The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing
Arnold Weinstein, "The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing"
English | ISBN: 0691177309 | 2022 | 352 pages | AZW3 | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0691177309 | 2022 | 352 pages | AZW3 | 2 MB
A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our lives
Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person―and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature’s
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