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Marjorie Garber

Marjorie B. Garber (born June 11, 1944) is a professor at Harvard University and the author of a wide variety of books, most notably ones about William Shakespeare and aspects of popular culture including sexuality.

She wrote Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, a ground breaking theoretical work on transvestitism's contribution to culture. Other works include Sex and Real Estate:Why We Love Houses, Academic Instincts, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, Shakespeare After All, and Dog Love (which is not primarily about bestiality, except for one chapter titled "Sex and the Single Dog").

Her book Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 2004) was chosen one of Newsweek's ten best nonfiction books of the year, and was awarded the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from Phi Beta Kappa.

She was educated at Swarthmore College (B.A., 1966; L.H.D., 2004) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1969).

(from Wikipedia)


“If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness.”
Marjorie Garber
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“We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.”
Marjorie Garber
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“Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.”
Marjorie Garber
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“It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.”
Marjorie Garber
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“If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.”
Marjorie Garber
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