Description
Why does Mark's Jesus speak in parables? Why does Plato's Socrates make bad arguments? Why are Beckett's novels so inscrutable? And why don't stage magicians even pretend to summon spirits anymore? In a series of captivating chapters on Mark, Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Chaucer, Joshua Landy not only answers these questions but explains why they are worth asking in the first place.Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are sometimes best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises designed to fortify specific mental capacities, from form-giving to equanimity, from reason to faith.Delivering plenty of surprises along the way--that moral readings of literature can be positively dangerous; that the parables were deliberately designed to be misunderstood; that Plato knowingly sets his main character up for a fall; that metaphor is powerfully connected to religious faith; that we can sustain our beliefs even when we suspect them to be illusions--How to Do Things with Fictions convincingly shows that our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, richer experience, and greater peace of mind may well be the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsINTRODUCTIONThirteen Ways of Looking at a FictionFormative FictionsThe Temporality of the Reading ExperienceIn Spite of Everything, a Role for MeaningA Polite Aside to HistoriansThe Value of Formative FictionsPART ONE-CLEARING THE GROUNDChapter One-Chaucer: Ambiguity and EthicsPrudence or Oneiromancy?A Parody of DidacticismPreaching to the ConvertedThe Asymmetry of 'Imaginative Resistance'Virtue Ethics and GossipQualificationsPositive ViewsPART TWO- ENCHANTMENT AND RE-ENCHANTMENTChapter Two-Mark: Metaphor and FaithRhetorical TheoriesFive Variables, Six ReadingsDeliberate OpacityThe Vision of MarkFrom Him Who Has NotTo Him Who HasThe Syrophenician WomanThe Formative CircleMetaphor and FaithTheological RamificationsA Parable about ParablesGetting It Wrong By Getting It RightCoda: The Secular KingdomAppendix: "Le Cygne"Chapter Three-Mallarmé: Irony and EnchantmentJean-Eugène Robert-HoudinExorcisms and ExperimentsScience and WonderLucid IllusionsStéphane MallarméThe Spell of PoetrySetting the SceneA Replacement FaithHow to Do Things with VersesA Corner of OrderThe Magic of RhymeA Training in EnchantmentA Sequence of StatesThe Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of Re-EnchantmentPART THREE-LOGIC AND ANTI-LOGICChapter Four-Plato: Fallacy and LogicA Platonic CoccyxAscent and DissentThe Developmental HypothesisDubious DialecticPericles, Socrates and PlatoThe Gorgias UnravelsThe Uses of OratoryWas Gorgias Refuted?Spiritual Exercises: Seven Points in ConclusionAppendix: Just How Bad is the Pericles Argument?Chapter Five-Beckett: Antithesis and TranquillityBringing Philosophy to an EndAtaraxiaAntilogoiOne Step ForwardFinding the Self to Lose the SelfAn Irreducible SinglenessRes CogitansSolutions and DissolutionsTwo Failures"I confess, I give in, there is I"Negative AnthropologyThe Beckettian SpiralAn End to Everything?Fail BetterGlimpses of the IdealTwo CaveatsCodaWorks Cited
