Ronald Schleifer, Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation, University of Michigan Press, 2001, 240 p.
Texte de l'éditeur:
Analogical Thinking argues that sometime around the turn of the
twentieth century, a new mode of comprehension arose, supplementing received Enlightenment ideas concerning the nature of understanding and
explanation. Focusing on the innovations of structural linguistics and its poststructural legacy,
the individualism of Enlightenment knowledge and the collaborations of post-Enlightenment
information, and practices of reading and interpretation across the arts and sciences, Analogical
Thinking examines the ways in which analogical presentations of similarities respond to the
experiences of twentieth-century culture.
The book traces this mode of thinking in linguistics, collaborative intellectual work in the arts
and sciences, and interpretations of literary and sacred texts, concluding with a reading of the
concept of Enlightenment in a comparison of Descartes and Foucault. The book examines the
poststructuralism of Derrida; the collaborations of information theory and modern science as
opposed to the individualism of Adam Smith and others, and analogical interpretations of Yeats,
Dinesen, the Bible, Dreiser, and Mailer. Its overall aim is to present an interdisciplinary
examination of a particular kind of understanding that responds to the experiences of our time.