Character as Form

Description

What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance understood characters as types. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind, in the same way that an entry in a dictionary collects definitions of a word. Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable. This book tests the old meaning of character against modern examples from poems, novels, comics, and performances in theater and film by Shakespeare, Molière, Austen, the Marx Brothers, Raul Ruiz, Denton Welch, and Lynda Barry. The heart of the book is the character of the misanthrope, who, in Shakespeare's phrase, “banishes the world.” Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction Confession How I wrote this book Another way I wrote this book How to use this book Another way to use this book The riddle of form and style Form mistaken for style Style mistaken for form Perfection assailed by repetition Style defended against form Chapter 1: Many is not more than one What a character is “Let me play the fool” What a character is Company Many is not more than one Proper names belong to everyone There is no zero The wealth of characters Hats are emotional The price of characters The twofold truth of character in performance What characters can’t do Characters lounge The spider community Why the sky is blue Chapter 2: Banish the world Negative anthropology Softer signs Poets are always gay Yes, Dwight, like Bill in New York City, is a flirt Every anvil A hereafter in the here Trenton makes/the world takes I hold the world Excursus: Why Latour’s actor-network theory, although great for studying things in the public world, is a dangerous method for literary studies With his hated hand The breath of kings How to banish the world Timon’s epitaph A heart in winter Chapter 3: What fiction means Decorum or discretion? For he who lives more lives than one/more deaths than one must die An example of the dominance of form Wilde in the age of ideals The necessary idealizing of you reality The legs/of the twentieth century The ideal thing The failure of portraiture Invasion of the body snatchers The Richardsonian lie Real or personal? Emotional fuckwittage Depicturing the gothic novel Chapter 4: The wish to be an object Nature's shyness Adrian’s footstool Tamburlaine’s footstool, part 1 Tamburlaine’s footstool, part 2 Neither inside nor outside Toys and spoons Sofas, chairs, desks, footstools Acknowledgments Works Cited Index