Does Literature Think?

Does Literature Think?
Author: Stathis Gourgouris
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804732147

What is the process by which literature might provide us with access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether literature thinks theoretically—whether it has a capacity, without the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it addresses itself. Suspicion about literature's access to knowledge is ancient, at least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the city in the Republic. With full awareness of this classical background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from Sophocles' Antigone to Don DeLillo's The Names, as he traces out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional.

Thinking with Literature

Thinking with Literature
Author: Terence Cave
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198749414

Thinking with Literature offers a succinct introduction to a cognitive literary criticsm. Broad in scope but focusing on a particular cluster of approaches, it aims to induce a change of perspective in the reader.

The Use and Abuse of Literature

The Use and Abuse of Literature
Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2012-04-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307277127

In this deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of reading in the digital age, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber aims to reclaim “literature” from the periphery of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a radical way of thinking. But what is literature anyway, how has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who gets to decide what the word means? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, other than serving as bourgeois or aristocratic accoutrements attesting to one’s worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? What are the boundaries that separate it from its “commercial” instance and from other more mundane kinds of writing? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read, much less study—and what would that mean?

The Event of Literature

The Event of Literature
Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2012-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300178816

Offers a thorough examination of the philosophy of literature, looking at the place of literature in human culture, what literature can be defined as and much more.

How to Read and Why

How to Read and Why
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2001-10-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0684859076

Bloom, the best-known literary critic of our time, shares his extensive knowledge of and profound joy in the works of a constellation of major writers, including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Austen, Dickinson, Melville, Wilde, and O'Connor in this eloquent invitation to readers to read and read well.

The Trouble with Literature

The Trouble with Literature
Author: Victoria Kahn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192536230

This book, based on the Clarendon Lectures in English for 2017, argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. But instead of arguing that the Reformation fostered English literature, as scholars have often done, Victoria Kahn claims that literature helped undo the Reformation, with implications for both poetry and belief. Ultimately, literature in the Reformation is one vehicle by which religious belief was itself transformed into a human artifact, whether we understand this as a poetic artifact or a mental fiction. This transformation in turn helped produce the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, with its emphasis on our experience of non-cognitive pleasure in the work of art, and the modern formalist definition of literature, according to which—in the words of one critic—'literature solves no problems and saves no souls.' This modern definition of literature, in short, has a history, this history is intertwined with the problem of belief, and by returning to the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in England, we can come to a new understanding of how the trouble with literature has shaped our discipline. The first lecture contrasts modern and early modern understandings of literature and literariness. The second and third lectures focus on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. The fourth lecture treats the work of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and J.M. Coetzee.

Distant Reading

Distant Reading
Author: Franco Moretti
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013-06-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1781684812

How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of "Modern European Literature," through the geo-cultural insights of "Conjectures of World Literature" and "Planet Hollywood," to the quantitative findings of "Style, inc." and the abstract patterns of "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of "distant reading," that has come to define-well beyond the wildest expectations of its author-a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.

Does Literature Think?

Does Literature Think?
Author: Stathis Gourgouris
Publisher:
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2022
Genre: LITERARY CRITICISM
ISBN: 9781503617193

What is the process by which literature might provide us with access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether literature thinks theoretically--whether it has a capacity, without the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it addresses itself. Suspicion about literature's access to knowledge is ancient, at least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the city in the Republic. With full awareness of this classical background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from Sophocles' Antigone to Don DeLillo's The Names, as he traces out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional.

In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love

In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
Author: Joseph Luzzi
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0008100640

A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.