ELDRIDGE, Richard, Literature, Life, and Modernity, Irvington, Columbia University Press, 2008, 192 p.
ISBN 978-0-231-14454-4
RÉSUMÉ
Richard Eldridge explores the ability of dense and formally interestingliterature to respond to the complexities of modern life. Beyond simpleentertainment, difficult modern works cultivate reflective depth andhelp their readers order and interpret their lives as subjects inrelation to complex economies and technological systems. By imaginingthemselves in the role of the protagonist or the authorial persona,readers become immersed in structures of sustained attention, underwhich concrete possibilities of meaningful life, along withdifficulties that block their realization, are tracked and clarified.
Literaryform, Eldridge argues, generates structures of care, reflection, andinvestment within readers, shaping-if not stabilizing-theirinteractions with everyday objects and events. Through the experienceof literary forms of attention, readers may come to think and live moreactively, more fully engaging with modern life, rather than passivelysuffering it. Eldridge considers the thought of Descartes, Kant,Adorno, Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, and Charles Taylor in his discussionof Goethe, Wordsworth, Rilke, Stoppard, and Sebald, advancing aphilosophy of literature that addresses our desire to read and themeaning and satisfaction that literary attention brings to ourfragmented modern lives.
BIOGRAPHIE
Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Persistence of Romanticism, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, and On Moral Personhood, and is the editor of Beyond Representation, Stanley Cavell, and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (forthcoming).