Walter Benjamin on Explosive Reading and the Storyteller
Walter Benjamin considers The Storyteller an artistic observer capabale of seeing and communicating beauty in a way that transforms readers and listeners.
Ernst Cassirer on the Gift of the Artist
Keywords Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, Lewis Hyde, Seeing, Artistic Observation, Gift, William Blake “The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It …
Ludwig Wittgenstein on the Ladder Illusion
Keywords Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus “Pay attention to the patter by means of which we convince someone of a truth of a mathematical proposition. It tells us something about the function of this conviction. I mean the …
Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel
Four women will invent time travel. Three will make their mark on history. Two will do anything to be remembered. One will not survive. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL Summer is here and we are cracking open a new book …
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Narrative Architecture in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode
Keywords Jane Alison, Narrative Architecture, Meander, Spiral, Explode “The wave is one. There’s a reason we’re drawn to it, whether viewing or watching entranced as one wave after another breaks on shore: a wave is a clear instance of energy …
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How to Read More by Creating a Reading Habit
“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.” Anthony Trollope For most teachers and professors wondering how to read more books, establishing new routines, resolutions, and goal-setting …
How Time and Space Converge to Evoke Walter Benjamin’s Aura
“The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close …
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Walter Ong’s Psychodynamics of Orality and the Reader
Keywords Walter Ong, Psychodynamics, Orality and Literacy “Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart …
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10 Diverse Books That Reflect Human Experience
“The book industry is focusing more on diverse voices and stories: a reflection of the real demographic of the United States, allowing all to find their stories reflected in books. Children’s publishers across the industry have put an emphasis on finding diverse …
A Thousand Eyes of Curiosity With Alberto Manguel
“Now open in my eyes a thousand eyes of curiosity.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves ALBERTO MANGUEL (BORN 1948) Alberto Manguel is a proliferate writer and reader. His world travels both in and out of books converge in everything he writes. …
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Henri Bergson on the Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought
Keywords Henri Bergson, Cinematic Mechanism of Thought, Intuition, Cognition, Creative Mind, Elan Vital “In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the …
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William Covino on the Art of Wonder in Philosophy
“The art of rhetoric underlines the ambiguity of language; to practice the art, one remains mindful that all conclusions are provisional, tentative. The art lies not in the completion of a text, but in the transfiguration of one text — …
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Dynamic Epistemology and the Etymology of Truth
“Hail to Thee, Logos, Thou Vast Almighty Title, In Whose name we conjure— Our acts the partial representatives Of Thy whole act.” Kenneth Burke MISUNDERSTANDING TRUTH There is a huge misunderstanding in culture that the idea of relativism has wiped …
David Foster Wallace and the Utter Hell of Solipsism
Keywords David Foster Wallace, Solipsism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Infinite Jest “One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible that solipsism.” David Foster Wallace The …
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The Muse Learns to Read: Trace the Process of Intellectual Becoming
When we trace language from orality, characterized by the pre-socratics and the passing of tradition from one mouth to the next, to literacy made possible by writing on clay tablets, we see a complex shift in human consciousness.