Overview

Full Product Details

9780226453095

Table of Contents

Reviews

Apropos of Something is a phenomenal achievement-lucid, urgent, and rampantly intelligent. Tamarkin's readings of art and literature emerge, like a leaping trout in a Winslow Homer painting, from the ground of careful philosophical explication to capture that feeling of surprise when we truly pay attention to something. Tamarkin does not simply analyze; she teaches us how to see. As a contribution to intellectual history, philosophy, aesthetic criticism, and theories of reading, this book possesses an Emersonian power to realize one of our great abstractions. * Gavin Jones, author of 'Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity' * Elisa Tamarkin shows what we do when we think the world, or the world thinks us-when an object separates from the slurry of general impressions and becomes important, singular, and relevant: standing out like Poe's raven amid forgettable furnishings. A marvelous study of patterns of thought in American culture. * Alexander Nemerov, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York * Apropos of Something summons the work of mostly major American thinkers from the nineteenth century, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics. It thus tells a story of how something that was overlooked on the grounds of its insignificance comes to occupy the center of attention. But that story, told by Tamarkin with impressive erudition, does more than simply make us see the American intellectual tradition in a new light, as preoccupied with questions of the minor, disregarded and insignificant, rather than the exceptional, central, and powerful. In reconstructing how attention can come to refocus on what has escaped it, her argument also becomes a remarkable theory of aesthetic perception in its own right. Its major and far-reaching proposition is that, in its very nature, aesthetic perception is profoundly ethical; for it is nothing other than a practice of saving and elevating what is weak, fragile, and frail. * Branka Arsic, author of 'Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau' *

Apropos of Something is a phenomenal achievement-lucid, urgent, and rampantly intelligent. Tamarkin's readings of art and literature emerge, like a leaping trout in a Winslow Homer painting, from the ground of careful philosophical explication to capture that feeling of surprise when we truly pay attention to something. Tamarkin does not simply analyze; she teaches us how to see. As a contribution to intellectual history, philosophy, aesthetic criticism, and theories of reading, this book possesses an Emersonian power to realize one of our great abstractions. * Gavin Jones, author of 'Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity' * Elisa Tamarkin shows what we do when we think the world, or the world thinks us-when an object separates from the slurry of general impressions and becomes important, singular, and relevant: standing out like Poe's raven amid forgettable furnishings. A marvelous study of patterns of thought in American culture. * Alexander Nemerov, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York *

Author Information

Elisa Tamarkin is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available