To outwit or confound closing or ending


From San Francisco Chronicle:

What do we mean by literature today? Why study it? Is there a form of writing that is not literary?

This is a book of questions rather than answers. For Garber argues that literature is a form of writing that offers unanswered (and potentially unanswerable) questions. Literary language is rife with figures of speech, allusions to other writings and characters facing ambiguous moral decisions.

The teaching and study of literature, too, is full of questions. As Garber puts it, in a lively classroom anecdote about teaching her most beloved author, “Since Shakespeare wrote so many years ago, scholars had had all this time to get it right, hadn’t they? What was the problem, and why couldn’t the professor give the right answer right away, instead of beating around the bush?”

Garber responds like a true college professor (as one myself, I applaud her frankness): “The absence of answers or determinate meanings” is exactly the set of “qualities that make a passage or a work literary.” Literary works have no single meaning, whatever the author intended. Indeed, Garber points out, “one of the key features of what might be called the literary unconscious is a tendency on the part of the text to outwit or to confound the activity of closing or ending.”