The Significance of Literature
The Importance of Being Earnest
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4892989 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joel Fineman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Pages | 79 |
| Publication date | 1980-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | October (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-2870 • E-ISSN: 1536-013X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/778454 |
| OpenAlex | W2312607813 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
What I am outlining here summarizes portions a longer essay I have been writing on Oscar Wilde's Importance Being Earnest. For the most part, I will forego discussion the play and focus on the way in which Wilde's farce precisely figures the problem The Self in Writing. '1 You will perhaps recall that Jack-Ernest, the hero the play, discovers the unity his duplicity when he learns that as an infant he was quite literally exchanged for writing in the cloakroom Victoria Station, his absent-minded governess having substituted for his person the manuscript a three-volume novel which is described as being of more than usually repulsive sentimentality. As a result, because Jack-Ernest is in this way so uniquely and definitively committed to literature, with literature thus registered as his alter-ego, he is one those few selfs or subjects whose very existence, as it is given to us, is specifically literary, an ego-ideal literature, as it were, whose form is so intimately immanent in his content as to collapse the distinction between a name and that which it bespeaks, and whose temporal destiny is so harmoniously organic a whole as to make it a matter natural fact that his end be in his beginning-for Ernest is indeed, as Lady Bracknell puts it
Aesthetics · Computer Science · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1987 - 2000 (14) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |