Seth Lerer
Biographic Data
| ID | 1032510 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Seth Lerer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Seth |
| FAMILY NAME | Lerer |
| SIGNATURE | LERER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8573-4219 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Chaucerian Theatricality: Then and Now
John Ganim's 1990 book, Chaucerian Theatricality , raised important questions about the methods of studying Chaucer's public poetry and, in turn, about the relationships among authorial, narratorial, and critical voices, both in his time and ours. This paper reconsiders Ganim's book in the context of Chaucerian criticism of the 1990s, and it develops the implications of its notion of theatricality to embrace new readings of the Tales and new appr…
Milton's “Ad Patrem” and the Poetics of Virgilian Sons
This article relocates John Milton's Latin poem to his father (“Ad Patrem”) in the contexts of the young Milton's literary self-fashioning and the changing patterns of early modern Virgil reception. Here and in his prose epistles, Milton establishes the persona of a scholarly, questing filial figure, grounded in a reading of book 6 of the “Aeneid” and its drama of fathers and sons. He makes a case for poetry and scholarship as shared practices. T…
The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form
Scribble
Scribble Seth Lerer (bio) I had but litille thyng to done when I scrybled thys bille. William Worcester may have had little else to do when he thus closed his 1456 letter, most likely addressed to Sir John Paston, complaining of a friend's behavior. That friend (believed to be Sir John Fastolff) argued with his servants, acted willfully and without counsel, and could barely be restrained. Such matters of deportment would have hardly been little t…
Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust
Poetry, it may be safe to say, begins in mourning. Loss and absence, exile and emigration, growing up and growing apart—all generate the need to speak about what has once been and what is gone. This sense of searching for a voice to fill a void fills literary texts of all times, from Homer's paeans to the heroic dead through Virgil's Aeneadic underworld to the range of sonnets, odes, and elegies that makeup volumes from Shakespeare to Berryman. P…
Humanism, philology and the medievalist
East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey
“I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts.” This vision of Erich Auerbach, presented in the epilogue to his Mimesis, has stayed with critics for over half a century. We have imagined him, the European Jewish philologist, sitting out the war in Istanbul, stripped of his colleagues and his library, working from memory to shape a histo…
Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children's Marginalia
The study of children's marginalia in manuscripts and printed books enables us to reassess traditional assumptions about bibliography, subjectivity, and the literary imagination in the English and American traditions. Commentaries, signatures, and scribbling defacements-together with fictional representations of young people writing in books-illustrate relationships among canonical authority, playful subversion, commodity value, and archival pres…
Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination
Research Article| September 01 2007 Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination Seth Lerer Seth Lerer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2007) 37 (3): 579–594. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-2007-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Seth Lerer; Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination. Journal of Me…
Thy Life to Mend, This Book Attend: Reading and Healing in the Arc of Children's Literature
Reading and healing come together in the traditions of children's literature as ways of locating the child's imaginative world in bed. In the American Puritan tradition, in particular, acts of reading and forms of healing give voice to a distinctively inward looking sense of youthful spirituality - a kind of antitheatrical conception of childhood. And in a range of works responding to that Puritan tradition (Hawthorne's exemplary biographies for …
The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies
In spite of the historicism that has dominated medieval English literary study for the past two decades, formalist approaches will not go away. Not only is close reading still the default mode of pedagogy for many medievalists, but certain genres (especially the Middle English lyric) still attract formalist criticism. This article argues that historicist criticism has excluded such genres from the current mainstream of literary history, and that,…
Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern
Error and the academic self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern
The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature
This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman conquest and the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The volume has five sections: 'After the Norman Conquest'; 'Writing in the British Isles'; 'Institutional Productions'; 'After the Black Death' an…
Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach
A century after his birth and fifty years after the composition of Mimesis, Auerbach still stands as a touchstone for contemporary academic debates on the place of historical criticism in the construction of literary history, on the relations between intellectual activity and political action, and on the function of the critic in recording—or effecting—social change. More than an occasion to review past accomplishments or revel in the nostalgias …
Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth. Ann W. Astell
Introduction: What is a Text
We are all now for methods, keenly on the watch for every least indication of disturbance in the accurate transmission of a text, sorting out by many subtle and ingenious methods the first, second, or third stage of the composition, the original draft, the first completed form, the revision of this, that, and the other purpose, and so on. But there is much more in these modern methods of research than used to be understood by bibliography, and I …
Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Giuseppe Mazzotta
Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Larry Scanlon
The Poetry of Boethius. Gerard O'Daly
Geschichte als Topik: Das Rhetorische Exemplum von der Antike zur Neuzeit und die "historiae" im Policraticus Johanns von Salisbury. Peter Von Moos
Textual Criticism and Literary Theory: Chaucer and His Readers
Textual Criticism and Literary Theory: Chaucer and His Readers
Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the "Consolation of Philosophy"
This book treats Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy as a work of imaginative literature, and applies modern techniques of criticism to his writings. The author's central purpose is to demonstrate the methodological and thematic coherence of The Consolation of Philosophy . Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguish…
The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies
In spite of the historicism that has dominated medieval English literary study for the past two decades, formalist approaches will not go away. Not only is close reading still the default mode of pedagogy for many medievalists, but certain genres (especially the Middle English lyric) still attract formalist criticism. This article argues that historicist criticism has excluded such genres from the current mainstream of literary history, and that,…
The owl, the nightingale, and the apes
La tradition litteraire du singe lettre, originaire des arts plastiques, dans le poeme moyen-anglais The Owl and the Nightingale| la metaphore du singe et les rapports du langage et de la pensee
Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the "Consolation of Philosophy"
This book treats Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy as a work of imaginative literature, and applies modern techniques of criticism to his writings. The author's central purpose is to demonstrate the methodological and thematic coherence of The Consolation of Philosophy . Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguish…
Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo
Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy
Textual Criticism and Literary Theory: Chaucer and His Readers
Textual Criticism and Literary Theory: Chaucer and His Readers
Geschichte als Topik: Das Rhetorische Exemplum von der Antike zur Neuzeit und die "historiae" im Policraticus Johanns von Salisbury. Peter Von Moos
The Poetry of Boethius. Gerard O'Daly
Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth. Ann W. Astell
Introduction: What is a Text
We are all now for methods, keenly on the watch for every least indication of disturbance in the accurate transmission of a text, sorting out by many subtle and ingenious methods the first, second, or third stage of the composition, the original draft, the first completed form, the revision of this, that, and the other purpose, and so on. But there is much more in these modern methods of research than used to be understood by bibliography, and I …
Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Giuseppe Mazzotta
Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Larry Scanlon
Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach
A century after his birth and fifty years after the composition of Mimesis, Auerbach still stands as a touchstone for contemporary academic debates on the place of historical criticism in the construction of literary history, on the relations between intellectual activity and political action, and on the function of the critic in recording—or effecting—social change. More than an occasion to review past accomplishments or revel in the nostalgias …
The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature
This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman conquest and the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The volume has five sections: 'After the Norman Conquest'; 'Writing in the British Isles'; 'Institutional Productions'; 'After the Black Death' an…
Error and the academic self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern
Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern
The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies
In spite of the historicism that has dominated medieval English literary study for the past two decades, formalist approaches will not go away. Not only is close reading still the default mode of pedagogy for many medievalists, but certain genres (especially the Middle English lyric) still attract formalist criticism. This article argues that historicist criticism has excluded such genres from the current mainstream of literary history, and that,…
Thy Life to Mend, This Book Attend: Reading and Healing in the Arc of Children's Literature
Reading and healing come together in the traditions of children's literature as ways of locating the child's imaginative world in bed. In the American Puritan tradition, in particular, acts of reading and forms of healing give voice to a distinctively inward looking sense of youthful spirituality - a kind of antitheatrical conception of childhood. And in a range of works responding to that Puritan tradition (Hawthorne's exemplary biographies for …
Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination
Research Article| September 01 2007 Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination Seth Lerer Seth Lerer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2007) 37 (3): 579–594. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-2007-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Seth Lerer; Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination. Journal of Me…
Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children's Marginalia
The study of children's marginalia in manuscripts and printed books enables us to reassess traditional assumptions about bibliography, subjectivity, and the literary imagination in the English and American traditions. Commentaries, signatures, and scribbling defacements-together with fictional representations of young people writing in books-illustrate relationships among canonical authority, playful subversion, commodity value, and archival pres…
East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey
“I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts.” This vision of Erich Auerbach, presented in the epilogue to his Mimesis, has stayed with critics for over half a century. We have imagined him, the European Jewish philologist, sitting out the war in Istanbul, stripped of his colleagues and his library, working from memory to shape a histo…
Humanism, philology and the medievalist
Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust
Poetry, it may be safe to say, begins in mourning. Loss and absence, exile and emigration, growing up and growing apart—all generate the need to speak about what has once been and what is gone. This sense of searching for a voice to fill a void fills literary texts of all times, from Homer's paeans to the heroic dead through Virgil's Aeneadic underworld to the range of sonnets, odes, and elegies that makeup volumes from Shakespeare to Berryman. P…
Scribble
Scribble Seth Lerer (bio) I had but litille thyng to done when I scrybled thys bille. William Worcester may have had little else to do when he thus closed his 1456 letter, most likely addressed to Sir John Paston, complaining of a friend's behavior. That friend (believed to be Sir John Fastolff) argued with his servants, acted willfully and without counsel, and could barely be restrained. Such matters of deportment would have hardly been little t…
The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form
Art (23 works) · Literature (18 works) · History (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · History (13 works) · Medieval Literature and History (12 works) · Classics (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Art history (5 works)