Mary Oliver Finds the Antidote to Confusion in Literature
In her essay collection, Upstream, Mary Oliver describes the antidote to confusion she found in literature – first reading and then writing – as a kind of standing with otherness in the world.
Marilyn McEntyre on When Poets Pray
Marilyn McEntyre collects her meditations on classic and contemporary poetry in When Poets Pray and offers the reader a deep reverence for language and God.
Simone de Beauvoir on The Ethics of Ambiguity and Existential Courage
Born in 1908 in Paris, France, the French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, developed as a writer, intellectual, and activist with radical existential courage.
Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read
Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read is a newly packaged collection of some of the most beautiful prose Virginia Woolf has written on the creative, radical, and rebellious act of reading.
Kenneth Burke on Reading for Identification
Kenneth Burke considers every influence of a rhetorical act and develops a theory of identification that offers readers a new way to think about rhetoric.
The Best Books for Teaching and Learning
The best books for teaching and learning include insights on neuroscience, biology, philosophy, psychology, and communication theory.
Kenneth Burke on Bad Readers
Kenneth Burke says bad readers stem from the spread of literacy through compulsory education and the culture’s inability to pay attention.
Clive Thompson on the Creative Imagination of Coders
Clive Thompson explores the origin stories of coders and recognizes they share one common character trait: a creative imagination.
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.
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 it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes […]
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 of this bog.” Marshall McLuhan When we trace language from orality, characterized by the pre-socratics and […]
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.
The Rhetorics of Reading With Wonder
Keywords Rhetorics of Reading, William Covino, Wonder, Paul de Man “Camerado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a man, (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms…” Walt Whitman, So Long! What happens when we read? Do […]
Steven Pinker on the Need for Empathy in Enlightenment Now
“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays Steven Pinker, the […]
Haruki Murakami’s Timeless Writing Advice
Keywords Haruki Murakami Writing Advice, Magic, Writing Routine, “I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is […]