How to Do Things with Fictions
Published on 23. August 2012
Book
Hardback
266 pages
978-0-19-518856-1 (ISBN)
Description
Why did Jesus speak in parables? Why does Plato's Socrates make bad arguments? Why do we root for criminal heroes? In mummy movies, why is the skeptic always the first to go? Why don't stage magicians even pretend to summon spirits any more? Why is Samuel Beckett so confusing? And why is it worth trying to answer questions like these?
Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are often best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises that fortify their mental capacities.
This book is both deeply insightful and rigorously argued, and the journey delivers plenty of surprises along the way-that moral readings of literature can be positively dangerous; that the parables were deliberately designed to be misunderstood; that Plato knowingly sets his main character up for a fall; that we can sustain our beliefs even when we suspect them to be illusions; and more. Perhaps best of all, though, the book is written with uncommon verve and a light touch that will satisfy the generally educated public and the specialist reader alike. In How to Do things with Fictions, Joshua Landy convincingly shows how the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves may well be our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, greater peace of mind, and richer experience.
Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are often best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises that fortify their mental capacities.
This book is both deeply insightful and rigorously argued, and the journey delivers plenty of surprises along the way-that moral readings of literature can be positively dangerous; that the parables were deliberately designed to be misunderstood; that Plato knowingly sets his main character up for a fall; that we can sustain our beliefs even when we suspect them to be illusions; and more. Perhaps best of all, though, the book is written with uncommon verve and a light touch that will satisfy the generally educated public and the specialist reader alike. In How to Do things with Fictions, Joshua Landy convincingly shows how the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves may well be our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, greater peace of mind, and richer experience.
Reviews / Votes
Joshua Landy's captivating book, How to Do Things with Fictions, dispenses with the usual pieties about what we stand to gain from literary works. In their place, he advances a compelling theory that reveals as much about what fiction can do for us as it does about what we can do with fiction. * Elaine Auyoung, MLN * In his eminently readable and concise new book, Professor Landy has made an important contribution to the increasingly substantial field of literary criticism devoted to theorizing the relationship between ethics and literature. * Patrick Fessenbecker, Journal of Literary Theory * accessible, elegantly written ... Landy's lively discussions of Mark, Plato, Mallarme, and Samuel Beckett (not to mention French stage magician Jean Robert-Houdin and numerous other figures) are sensitive and provocative ... It is rare to read a work in which the sense comes through so fully of what it must be like to sit in the author's classroom; in this case, it is clear that Stanford students enjoy an intellectual treat, one now available to many others ... Essential. * D.L. Patey, Choice * [Landy's] responses to the texts are personal, lively and - in parts - spectacularly acute. He is at his best as a close reader when he is examining Mark's gospel, or discussing "the cosmic magnitude" of MallarmA (c)'s "ses purs ongles" sonnet. * Stephen Abell, The Guardian *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Adult education
Illustrations
5 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
567 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-518856-1 (9780195188561)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Joshua Landy
How to Do Things with Fictions
Book
07/2014
Oxford University Press Inc
€53.00
Shipment within 15-20 days
Joshua Landy
How to Do Things with Fictions
E-Book
08/2012
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€20.99
Available for download
Joshua Landy
How to Do Things with Fictions
E-Book
07/2012
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€20.99
Available for download
Person
Joshua Landy teaches French at Stanford University, where he co-founded and co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature. He is author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust and editor, with Michael Saler, of The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age.
Content
Table of Contents ; Acknowledgments ; INTRODUCTION ; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fiction ; Formative Fictions ; The Temporality of the Reading Experience ; In Spite of Everything, a Role for Meaning ; A Polite Aside to Historians ; The Value of Formative Fictions ; PART ONE-CLEARING THE GROUND ; Chapter One-Chaucer: Ambiguity and Ethics ; Prudence or Oneiromancy? ; A Parody of Didacticism ; Preaching to the Converted ; The Asymmetry of 'Imaginative Resistance' ; Virtue Ethics and Gossip ; Qualifications ; Positive Views ; PART TWO- ENCHANTMENT AND RE-ENCHANTMENT ; Chapter Two-Mark: Metaphor and Faith ; Rhetorical Theories ; Five Variables, Six Readings ; Deliberate Opacity ; The Vision of Mark ; From Him Who Has Not ; To Him Who Has ; The Syrophenician Woman ; The Formative Circle ; Metaphor and Faith ; Theological Ramifications ; A Parable about Parables ; Getting It Wrong By Getting It Right ; Coda: The Secular Kingdom ; Appendix: <"Le Cygne>" ; Chapter Three-Mallarme: Irony and Enchantment ; Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin ; Exorcisms and Experiments ; Science and Wonder ; Lucid Illusions ; Stephane Mallarme ; The Spell of Poetry ; Setting the Scene ; A Replacement Faith ; How to Do Things with Verses ; A Corner of Order ; The Magic of Rhyme ; A Training in Enchantment ; A Sequence of States ; The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of Re-Enchantment ; PART THREE-LOGIC AND ANTI-LOGIC ; Chapter Four-Plato: Fallacy and Logic ; A Platonic Coccyx ; Ascent and Dissent ; The Developmental Hypothesis ; Dubious Dialectic ; Pericles, Socrates and Plato ; The Gorgias Unravels ; The Uses of Oratory ; Was Gorgias Refuted? ; Spiritual Exercises: Seven Points in Conclusion ; Appendix: Just How Bad is the Pericles Argument? ; Chapter Five-Beckett: Antithesis and Tranquillity ; Bringing Philosophy to an End ; Ataraxia ; Antilogoi ; One Step Forward ; Finding the Self to Lose the Self ; An Irreducible Singleness ; Res Cogitans ; Solutions and Dissolutions ; Two Failures ; <"I confess, I give in, there is I>" ; Negative Anthropology ; The Beckettian Spiral ; An End to Everything? ; Fail Better ; Glimpses of the Ideal ; Two Caveats ; Coda ; Works Cited