The Muses on Their Lunch Hour

By: Marjorie Garber

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Synopsis: &“Witty, shrewd, and imaginative essays on interdisciplinary topics . . . from Shakespeare to psychoanalysis, and the practice of higher education today.&” —Publishers Weekly As a break from their ordained labors, what might the Muses do on their lunch hour today? This collection of essays uses these figures of ancient legend to explore such modern-day topics as the curious return of myth and ritual in the theories of evolutionary psychologists and much more. Two themes emerge consistently. The first is that to predict the &“next big thing&” in literary studies, we should look back at ideas and practices set aside by a previous generation of critics. In the past several decades we have seen the reemergence of—for example—textual editing, biography, character criticism, aesthetics, and philology as &“hot&” new areas for critical intervention. The second theme expands on this observation, making the case for &“cultural forgetting&” as the way the arts and humanities renew themselves, both within fields and across them. Although she is never represented in traditional paintings or poetry, a missing Muse—we can call her Amnesia—turns out to be a key figure for the creation of theory and criticism in the arts.