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We tend to think of ourselves using language. What if we thought instead about language working on us, or about language as something we experience rather than make use of? This book explores the generative capacities of language, suggesting that we need to pay much greater attention to the meaning-making capabilities, and political and moral implications, of more intangible aspects of language: atmosphere, mood, texture, the mode-of-being a use of language carries - and not only carries, but gives off, sends into both its reader and writer. Advancing an interpretation of language as fundamentally attitudinal and creative, Experiencing Ways Through Words explores literature in the light of such thinking, claiming that properties we tend to sideline as 'aesthetic' are profoundly constitutive of a text's capacity for significance.
List of contents
1.-Introduction. -2.-the critical conversation.- literature in the public sphere. -3.-the attitudinal realm. -Leavis's early writings. -4.-enabling.-being language animals.-Index.
About the author
Emily Abdeni-Holman read for her doctorate in literature at the University of Oxford, UK, and has held postdoctoral fellowships in Beirut, Jerusalem, and Oxford. Her first book, Body Tectonic, is a work of news poetry on Lebanon's socioeconomic crisis.
Summary
We tend to think of ourselves using language. What if we thought instead about language working on us, or about language as something we experience rather than make use of? This book explores the generative capacities of language, suggesting that we need to pay much greater attention to the meaning-making capabilities, and political and moral implications, of more intangible aspects of language: atmosphere, mood, texture, the mode-of-being a use of language carries — and not only carries, but gives off, sends into both its reader and writer. Advancing an interpretation of language as fundamentally attitudinal and creative, Experiencing Ways Through Words explores literature in the light of such thinking, claiming that properties we tend to sideline as ‘aesthetic’ are profoundly constitutive of a text’s capacity for significance.
