A Touch More Rare

<p>Harry Berger Jr. has long been one of our most revered and respected literary and cultural critics. Since the late nineties a stream of remarkable and innovative publications have shown how very broad his interests are moving from Shakespeare to baroque painting to Plato to theories of early culture.</p><p>In this volume a distinguished group of scholars gathers to celebrate the work of Harry Berger Jr. To "celebrate" in Berger's words is "to visit something either in great numbers or else frequently-to go away and come back go away and come back go away and come back. Celebrating is what you do the second or third time around but not the first. To celebrate is to revisit. To revisit is to revise. Celebration is the eureka of revision." Not only former students but distinguished colleagues and scholars come together in these pages to discover Berger's eurekas-to revisit the rigor and originality of his criticism and occasionally to revise its conclusions all through the joy of strenuous engagement.</p><p>Nineteen essays on Berger's Shakespeare his Spenser his Plato and his Rembrandt on his theories of interpretation and cultural change and on the ethos of his critical and pedagogical styles open new approaches to the astonishing ongoing body of work authored by Berger.</p><p>An introduction by the editors and an afterword by Berger himself place this festival of interpretation in the context of Berger's intellectual development and the reception of his work from the mid-twentieth century into the first decade of the twenty-first.</p>