The Silence of Bartleby [Paperback]

Dan McCall (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 206 pages
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr; First Edition edition (August 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801495938
• ISBN-13: 978-0801495939
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #301,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable for understanding Melville and lit-crit., October 2, 1998

By 

R. B. Bernstein "R. B. Bernstein, Adjunct Pro... (Brooklyn, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Silence of Bartleby (Paperback)

This is the best work of literary criticism I've ever read. It's brilliant, yet at the same time written in an amazingly lucid and modest prose style that invites any reader, not just those experienced in literary criticism, to take part in the continuing conversation about Herman Melville's greatest short story and one of his greatest works of fiction.

McCall dissects the various schools of literary scholarship with singular good humor and self-deprecating wit. His focus on "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street" couldn't be better; this seemingly clear yet deeply mysterious story has attracted the attention of just about every different school of literary criticism, and their ruminations on how to read a great literary work and what to seek in it, laid from end to end, form a spectrum of approaches to literature. Many who are not experienced in literary criticism find this profusion of approaches bewildering, frustrating, and even infuriating. It is the greatest merit of this wonderful book that McCall restores a sense of balance and perspective to the stew of methods of reading a work of literature.

Above all, he pleads, let writers speak for themselves. Don't subjugate the work of literature you're writing about to your own close-focus set of goals or polemical objectives. And, if a work of literature is mysterious and troubling, perhaps that's exactly what the writer wants the reader to take from it.

McCall is a professor of American studies at Cornell and a skilled novelist -- I wish that more professors (and not just of American Studies) wrote with his clarity and grace.

He wisely includes the text of Melville's famous short story as an appendix for the reader. Those who have not previously read "Bartleby" would be well-advised to read that appendix FIRST, and then read McCall's wonderful book.

-- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School