Thinking with Words

Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork provides a unique foundational introduction to the depths and glories of literature and its study. It is a book about why literature matters, and why it always will. Readers will explore the roots of literature and art in the interplay between life and language, actions and events, and culture and texts. This is not a book about theories; it is a book about our complex engagement with language and literature, from which theories, interpretations, and insight arise. As this is a groundwork, confusions are dissolved and analytical tools for thinking are developed and honed. Readers will discover that their ways of talking about literature can powerfully contribute to their ways of talking about life. The book resituates literary studies within fundamental arguments about language, knowledge, and ethics. Thinking with Words is essential reading for anyone interested not just in literature, but in art, culture, and language.

Brett Bourbon is Professor of English Literature at the University of Dallas. He is also a Visiting Professor in The Program of Literary Theory, University of Lisbon. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and was a professor at Stanford. He was awarded a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship and a Fulbright Award. He has published many essays and three books, Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Meaning and Mind in Literature and Philosophy (2004), Everyday Poetics: Ethics, Love, and Logic (2022), and Jane Austen And the Ethics of Life (2022). Miguel Tamen is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Lisbon. Between 2000 and 2014, he also held a regular visiting appointment at the University of Chicago. He was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and at the National Humanities Center. He is the author of Friends of Interpretable Objects (2001), What Art Is Like (2012), and Closeness (2021), among other books.

Introduction PART I LANGUAGE 1. Use and Mention 2. Words and Sentences 3. Meaning and Meaningfulness 4. Propaganda and Ambiguity PART II LITERATURE 5. Mimesis and Catharsis 6. Character and Character 7. Fictions and Stop Signs 8. Poems and Particularity PART III READING 9. Familiar and Unfamiliar 10. Attitudes and Words 11. Paraphrase and Example 12. Persons and Life PART IV ART 13. Poems and Eyes 14. Making and Finding 15. Actions and Art 16. Closeness and Distance PART V CULTURES 17. Actions and Events 18. Context and Text 19. Us and Them 20. Thinking with Words