As with almost all of these categories, it’s tough to narrow down to just five favorites, but here goes: 5. Thomas Wolfe, “The Lost Boy,” in The American Short Story, ed. Thomas K. Parkes. I’ve got a big soft spot for Thomas Wolfe, so it’s difficult for me to be objective. This story presages the…
As per my custom over the last several years, I’ll spend the next week recounting some of my reading highlights from 2010. I used to do this over at What I’m Reading, but having effectively abandoned that blog, I’ll incorporate the tradition here at Fors Clavigera. I will choose five favorites from four different genres:…
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…
I’m continuing to live with David Foster Wallace quite a bit. Following his reflections on the tyranny of irony, consider what he says later in the same essay: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic…
Over at the Leiter Reports blog, there’s been an interesting conversation about where philosophy departments should interview job candidates. Let me sketch a bit of context for those not familiar with the meat market that is the Eastern meeting of the APA: this divisional meeting takes place each year between Christmas and New Year’s, which…
While, in my last post, I was praising David Foster Wallace’s writing and voice–a “formal” praise–he is (was, sadly) also stunningly brilliant, even prescient. For example, consider just one of the essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, “E UNIBAS PLURAM: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which is something of a metacommentary on…