Promotional Information

What Literature Teaches Us About Life

About the Author

Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He also gives a series of audio and video lectures on world literature for The Teaching Company. He spends his time in Providence, Block Island, Stockholm, and Brittany.

Reviews

“Simply put, A Scream Goes Through the House is a breakthrough book, a triumph of scholarship and writing. What a treat it is to have Weinstein guide us through some of the canonical works of literature and show us what we have intuitively suspected: that literature does more than just entertain; literature educates, literature provides us with a map for our journey, and literature gives the journey meaning. Indeed, A Scream Goes Through the House proves its own thesis by doing just that for the reader. It is a book for the ages.”
—Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner and My Own Country

“A Scream Goes Through the House is the crown of Arnold Weinstein’s distinguished career as a teacher and writer, a deep response to great works of prose and poetry, art, theater, and film from Sophocles and Shakespeare to a wealth of modern authors. This book is literally a matter of life and death, for it celebrates the bonds between our mortality and our survival, our pain and our sensitivity, our frailty and our strength, our individual and communal selves, the vital bridges only works of imagination can construct. A scream goes through the house, and whether it is the house of art or the house of human-kind, that scream—thanks to Weinstein’s insight, eloquence, and courage—pierces the heart, wounding us even as it makes us whole and well. A passionate tribute to the power of art to restore us all.”
—Robert Fagles

"This book is about the urgency, centrality, and reach of human feeling," begins Weinstein, a Brown University literature professor, proposing to use the key works of a wide range of artists-William Blake, James Baldwin, Eugene O'Neill, Edvard Munch and Ingmar Bergman, among others-to demonstrate the ways in which "art is sustenance; art is transformation." An early chapter manages to breathe new life into one of the most co-opted images of recent memory, Munch's masterwork The Scream, and announces a persistent theme of the links between bodies, which can be hurt, diseased or dead, and feelings. The middle three chapters ("Living in the Body"; "Diagnosis: Narratives of Exposure"; "Plague and Human Connection") engage a host of medical analogies, even comparing an EKG with "soul searching," followed by the quandary of "Saying Death," which asks the rhetorical question: "Is our thinking itself not saturated with death?" While most of the actual works Weinstein points toward go a good way toward posing and answering difficult questions in complex and compelling ways, his book often hems in their multifaceted characters. An epilogue, offering yet another examination of Hamlet, notes: "Depression has its writers"; this meta-work does not finally bring us closer to many of those here, or their mortal coils. (Aug. 5) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

"Simply put, A Scream Goes Through the House is a breakthrough book, a triumph of scholarship and writing. What a treat it is to have Weinstein guide us through some of the canonical works of literature and show us what we have intuitively suspected: that literature does more than just entertain; literature educates, literature provides us with a map for our journey, and literature gives the journey meaning. Indeed, A Scream Goes Through the House proves its own thesis by doing just that for the reader. It is a book for the ages."
-Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner and My Own Country

"A Scream Goes Through the House is the crown of Arnold Weinstein's distinguished career as a teacher and writer, a deep response to great works of prose and poetry, art, theater, and film from Sophocles and Shakespeare to a wealth of modern authors. This book is literally a matter of life and death, for it celebrates the bonds between our mortality and our survival, our pain and our sensitivity, our frailty and our strength, our individual and communal selves, the vital bridges only works of imagination can construct. A scream goes through the house, and whether it is the house of art or the house of human-kind, that scream-thanks to Weinstein's insight, eloquence, and courage-pierces the heart, wounding us even as it makes us whole and well. A passionate tribute to the power of art to restore us all."
-Robert Fagles