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NEWS
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Program
Descriptions
Classic Program
Senior Focus
Crossing Borders
Volume 8, Number 1 - Fall 2009
On the
Bookshelf
by Sarah Hirschman
Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, by Michael Wood. Cambridge University Press, 2005
Michael Wood, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, has written books on Nabokov, Stendhal, García Márquez and Kafka. In this spirited and sometimes enigmatic work, he takes a close look at various writings by Henry James, Kafka, and others to see whether their specific, oblique ways of spinning tales provoke readers to a sense of wonder that leads to a more profound, complex knowledge of the world and of themselves.
In an important chapter, Wood discusses the influence of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity on his own approach. Empson’s alertness to the ambiguities, complexities and contradictions in literary texts helps explain how an attentive reader may be led down roundabout paths that, in the end, result in a deepened understanding and new knowledge.
Wood’s provocative suggestion that a literary text may “know” more than either the author or the reader is bound to provoke discussion. Does he mean that the text can acquire meanings that the author did not suspect? Or do the complexities and ambiguities lead each of us to see different patterns as we observe from various angles? Or does he really mean that there is a secret knowledge encased within the text that we can discover?
I was fascinated by Wood’s volume as it led me to interesting comparisons with the way the participants of People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos acquire a new kind of knowledge through the discovery and discussion of the poetics, shadows, and themes of literary short stories.