Reading with Peter Brooks

<p>For many decades Peter Brooks’s critical writing has been a force of illumination and inspiration for readers of many kinds, with memorable books that continue to generate new thinking.<i> Reading for the Plot </i>was perhaps the best known of these until Brooks published <i>Seduced by Story </i>(2022), a provocative calling out of the now ubiquitous cultural stress on ‘stories’ of all and any kind.<br><br>The mini-essays in this volume build on the diverse strands of Brooks’s work in their own ways, to demonstrate –and celebrate—its significance for critical thinking across a range of different disciplinary fields and institutional settings: in literary history and narrative theory; in psychoanalytic and legal studies; through interdisciplinary initiatives at Yale. There are also two longer essays by Peter Brooks himself, including one on his experience of prison teaching.</p>