Rowan Williams on Why Adults Don’t Outgrow Fairy Tales In our day, it is adults who seem most to need and use them [fairy tales], because they are just about the only stories we have in common with which to think through deep dilemmas and to keep alive registers of emotion and imagination otherwise being […]
Wayne Booth on appealing to the authority of “WE” CON: Against the use of “WE” Something is wrong in these confident “we’s,” something worse than a mere stylistic tic. I am shocked at the confidence my younger self sometimes shows in reporting how “we” respond. Who are we, here? “We” flesh-and-blood readers are unpredictable, and […]
George Steiner on … 1. Hermeneutics A master-reader (or viewer or listener) equipped, in the case of literature, with linguist-historical knowledge, ideally sensitive to the polysemic, metamorphic lives of language, inspiredly intuitive in his or her empathy – a Coleridge reading Wordsworth, a Karl Barth glossing Romans, a Mandelstam responding to Dante – will come […]
Stanley Fish on humanism The idea – the core idea of humanism – is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them, a sequence the young John Milton experiences when he reads Dante and Petrarch, finds himself moved by them to “more love of virtue,” and comes to see […]
The Oxen by Thomas Hardy (1915) Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. / “Now they are all on their knees,” / An elder said as we sat in a flock / By the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where / They dwelt in their strawy pen, / Nor did […]
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