Reading with Peter Brooks
Edited by Rachel Bowlby
- Peter Brooks’s achievements considered from many angles
- 20 mini-essays discussing Brooks’s work in the context of literary history and narrative theory; psychoanalytic and legal studies; and interdisciplinary initiatives at Yale University
- Lucid demonstrations of how critical thinking works in practice
- Includes two pieces of writing from Peter Brooks himself
For many decades Peter Brooks’s critical writing has been a force of illumination and inspiration for readers of many kinds, with memorable books that continue to generate new thinking. Reading for the Plot was perhaps the best known of these until Brooks published Seduced by Story (2022), a provocative calling out of the now ubiquitous cultural stress on ‘stories’ of all and any kind. The mini-essays in this volume build on the diverse strands of Brooks’s work in their own ways, to demonstrate –and celebrate—its significance for critical thinking across a range of different disciplinary fields and institutional settings: in literary history and narrative theory; in psychoanalytic and legal studies; through interdisciplinary initiatives at Yale. There are also two longer essays by Peter Brooks himself, including one on his experience of prison teaching.
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Rachel Bowlby
I. Reading Brooks
1. Afforded by the Plot: Downstream Responses
Terence Cave
2. The Critical Imagination
Alex Woloch
3. Reading For and Against the Plot
David Shields
4. Melodrama or Irony?
Aaron Matz
II. Brooks Reading
5. Storied by Seduction
Janet Beizer
6. Reading with Balzac
Martine Reid
7. Reading for the Plot, or Rereading Stendhal in 2023
Susanna Lee
8. Knowledge and its Limitations
Ann Jefferson
III. Psychoanalysis
9. What Does a Worldly Criticism Mean?
Alessia Ricciardi
10. Telling Stories: From Stories to Talking to Metaphor to Narrative
Juliet Mitchell
11. Looking After the Reader? Transference, Tutelage and the Novel
Sarah Raff
IV. Histories
12. Brooks in the Ruins: Flaubert and the Politics of Narrative
Maurice Samuels
13. The Fingerprint Story
Rachel Bowlby
14. Brooks’s James: A Blind Man in Paris
Caroline Weber
V. Brooks’s Yale
15. Intellectual Trajectory
Peter Brooks
16. Peter Brooks and the Interdisciplinary Humanities
Sarah Winter
17. Majoring in Literature
David Marshall
VI. Disciplinary Stories
18. ‘Confessing’ the Power of Education: Personal Stories in Policy,
Advocacy and Fundraising
Chiara Benetollo
19. The Stakes of the Plot: Narrative in Law
Tal Kastner
20. Prison Term
Peter Brooks
Index
These lively, brief but extremely efficient essays by a host of distinguished contributors highlight the range and impact over the years of Peter Brooks's scholarship in the overlapping areas of narrative studies, psychoanalysis and law. Every reader will find something of interest here.
