Introduction
PART I LANGUAGE
1. Use and Mention
2. Words and Sentences
3. Meaning and Meaningfulness
4. Propaganda and Ambiguity
PART II LITERATURE
5. Mimesis and Catharsis
6. Character and Character
7. Fictions and Stop Signs
8. Poems and Particularity
PART III READING
9. Familiar and Unfamiliar
10. Attitudes and Words
11. Paraphrase and Example
12. Persons and Life
PART IV ART
13. Poems and Eyes
14. Making and Finding
15. Actions and Art
16. Closeness and Distance
PART V CULTURES
17. Actions and Events
18. Context and Text
19. Us and Them
20. Thinking with Words
Biography
Brett Bourbon is Professor of English Literature at the University of Dallas. He is also a Visiting Professor in The Program of Literary Theory, University of Lisbon. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and was a professor at Stanford. He was awarded a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship and a Fulbright Award. He has published many essays and three books, Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Meaning and Mind in Literature and Philosophy (2004), Everyday Poetics: Ethics, Love, and Logic (2022), and Jane Austen And the Ethics of Life (2022).
Miguel Tamen is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Lisbon. Between 2000 and 2014, he also held a regular visiting appointment at the University of Chicago. He was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and at the National Humanities Center. He is the author of Friends of Interpretable Objects (2001), What Art Is Like (2012), and Closeness (2021), among other books.
