Product Description

“For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise. But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community.... Through art we discover that we are not alone.”

So writes the esteemed Brown University professor Arnold Weinstein in this brilliant, radical exploration of Western literature. In the tradition of Harold Bloom and Jacques Barzun, Weinstein guides us through great works of art, to reveal how literature constitutes nothing less than a feast for the heart. Our encounter with literature and art can be a unique form of human connection, an entry into the storehouse of feeling.

Writing about works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Munch, Proust, O’Neill, Burroughs, DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, and others, Weinstein explores how writers and artists give us a vision of what human life is really all about. Reading is an affair of the heart as well as of the mind, deepening our sense of the fundamental forces and emotions that govern our lives, including fear, pain, illness, loss, depression, death, and love.

Provocative, beautifully written, essential, A Scream Goes Through the House traces the human cry that echoes in literature through the ages, demonstrating how intense feelings are heard and shared. With intellectual insight and emotional acumen, Weinstein reveals how the scream that resounds through the house of literature, history, the body, and the family shows us who we really are and joins us together in a vast and timeless community.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1724185 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-05
• Released on: 2003-08-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Weinstein dreamed one night that his parents wailed in lament, a scream that awakened the entire household. Stunned by the porousness of the subconscious, struck anew by the inextricable interlacing of body and soul, and inspired to contemplate ever more deeply the role art plays in our struggle to come to terms with death, Weinstein embarks on a fresh and original interpretation of somatically oriented works. Discursive and mind expanding, Weinstein's exciting critical foray maps the great themes and revelations of art, which, he insists, is not an intellectual exercise but rather a grand effort to convey what it feels like to be alive. Weinstein discerns intriguing links between medicine and literature (his chapter "Plague and Human Connection" couldn't be more timely and instructive) and excels at lively psychological interpretations of diverse works in which writers and artists transform objective reality into "the supreme subjective record of life." Blending the literary passion of Harold Bloom with the physiological insights of Antonio Damasio, Weinstein offers splendid readings of the creations of James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Edvard Munch, Kafka, Faulkner, William Burroughs, and Toni Morrison, declaring, "Art connects. Art equips. Art is sustenance." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“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