出版社：Editura Universităţii "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" Iaşi
摘要：A book about words as a shared good ensuring our humanness, Gary Saul Morson's latest work is, at the same time, an exercise in virtuosity with respect to one's personal use of words. It goes without saying that the manner of exposition serves the argument, but in this particular case it seems to us to fully deserve a special mention from the very beginning. A serene, wittily entertaining, and highly generous disposition is a universal of the discourse. Additionally, an aura of a narrative envelops both the content's presentation and the developing of a 'story' by an author who knows how to stage his audience's solidarity with himself – only to use it for the benefit of this one – as well as to turn questions and questioning into the engine for progressing or, from the opposite perspective, unwinding. 'Along the way' and through allegedly common problematization, things become clearer and are sure to engross the reader, for following them one moves along a path that is also one's own adventure. The author's artistry turns a theory book into a multi-layered, engaging, and rewarding story. Gradation, identifiable at the level of the discourse as a whole but also in the smallest structural unit, adds value to the narrative matter (ever sparser after the prologue) or even replaces it. On the part of reception, one notices the lecture is by design a story bordering on parable, and this is made all the more interesting by the fact that it seems to correspond to at least one of the issues being dealt with in the book, namely the wandering of quotations from one genre to another. A striking parallelism is also the fact that, concerned with the literary forms that are the most memorable of all, the author writes in a highly memorable manner himself. Furthermore, this is valid for all the book's compartments, beginning with acknowledgements and reaching even to some of the notes. In other words, the book makes for fascinating reading and this only enhances the fact that it is an impressive scholarly achievement. Indeed, one may have high expectations from the American theorist and critic who also signed The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (co-authored with Caryl Emerson), Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory), Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (to name just a few of the titles). Yet I believe this is not a case of authority shaping opinion, but of authority being again and further acknowledged.
