Description: Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. He seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship.
Brief description: Brett Bourbon is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.
Review Quotes: This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive--if tellingly irreducible--relations to literary texts.--Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory and Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge