The Phenomenology of Love and Reading [Hardcover]

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding.

The Phenomenology of Love and Readingaccepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love?s habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

One of the professed goals of this work is to bring the theology of French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) together with literary criticism. Marion is an important thinker in the phenomenological tradition, and in recent times he has become one of the leading voices in contemporary theology. But until now the relevance of Marions work had not reached the field of literary theory, and this book attempts to forge that connection. Falke (English literature and culture, Univ. of Troms?, Norway) focuses on the theme of love, which, according to Marion, takes precedence over all other experiences. In the introduction the author writes that criticism should itself be an act of love; indeed, it should not be separate from the rest of life, and it should add something to the world. This is because literature expands one, and books provide an elsewhere that takes the reader away from ordinary self-possession. And so, it selã,