A Temple of Texts (American Literature Series) [Paperback]

William H. Gass (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1564784681 | ISBN-13: 978-1564784681 | Edition: First Edition

Winner of the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, A Temple of Texts is the latest critical collection from one of America's greatest essayists and novelists. Here, William H. Gass pays homage to the readerly side of the literary experience by turning his critical sensibility upon all the books that shaped his own development as a reader, writer, and human being. With essays on figures ranging from William Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein to Flann O'Brien and Robert Burton, Gass creates a "temple" of readerly devotion, a collection of critical explorations as brilliant and incisive as readers have come to expect from this literary master, but also a surprisingly personal window into the author's own literary development.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gass loves words. His prose is extravagant, lush, sometimes overly florid (as when he talks of Flann O'Brien's death on "the first Fools' Day of April, 1966"), and in this new collection, his words have a tendency to get in the way of his subject matter. Which is a shame, because Gass, a novelist and award-winning critic, writes about books and authors often ignored by mainstream readers: Rabelais, Robert Burton, Elias Canetti. Then again, Gass doesn't write for the mainstream. He is the strangest of academic amalgams: a self-professed lover of the avant-garde as represented by Gertrude Stein, Flann O'Brien and Robert Coover, while at the same time he extols the virtues of what he calls "the classics." His definition of classic is, to be sure, expansive, but he applies an old-fashioned standard to all literature, declaring the need for those classics as the basis for a varied literary diet. Despite the occasional gem, such as a touching, if rambling, tribute to William Gaddis, the essays often devolve into little more than a brief synopsis of plot. This volume is appropriately titled, because Gass approaches his subjects reverently, but as in a temple, the service depends as much on the ritual of devotion as on innovation in thought. (Feb. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

It's unfortunate that the term critic often connotes negativity and sniping. What novelist and professor of philosophy William Gass practices in his critical essays is more in the line of learned appreciation or ecstatic advocacy. Though many of these pieces first appeared in other books as forwards, afterwards, and introductions, reviewers feel that A Temple of Texts may be his most cohesive collection yet. Gass's allusions and elaborate metaphors don't make for skimming. But for these willing to dig in, the author fulfills his mission "to provide suggestions of where best to start, what to expect, how to look or read or listen; and to give reasons why the work should be treated with seriousness and respect."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 419 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr; First Edition edition (September 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564784681
• ISBN-13: 978-1564784681
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #723,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars William Gass a High Priest in This Temple of Texts, January 27, 2010

By 

J. T. MORRISSEY (Illinois) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Temple of Texts (American Literature Series) (Paperback)

A Temple of Texts William H. Gass is one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, and luckily for us he's also one of the great writers. In this collection of essays, Gass tackles a variety of topics related to literature and culture. He writes about complex ideas in prose that is easy and enjoyable to read. His sarcastic wit is often laugh-outloud funny. Each essay is a reprint from a previously published article or book introduction. I recall reading his very humorous and insightful introduction, which is included here, to William Gass's novel The Recognitions, and it was fun to read it again in this new context. Anyone interested in major writers of the Twentieth Century should include Gass's collection on her reading list.

26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Twice-removed tales: mandarin lit crit in the high style, December 27, 2006

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John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Temple of Texts (Hardcover)

This collects introductions to new editions of literary works, musings on books and ideas, and a variety of book reviews, some brief, some-- as with that of Susan Neiman's philosophical study of evil, extended. The high style Gass favors, and which the Washington Post's Michael Dirnda pours/pores over, does demand concentration. It will reward effort, but the amounts of inspiration that I gained proved inconsistent. It's like chewing through a slice of dense fruit cake. Most hate it, some tolerate it, and only a few long for it. But all can admire, if often from a safe distance, the craft with which the cherries are glazed and the citron positioned. Embedded in the middle, one may find a tasty bit suddenly within a lot of compacted mass. The opening essay, to move to Gass' own analogy, is addressed to a young person encountering the classic works, typifies Gass' approach: you will not become a better chess player unless you pit yourself against your betters, and unless you learn from your subsequent losses.

His essays tend to repeat key points in the actual novels he introduces, and this tendency can be either instructive in serving as a reminder of your own past readings of the work under scrutiny, or dull, if you have little interest in the work Gass is analyzing. Many of these entries are wrenched out of their original contexts, and the assortment of short pieces probably will reveal to you what I found: a lot of them you skim, fewer you pause over, and once in a while you stop and dive in deep, the prose washing over you. It's hard to stay afloat for long: you either rush out of this book and never look back, or you wear yourself out as you attempt to keep up with Gass' marathon mental stamina. I suppose it's a sign of my own limitations, compared to Gass' erudite appetite, that I was not moved sufficiently to read, or re-read, any of the works he studies or reviews. His own treatments exhaust the casually curious potential reader; Gass, consumed in his own process of analysis, shares so much with us that we feel satiated just by peering over his shoulder at what he directs our gaze to within the text once, now twice, removed.

Gass criticizes the Net ("interbunk" he sneers) for lacking what a library possesses: the construct of a collection of minds, vetted for print, and all at the tip of your hand for perusal, within a collated and orderly fashion. But, since I am reviewing this book on the Net where you are perusing my post, perhaps Gass' critique of the non-printed page dissemination of information that we gather so as to search within for wisdom itself lacks full insight. I suppose, professional or professorial media critics notwithstanding, that decades will pass before the ramifications of our shift show as a massive dumbing down of billions of us, a play for corporate and state demogoguery, a savvy manipulation of our desires for consumerism and celebrity, or an inspired new medium that liberates the minds throughout the world and beyond limits of geography, educational access, regime, or privilege.

Gass, well in his eighties now, does impressively draw upon a half-century of teaching and even longer reading done very very assiduously. He puts any of us in the younger generations, in lives tempted by flashier media, to shame. I suppose those of us decades behind Gass in vast amounts of rarified reading, breadth of knowledge, and hard-won philosophical rigor will never catch up, as we pass our time learning from sources likely as not beyond the page. Many of us admittedly do less learning and more wallowing in the information the media sloshes over our willing selves, submerged in a demotic tide that Gass measures as polluted and corrosive. This is why the library represents disciplined effort for Gass, as opposed to the way you and I are sharing my opinions about this book right now. Is the active-passive reader-writer dichotomy, however, merely by its precedence the better way? Gass evokes in an essay on secondhand books powerfully the seductive appeal of reading pages others have passed over before you. Yet, as with the libraries he praised, these essays often carry a bit of musty air about them. This may enrich their appeal, but it may also shorten their shelf life.

Gass, then, represents the Ivy League (Cornell, class of '50) aura of gentlemanly scholarship that transcends the grubbing for tenure or the backstabbing of colleagues. It is as welcome in this age of publish-or-perish as it is in that of point-and-click. Fewer younger literary critics follow this mandate to address not a few on a tenure committee or within a drastically minimal readership of similarly indoctrinated cohorts. From this book, if not by all of its contents, I do take heart at its goal of setting us in front of a chess master-- himself-- who's far better than we can ever be at the game of interpretation. Still, we must play on.

Nonetheless, the mandarin tendencies indulged in with full savor by Gass do make this book reminiscent of recondite authors he praises such as Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, or Ben Jonson. And, like Rabelais, Gass loves to list and to keep on describing, in the way that he approves in Alexander Theroux (who does deserve much more acclaim I admit), "more is more." If your tastes run towards the ornate, this book will rouse your instincts for the texts-- mostly from the past more than contemporaries, although of course his near namesake William Gaddis appears, as well as peers such as Robert Coover and Stanley Elkin.

Gass cites, in his essay about evil, Elkin's line from "The Living End," that God includes mess and madness in his universe since it "makes for a better story." This is the type of insight Gass favors: epigrammatic, wry, and existentially honest. He is not afraid to praise as well as chide. He does not pander, although he does for my tastes lavish pages of prose without respite upon books, in which he finds the true alchemy. Rather than lead into gold, writers seek transformation of the world into words. Now, a bookish sort myself, I too am entertained by this legerdemain, but I do pause given Gass' implications. Even most biblio-idolators recognize, if only in our saner moments, that the world is where words should point us, to expand the telescope into the stratosphere of ideas rather than peer through its diminished reversal at a shrunken rectangular shape that distorts the universe back into the page.

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed, though Rich in Ideas, October 28, 2010

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Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Temple of Texts (American Literature Series) (Paperback)

William Gass proves his remarkable erudition in this expansive collection of reviews and reflections. Although this book is a bit unfocused at time-particularly in Gass' meandering discussion of the history of the spectacle-there are still extraordinary essays on Rilke, Gaddis, Rodin, as well are more abstract commentaries on the nature of evil and sacred literature. Mr. Gass' personal temple of texts is an interesting look at his aesthetic and philosophic influences, without the oracular and hierarchical tone of critics like Harold Bloom. Still, this collection is a bit rich at times-like biting into an overly sweet, strawberry chocolate. However, Gass nevertheless proves his intimidating knowledge of literature and culture without ever losing touch with his own creative commitments.