Meyer Schapiro is one of those critics whose idea of criticism is to use it to weave a story of his own out of the story or visual experience he is examining, this principle applying just as much in art criticism as it does in literary criticism where, for example, Lionel Trilling wove his own story of the nature of morals out of the story he found in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park”, however contrary that interpretation might be to an accurate one. Schapiro does so, moreover, in the discursive prose style of the typical scholarly essay, where observations are made to elaborate on an early announced theme, rather than in what might be considered the more artistic story like process of suspense and release that can be found in, for example, Erich Auerbach’s classic essay “Odysseus’ Scar”, where the author uses the recognition scene in “the Odyssey” to tell a story about the difference between Greek and Hebrew culture, something it would not have occured to Homer to consider even if it is a story very much on Auerbach’s mind. (What are produced in these essays are stories because they are full of the unfolding drama of the particular in conflict with the general, Auerbach telling us of ways to distinguish the Greek from the Hebrew, there being many more that are not referred to. That is different from most scholarship which makes no bones about subsuming limited evidence to a particular thesis).
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