinstein explores how writers and artists give us a vision of what human life is really all about. Reading is an affair of the heart as well as of the mind, deepening our sense of the fundamental forces and emotions that govern our lives, including fear, pain, illness, loss, depression, death, and love.

Provocative, beautifully written, essential, A Scream Goes Through the House traces the human cry that echoes in literature through the ages, demonstrating how intense feelings are heard and shared. With intellectual insight and emotional acumen, Weinstein reveals how the scream that resounds through the house of literature, history, the body, and the family shows us who we really are and joins us together in a vast and timeless community.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"This book is about the urgency, centrality, and reach of human feeling," begins Weinstein, a Brown University literature professor, proposing to use the key works of a wide range of artists-William Blake, James Baldwin, Eugene O'Neill, Edvard Munch and Ingmar Bergman, among others-to demonstrate the ways in which "art is sustenance; art is transformation." An early chapter manages to breathe new life into one of the most co-opted images of recent memory, Munch's masterwork The Scream, and announces a persistent theme of the links between bodies, which can be hurt, diseased or dead, and feelings. The middle three chapters ("Living in the Body"; "Diagnosis: Narratives of Exposure"; "Plague and Human Connection") engage a host of medical analogies, even comparing an EKG with "soul searching," followed by the quandary of "Saying Death," which asks the rhetorical question: "Is our thinking itself not saturated with death?" While most of the actual works Weinstein points toward go a good way toward posing and answering difficult questions in complex and compelling ways, his book often hems in their multifaceted characters. An epilogue, offering yet another examination of Hamlet, notes: "Depression has its writers"; this meta-work does not finally bring us closer to many of those here, or their mortal coils.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Weinstein dreamed one night that his parents wailed in lament, a scream that awakened the entire household. Stunned by the porousness of the subconscious, struck anew by the inextricable interlacing of body and soul, and inspired to contemplate ever more deeply the role art plays in our struggle to come to terms with death, Weinstein embarks on a fresh and original interpretation of somatically oriented works. Discursive and mind expanding, Weinstein's exciting critical foray maps the great themes and revelations of art, which, he insists, is not an intellectual exercise but rather a grand effort to convey what it feels like to be alive. Weinstein discerns intriguing links between medicine and literature (his chapter "Plague and Human Connection" couldn't be more timely and instructive) and excels at lively psychological interpretations of diverse works in which writers and artists transform objective reality into "the supreme subjective record of life." Blending the literary passion of Harold Bloom with the physiological insights of Antonio Damasio, Weinstein offers splendid readings of the creations of James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Edvard Munch, Kafka, Faulkner, William Burroughs, and Toni Morrison, declaring, "Art connects. Art equips. Art is sustenance." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (August 5, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375506241
• ISBN-13: 978-0375506246
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,069,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modernity and the Doom of Consciousness, February 26, 2004

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (Hardcover)

As a real fan of Arnold Weinstein's terrific lectures on both American and World Literature (from the Teaching Company, but which I borrow from my library), I had high expectations for this book. My expectations were exceeded. That's because in the lectures, Dr. Weinstein focuses almost exclusively on literature. That's not a bad thing. It's a solid traditional approach. But in this text he is also free to draw in art, theater and film where appropriate, and to treat his material thematically, instead of on a book by book basis, a practice which tends to marginalize overall thematic observations. Also, in this format Dr. Weinstein can engage in digressions, and not worry about taking up too much time doing so, as he might in a lecture situation.

Here's an example of a short digression that I found particularly insightful: "One of the ironies of modern culture is its peculiar treatment of high art. Either we subject it to the rigors of modern critical theory, so as to disclose the hidden ideological arrangements it contains; or we piously commit it to the scholar's care, with the implicit view that we "laypeople" do not have the tools of access to frequent such work with any degree of profit. It would be better if we taught our students to view all art as fair game, to approach the most formidable and hermetic works as an aspiring thief might; with intent to break and enter, to discover, steal and possess what is there." Page 334.

Summarizing his insights at the end of this highly engaging text, he meditates on the tragedy of modernity, which he sees as a surfeit of consciousness combined with a lack of human connection. Weinstein illustrates this observation most dramatically through Faulkner's Quentin Compson. First, he cites Robert Penn Warren as having gotten it right when he said that it is not that Quentin suffers from a consciousness of doom, but rather the doom of consciousness. Hamlet was perhaps the first hyperconscious modern, and Weinstein does a fine job of showing how Hamlet and Quentin are connected, too.

Implicit in this, at least in my opinion, is that hyperconsciousness has been promoted by the consumer society. It has filled the world with things, variations of things upon things, filling up our lives with endless vexed choices and in so doing both stokes and attempts to put out the fire of hyperconsciouness. In either case we are seduced into ignoring the fast beating heart of our own humanity as this world of things muffles the scream that goes through the house of our bodies and consciousness.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deeply Felt and Highly Learned, July 26, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (Hardcover)

For a visceral thrill we can always count on Arnold--not Schwarzenegger in this case, but Arnold Weinstein, whose books combine a whole lot of learning with the human touch of passion and the starkness of memory. Arnold's dream of a scream loud enough to wake up an entire household clues us in immediately that he is a sensitive, caring man, with definite issues regarding boundaries. No wonder he then focusses on the famous Munch painting in which space and time are caught up and expressed in a soundless scream, a visceral pain of being that transcends the visual and becomes auditory, or not quite.

Many professors have written reams about Munch's SCREAM, but few have managed to bring it into the mainstream of Western intellectual culture. As he did in his book about spaces and the heimlich, Weinstein constantly surprises and envigorates the tiredest old subjects, I can just imagine what he does to his students!

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, August 21, 2003

By 

Michael E. Lewitt "michael_lewitt" (Boca Raton, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (Hardcover)

Professor Weinstein is one of the great teachers of literature, and one of the great humanists as well. His new book offers a compelling approach to literature, one that is not common in the academy by trying to de-intellectualize the reading of literature by connecting it to living, not thinking, our lives. His interpretations of Edward Munch's art are particularly compelling and novel, while his readings of literary works such as Toni Morrison's BELOVED are original and make one want to run out and read the book immediately. This is a completely original and human book and I recommend it highly.