The Phenomenology of Love and Reading

by Cassandra Falke

Overview

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary returban to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding.

The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love´s habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628926484
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/17/2016
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her previous books include Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820-1848 (2013) and, as editor, Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (2010). She has also published articles about English Romanticism, literary theory, and liberal arts education.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Phenomenology and Literature
2 The Erotic Reduction
3 The Lover's Advance
Interlude
4 Empathy
5 Attention
6 Being Overwhelmed
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"For Falke--love is a submission of the ego to the other, not in submitting to the domination by the other, but in putting aside one's ego desires, and opening one's self to becoming changed by the other--whether or not the other reciprocates the love ... That in short form is the challenge Falke poses to the reader of her book: allow at least the literary book, if not the theoretical and argumentative book, for the most part, to change your inner self, rather than coming to the book with a sense of a need to control, own, and dominate. Moreover, not only does Falke construct a theoretical structure for developing her thesis of reading as erotic love, as a form of allowing the book to speak to you in its own terms, from its own frame of reference, Falke also, provides a practicum for how to perform the erotic reduction of a text ... The adoption of erotic reduction is a logical necessity, even when psychologically difficult, if our goal is to get inside the mind of the book, as it were." - Literature and Theology

From the Publisher