Sunday, January 08, 2017

Pg. 99: Cassandra Falke's "The Phenomenology of Love and Reading"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Phenomenology of Love and Reading by Cassandra Falke.

About the book, from the publisher:
The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return 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.
Read an excerpt from The Phenomenology of Love and Reading, and learn more about the book at the Bloomsbury website.

The Page 99 Test: The Phenomenology of Love and Reading.

--Marshal Zeringue