Abstract
“Greatness” as a term is today both an inflated and a deflated currency, shading over into categories of notoriety, transcendence, and some version of the postmodern fifteen minutes of fame. The modern cultural fantasy about heroes and greatness is a symptom of desire and loss: a desire for identifiable and objective standards, and a nostalgia for hierarchy, whether of rank or merit.
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Notes
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.545—546, 55. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Richard David (London: Methuen, 1968).
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure 3.1.214—216. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. J.W. Lever (London and New York: Methuen, 1987).
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 2.5.145—146. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975).
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1985; orig. pub. 1813), p. 96.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Uses of Great Men,” in Representative Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903).
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), p. 492.
Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. M. and E.W. Said, Centennial Review, 13 (Winter 1969), p. 17.
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 12.
Mortimer J. Adler, “Reforming Education: The opening of the American Mind,” ed. Geraldine Van Doren (New York: Collier Books, 1988), p. 350.
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© 2005 Lee Morrissey
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Morrissey, L. (2005). Marjorie Garber (1944–) from “Greatness,” Symptoms of Culture (1998). In: Morrissey, L. (eds) Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04916-2_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04916-2_40
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