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Published Feb 2011
464 pages
Genre: Other
Publication Information
From Homer and Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer, major works of literature have a great deal to teach us about two of life's most significant stages--growing up and growing old. Distinguised scholar Arnold Weinstein's provocative and engaging new book, Morning, Noon, and Night, explores classic writing's insights into coming-of-age and surrendering to time, and considers the impact of these revelations upon our lives.
With wisdom, humor, and moving personal observations, Weinstein leads us to look deep inside ourselves and these great books, to see how we can use art as both mirror and guide. He offers incisive readings of seminal novels about childhood--Huck Finn's empathy for the runaway slave Jim illuminates a child's moral education; Catherine and Heathcliff's struggle with obsessive passion in Wuthering Heights is hauntingly familiar to many young lovers; Dickens's Pip, in Great Expectations, must grapple with a world that wishes him harm; and in Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical Persepolis, little Marjane faces a different kind of struggle--growing into adolescence as her country moves through the pain of the Iranian Revolution.
In turn, great writers also ponder the lessons learned in life's twilight years: both King Lear and Willy Loman suffer as their patriarchal authority collapses and death creeps up; Brecht's Mother Courage displays the inspiring indomitability of an aging woman who has "borne every possible blow... but is still standing, still moving." And older love can sometimes be funny (Rip Van Winkle conveniently sleeps right through his marriage) and sometimes tragic (as J. M. Coetzee’s David Lurie learns the hard way, in Disgrace).
Tapping into the hearts and minds of memorable characters, from Sophocles' Oedipus to Artie in Art Spiegelman's Maus, Morning, Noon, and Night makes an eloquent and powerful case for the role of great literature as a knowing window into our lives and times. Its intelligence, passion, and genuine appreciation for the written word remind us just how crucial books are to the business of being human.
"Starred Review. From familiar works to those not so well-known, Weinstein expertly extracts their timeless lessons." - Kirkus Reviews
"Weinstein focuses on literary figures ensnared in maddening ambiguities, omitting from his study luminous figures such as Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Prospero, who triumph over transitional hardship. Still...readers will find much to praise in sobering reflections that free literature from the lethal grip of academic theorizing by connecting it again with real life." - Booklist
"If at some level novels are 'instructions for living,' no one does a better job of revealing and clarifying those instructions than Arnold Weinstein. I have delighted in and learned so much from his previous books and his memorable lectures, but Morning, Noon, and Night tops them all--an exploration of what it is to have time go by, to have power start to slip from our hands, and how, if we are lucky, we discover early that only love endures." - Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
This information about Morning, Noon, and Night was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life and Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison. His other books include Vision and Response in Modern Fiction; Fictions of the Self: 1550–1800; The Fiction of Relationship; Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo; and Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman. His lectures on world literature are produced in DVD and CD format by The Teaching Company. Professor Weinstein divides his time between Brown University, Block Island, Stockholm, and Brittany.
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