MARJORIE GARBER  is a distinguished and tremendously influential cultural critic and commentator who writes frequently about gender, eroticism, bisexuality, and a wide range of cultural issues.  Her latest book of essays, Quotation Marks, is an important and stimulating contribution to an understanding of our cultural landscape. 

"The world we inherit and inhabit   is . . .  a montage, a palimpsest of citations and quotations that are half-recognized and, in their flashes of recognition, of literal ‘reknowing,’ come back to us as wisdom" says essayist Marjorie Garber in the preface to her new book of essays, Quotation Marks, which examines a wide range of cultural phenonoma, including the function of quotation marks, visible and invisible, and the way they influence how we speak and think.

Monica Lewinsky, Jane Austen, fashion, Shakespeare, terms of address, quotation marks, sequels, nostalgia, Hubbard squash and more, are the subjects of Quotation Marks, in which cultural critic Marjorie Garber turns to the history of words, great writers, everyday speech and the painted image to hold a mirror up to our culture and the way we live, work, think, and relate to one another in 21st Century America.

Written with characteristic verve, Quotation Marks shows how we depend upon the most quotable men and women in history, using great writers to bolster what we ourselves have to say. The entertaining turns and reversals of Marjorie Garber’s arguments offer the rare pleasure of a true essayist. What does morality have to do with style? What’s the difference between work and "work"? What do we admire and what do we imitate, and what does either have to do with love? Why are sequels so enticing?

The centerpiece of the book is a lavishly illustrated essay on paintings of inanimate objects, especially vegetables, in which Marjorie Garber explores our cultural predisposition to assign gender to things and to see personal relations where there may be nothing more than two pears on a plate.

Reading these essays is to experience the pleasure of watching a remarkable critic grapple with the curious and the everyday, and make both speak to the question between the quotation marks: "Who are we now?"

Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor English and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard. Her books, Symptoms of Culture, Vested Interests, and Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, are available in paperback from Routledge. Her most recent books are Sex and Real Estate and Academic Instincts. She has had articles published in The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.   Professor Garber is an important and influential voice.  There is a tremendous amount of information about her to be found on the Web.  Please visit this link for more information.

From the Preface to Quotation Marks by Marjorie Garber:

"The quotation resides somewhere in the territory between the aphorism and the echo–which is to say, between the essay and the lyric voice. It is sometimes an excuse for not thinking, and at other times a goad to thought: Polonius’s anodyne bromides ('This above all, to thine own self be true') and Oscar Wilde’s acerbic epigrams....

Many of the essays in this book take as starting points–and frequently as their points of return– a word or phrase that is uttered in quotation marks–or, perhaps one should write, 'in quotation marks.'   The title essay discusses the odd circumstance of speaking in quotation marks, from the double-finger-squeeze gesture on the podium to the unexpected voices of John Keats’s oracular urn and Edgar Allan Poe’s uncannily iterative raven....

Some essays address the case of historical personages and authors who frequently appear 'in quotation marks' in our culture: William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Cleopatra, Monica Lewinsky....

The world we inherit and inhabit is just such a montage, a palimpsest of citations and quotations that are half-recognized and, in their flashes of recognition, of literal 'reknowing,' come back to us as wisdom.

Wisdom itself was once a set of quotations, wide sayings or precepts, as in the 'wisdom' books of the Bible, where the term 'wisdom literature' denotes the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus, and the Epistle of James....

The essays that follow will explore the function of quotation marks, visible and invisible, in framing, conveying resisting, or querying such wisdom or wisdoms. It is the claim of this book that the centrality of the humanities in a world increasingly skeptical of their value depends upon taking language seriously, no matter how unexpected its authorities, how multiple and contradictory its associations, and how circuitous its path to meaning."

ISBN 0-415-93745-0, paperback original, $19.95 USA; $29.95 Canada. Pub. Date: November 2002. 6 X 9. 288 pp. 8 pages of color plates. Cultural Studies/Literature. Published by Routledge. www.routledge.com

For more information or to schedule an interview,
Contact: Susannah Greenberg, Public Relations, 212-727-7271
publicity@bookbuzz.com

Print Journalists

Clippings would be greatly appreciated.  Please send clippings to: 
Susannah Greenberg Public Relations, 26 West 17th Street, Suite 504, N.Y., N.Y.  10011

 

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