Peter Brooks

Seduced by Story

Lydia Davis

Vivant Denon

A classic eighteenth-century French libertine work finds a young man summoned to the country estate of Madame de T--- and embarking on an escapade of passion and unexpected consummation, in a translation that is accompanied by the French text and an introduction that evaluates its themes. Original.

No Tomorrow/Point de Lendemain

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.

Design and Intention in Narrative

Reading for the Plot

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

Balzac's Lives

Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

Henry James Comes Home

A book on the experience of reading Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine which recounts the process of Peter Brooks's own discovery of Balzac. A personal account of coming to terms with Balzac: moving from more classical and restrained authors to the highly-coloured melodramatic novels of the Human Comedy, which give us the dynamics of a new and challenging world on the threshold of modernity. This volume shows readers how to read, and to love reading, Balzac, and how to engage with his vast work.

Honoré de Balzac

Psikanaliz ve hikaye anlatıcılığı

" Psychoanalysis and Narrative is a clear and exemplary demonstration of the ways in which the vital connections between psychoanalysis and literature can be articulated without reductive simplification. Following Freud's assumption that sexuality and narrative form are analogous, Brooks proposes that literature constitutes a fundamental part of human existence. He supplements the terminology of narrative theory with the rich and suggestive language of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and Storytelling

From the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871, France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against Prussia and witnessed bloody class warfare that culminated in the crushing of the Paris Commune. In Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Peter Brooks examines why Flaubert thought his recently published novel, Sentimental Education, was prophetic of the upheavals in France during this “terrible year,” and how Flaubert's life and that of his compatriots were changed forever. Brooks uses letters between Flaubert and his novelist friend and confidante George Sand to tell the story of Flaubert and his work, exploring his political commitments and his understanding of war, occupation, insurrection, and bloody political repression. Interweaving history, art history, and literary criticism—from Flaubert's magnificent novel of historical despair, to the building of the reactionary monument the Sacré-Coeur on Paris's highest summit, to the emergence of photography as historical witness—Brooks sheds new light on the pivotal moment when France redefined herself for the modern world.

The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris

Literature has often understood the problematic nature of confession better than the law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Roussean, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Camus, among others."--BOOK JACKET.

Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature

Troubling Confessions

Alex Woloch

Professor of English at Stanford University Alex Woloch

Features contributors, Judith Butler, Frederick Crews, Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Wollheim and other theorists from such fields as literature, philosophy, film, history, cultural studies, neuroscience, psychotherapy. Under discussion in all these articles is whether Freud is still relevant, specifically whether psychoanalysis is still a valid theory of mind, if its therapeutic applications have been rendered obsolete by drugs, how psychoanalysis still figures in debates about sexual identity despite its rejection by many feminists, and how Freud's work still contributes to cultural analysis. The editor's conclusion is that Freud is not only still relevant but the "presiding genius of our culture and the author of its symptomatic illnesses." Papers were delivered in a 1998 symposium at Yale, the locale from which Freud launched his original invasion of the US psyche nearly a century before. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

Whose Freud?

Realist Vision explores the claim to represent the world “as it is.” Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project. Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the “invention” of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as “photorealism” and “reality TV.”

Realist Vision

Henry James Goes to Paris

In this spiritual sequel to his influential Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks examines the dangerously alluring power of storytelling. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.

The Use and Abuse of Narrative

Psychoanalysis and Narrative d is a clear and exemplary demonstration of the ways in which the vital connections between psychoanalysis and literature can be articulated without reductive simplification. Following Freud's assumption that sexuality and narrative form are analogous, Brooks proposes that literature constitutes a fundamental part of human existence. He supplements the terminology of narrative theory with the rich and suggestive language of psychoanalysis.

The desire to know the body is a powerful dynamic of storytelling in all its forms. Peter Brooks argues that modern narrative is intent on uncovering the body in order to expose a truth that must be written in the flesh. In a book that ranges widely through literature and painting, Brooks shows how the imagination strives to bring the body into language and to write stories on the body. From Rousseau, Balzac, Mary Shelley, and Flaubert, to George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Marguerite Duras, from Manet and Gauguin to Mapplethorpe, writers and artists have returned in fascination to the body, the inescapable other of the spirit. Brooks's deep understanding of psychoanalysis informs his demonstration of how the "epistemophilic urge"--the desire to know-guides fictional plots and our reading of them. It is the sexual body that furnishes the building blocks of symbolization, eventually of language itself-which then takes us away from the body. Yet mind and language need to recover the body, as an other realm that is primary to their very definition. Brooks shows how and why the female body has become the field upon which the aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of a whole society are played out. And he suggests how writers and artists have found in the woman's body the dynamic principle of their storytelling, its motor force. This major book entertains and teaches: Brooks presumes no special knowledge on the part of his readers. His account proceeds chronologically from Rousseau in the eighteenth century forward to contemporary artists and writers. Body Work gives us a set of analytical tools and ideas-primarily from psychoanalysis, narrative and film studies, and feminist theory-that enable us to read modern narrative afresh.

Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative

Body Work

Paul Gewirtz

The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically.This notable volume-inspired by a symposium held at Yale Law School-brings together an exceptional group of well-known figures in law and literary studies to take a probing look at how and why stories are told in the law and how they are constructed and made effective. Why is it that some stories-confessions, victim impact statements-can be excluded from decisionmakers' hearing? How do judges claim the authority by which they impose certain stories on reality?Law's Stories opens new perspectives on the law, as narrative exchange, performance, explanation. It provides a compelling encounter of law and literature, seen as two wary but necessary interlocutors.ContributorsJ. M. BalkinPeter BrooksHarlon L. DaltonAlan M. DershowitzDaniel A. FarberRobert A. FergusonPaul GewirtzJohn HollanderAnthony KronmanPierre N. LevalSanford LevinsonCatharine MacKinnonJanet MalcolmMartha MinowDavid N. RosenElaine ScarryLouis Michael SeidmanSuzanna SherryReva B. SiegelRobert Weisberg.

Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law

Law's Stories

Contending that a search for "realism" distorts the writing of Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, and Stendahl, Peter Brooks considers their novels with reference to the manner in which the characters explore their worth and pursue their own systems of relationships. The novels discussed are used as examples of the fictional exploitation of the drama inherent in man's social existence and the encounters of personal styles within the framework and code provided by a coterie which is an object of conscious cultivation for its own sake. The author gives detailed readings of the four authors’ works and moves backward to consider the seventeenth-century moralistes and the drawing rooms in which literary forms applied to social man were eloquently elaborated. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Peter Brooks

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