Synopses & Reviews
Certain questions are basic to the human condition: how we imagine the world, and ourselves and others within it; how we confront the constraints of language and the limits of our own minds; and how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to give shape to the future. These are the questions James Boyd White addresses in this book, exploring each through readings og great works of Western culture, Huckleberry Finn, the Odyssey, and the paintins of Vermeer among them. In doing so, White creates a deeply moving and insightful book and presents an inspiring conception of mind, language, and the essence of living.
Review
"This ambitious book tracks 'through a series of texts in which a mind can be seen trying to imagine a world, and the self within it, in such a way as to make possible coherent speech and valuable action.' We watch Thoreau re-imagining himself as a creator, Huck Finn struggling with other people's imagined worlds, Odysseus
mastering his world in change, and Frost and Herbert imagining worlds they can exist in. He shows Plato imagining the mind in Phaedrus, and White's own struggles as a lawyer dealing with slippery language and even slipperier reality. He closes each section with personal anecdotes of himself growing up, unusual in a scholarly book, but always illuminating. Unfortunately, his final chapter, on uncovering meaning in Vermeer's paintings of women, descends into mere blither; White simply has no idea what he's talking about. But his chapters on how Homer's early Greek language works and how to take sentences apart are alone worth the price of the volume." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
About the Author
James Boyd White is the Hart Wright Professor of Law, professor of English, and adjunct professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan. His many books include The Legal Imagination, Acts of Hope, and Justice as Translation, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Beyond Words
Part I
1. Thoreau's Walden: Sporting with Proud Reliance in the Fields of Air
2. Huckleberry Finn: Doing Whichever Come Handiest at the Time
3. The Odyssey: Living in a Land Transformed
Part II
4. Reading Greek: Autar ho ek limenos
5. Making Meaning in the Sentence
6. The Phaedrus: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Love
Part III
7. Frost and Herbert: Poetry as Life
8. The Life of the Law as a Life of Writing
9. The Depth of Meaning in Vermeer
Acknowledgments
Index