Arthur Danto’s contribution to the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Literature is not exactly worth the price of the book (it’s $200!), but it would certainly be worth the bus fare to the library. His quarry in “Philosophy and/as/of Literature” is the literary nature of philosophical writing and what that means for philosophical reading…
The book from my summer reading that probably most affected me was David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. While Lipsky’s voice is a bit irritating, and while the book feels like a sort of theft on Lipsky’s part, the transcript of a 5-day of…
As I noted earlier, I’m in a period of thinking through issues of genre and style in theological and philosophical writing, and thus I’m labeling my blog reflections on these matters “Notes toward a new genre.” My first post generated more email responses than usual, so I’m encouraged that others are also thinking through these…
In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the bodily nature of our language, ultimately claiming, “Words have a physiognomy.” I was reminded of this when I read Ian McGilchrist’s recent reflection, “Four Walls,” in the July/August 2010 issue of Poetry: Poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex as…
As I’m working on volume 2 of “Cultural Liturgies,” I am spending a lot of time and energy on considerations of genre and style, particularly given the argument in Desiring the Kingdom: that we are affective, liturgical animals who are moved and shaped more fundamentally by the imagination than the intellect. (Proust’s Contre Saint-Beuve is…