Matthew Arnold suggests how a thoroughgoing Platonism might help us think through art, criticism, and more: “the application of ideas to life” in his suggestive phrase, art becomes, if we take “ideas” as a surrogate for the “ideas” that are Platonic forms, the application itself. Whereas the study of philosophy is the study of forms themselves, such as Justice, Truth, Beauty, all at a level … Continue reading 239. (Matthew Arnold)
In the blog posts lately, I’ve discussed literature as happening when an author gets a condition of judgment inside of a judgment about what is possible, given the contingencies of human bodily existence. That descriptions looks outwards: a judgment of what is possible is historically dependent, will depend, that is, on what meanings and understanding are available to an author, among which, centrally, will be … Continue reading 230. (William Empson)
Within David Runciman’s rapidly swirling, but nonetheless breezy, work of political science, How Democracy Ends is an ethical anxiety, and hope, that he has explored in at least one earlier work on American politics, but that emerges with a force and appeal that feels more at home in a tradition of continental philosophy. In part, this is because the idea comes into focus in his … Continue reading 225. Suspending Words
When someone says that something possesses the quality of the literary, or refers to the literary or even artistic imagination, they refer, I’ve suggested, to a special sort of imaginative tact: one that apprehends bodily experience. On the one hand, it might be said that not all literature is or should be about the body; on the other hand, it might be said that any … Continue reading 214. (T.S. Eliot)
Marius Bewley is probably little remembered nowadays; a literary critic of the mid-century, whose critical principles were indebted mostly to Lionel Trilling and F.R. Leavis, he wrote mostly, and most penetratingly, on American literature. His book length studies of the American novel, The Eccentric Design and The Complex Fate, are concerned with authors from Cooper to Fitzgerald, with special attention in the latter to Hawthorne … Continue reading 193. (Marius Bewley)
Samuel Johnson has never held me in magnetic thrall as he does so many of the critics I admire. He seems so thoroughly of another world of poetry and taste. What to do with those critical judgments that seem to rest on an entirely foreign notion of what poetry should do and be? If I could make sense of one of these, reading Johnson generously … Continue reading 191. (Samuel Johnson)
When anyone remembers Charles Williams these days, it is probably for one of two reasons. Either they know of Williams through his association with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He was a brief but dazzling member of the Inklings and features centrally in the enjoyable recent biography of that group, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski. Otherwise, they know of Williams … Continue reading 187. (Charles Williams)
