The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading

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From a short lyric to a complex novel, follow Reuben Brower's lead through the attentive reader's fields of light.

In this classic study, Harvard professor Reuben Brower guides the reader from noticing the alluring details of a well-made poem, novel, or play to attending to the encompassing ways in which the writing achieves its greatness.

Part One: THE DISCOVERY OF DESIGN
I. The Speaking Voice
II. The Aura Around a Bright Clear Centre
III. Saying One Thing and Meaning Another
IV. The Figure of Sound
V. The Sinewie Thread

Part Two: IN LARGE LETTERS
VI. The Mirror of Analogy 'The Tempest'
VII. Something Central Which Permeated: Virginia Woolf and 'Mrs. Dalloway'
VIII. The Groves of Eden: Design in a Satire by Pope
IX. Light and Bright and Sparkling: Irony and Fiction in 'Pride and Prejudice'
X. The Twilight of the Double Vision: Symbol and Irony in 'A Passage to India'
XI. The Flower of Light: Integrity of Imagination

"Not only does Brower begin his book with a lyric, but he deliberately chooses a very short one indeed, as if to show how much can be said about the smallest of poetic 'figures' looked at closely. The poem is 'The Sick Rose,' one of William Blake's best-known songs of experience…Brower's task is to show how the poem is 'imaginatively organized,' by which he means that, to read it, we must sense the 'extraordinary interconnectedness among a relatively large number of different items of experience.'" –From the Foreword by William H. Pritchard

Reuben Arthur Brower was a professor of classics and English at Amherst College before he moved to Harvard University, where he became Cabot Professor of English. He is perhaps best remembered for a course he created at Harvard, Humanites 6: Interpretation of Literature, known familiarly to students as "Hum 6."