Reading with Peter Brooks

For many decades Peter Brooks’s critical writing has been a force of illumination and inspiration for readers of many kinds, with memorable books that continue to generate new thinking. Reading for the Plot was perhaps the best known of these until Brooks published Seduced by Story (2022), a provocative calling out of the now ubiquitous cultural stress on ‘stories’ of all and any kind. The mini-essays in this volume build on the diverse strands of Brooks’s work in their own ways, to demonstrate –and celebrate―its significance for critical thinking across a range of different disciplinary fields and institutional settings: in literary history and narrative theory; in psychoanalytic and legal studies; through interdisciplinary initiatives at Yale. There are also two longer essays by Peter Brooks himself, including one on his experience of prison teaching. Cover Introduction Half Title Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors I Reading Brooks 1. Afforded by the Plot: Downstream Responses 2. The Critical Imagination 3. Reading For and Against the Plot 4. Melodrama or Irony? II Brooks Reading 5. Storied by Seduction 6. Reading with Balzac 7. Reading for the Plot, or Rereading Stendhal in 2023 8. Knowledge and Its Limitations III Psychoanalysis 9. What Does a Worldly Criticism Mean? 10. Telling Stories: From Stories to Talking to Metaphor to Narrative 11. Looking After the Reader? Transference, Tutelage and the Novel IV Histories 12. Brooks in the Ruins: Flaubert and the Politics of Narrative 13. The Fingerprint Story 14. Brooks’s James: A Blind Man in Paris V Brooks’s Yale 15. Intellectual Trajectory 16. Peter Brooks and the Interdisciplinary Humanities 17. Majoring in Literature VI Disciplinary Stories 18. ‘Confessing’ the Power of Education: Personal Stories in Policy, Advocacy and Fundraising 19. The Stakes of the Plot: Narrative in Law 20. Prison Term Index