The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing
Hardcover
- Price:
- $29.95/拢25.00
- ISBN:
- Published (US):
- Jan 18, 2022
- Published (UK):
- Mar 15, 2022
- Copyright:
- 2021
- Pages:
- 352
- Size:
- 6.12 x 9.25 in.
- 3 b/w illus.
- Main_subject:
- Literature
Paperback
ebook
Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor鈥檚 life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person鈥攁nd of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature鈥檚 knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters鈥� lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge鈥攁nd come to understand its cost.
In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.
