Overview

In Living in Language, David Bosworth makes a compelling case for the power and relevance of the literary imagination throughout history. In a series of essays both lyrical and analytical, he examines how certain works have engaged the most pressing problems of their authors' ages even as they illuminate challenges that still haunt the world. The topics addressed are rich and various: the evolutionary significance of metaphorical reasoning; how Hitler's infatuation with an opera's plot predicted the arc of his horrific reign, even as his victims employed the power of narrative to endure his crimes; the ways in which Melville's late fiction foresaw the sources driving America's current cultural crisis; and how, in probing his era's political turmoil, Shakespeare's plays supply clues to resolving the current era's. From the spiritual quest of a musical prose to the cinematic craft of amending America's foundational story; from the myth of the Fall to novels that probe the Internet's impact on our lives today, Bosworth reveals how the literary imagination honors the """"living"""" prescribed by the human predicament, evoking its beauty while never stinting on its uncertainties, cruelties, and pain.

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9781666774498

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""David Bosworth contends that 'the history we are living is best understood as . . . a complex, interactive, ongoing novel.' Note his response to a trendy commentator's claim that language is about nothing but itself: 'Our speaker didn't seem to know that, beneath the precious mask his theory wove, the very sounds he spoke were pulsing with the passions of past events.' We must rejoice that Bosworth, both erudite and humane, feels that pulsing more acutely than any other contemporary."" --Sydney Lea, Vermont poet laureate (2011-15) ""Capacious and precise, critical and sympathetic, deeply cultured and thoroughly down-to-earth, David Bosworth's Living in Language engages the reader with free-ranging enthusiasm: whether elaborating on James Fenimore Cooper, Wallace Stevens, or Patricia Lockwood, his prose is distinguished by originality and vividness. Even as he laments the instrumental rationalism of our age, Bosworth offers a glimpse of a present that contains ""so many riches to assay here, so much pain to parse and beauty to acclaim."" This book is to be acclaimed."" --Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry ""In ""What Calls for Thinking,"" Martin Heidegger avows that mythos and logos ""become separated and opposed only at the point where neither can keep to its pristine essence."" It is the heartening accomplishment of Bosworth's beautiful essays to advocate successfully for the pristine and for the essential in human tellings. Those canons which culminate in ourselves, whether we honor them or not, forecast the future life of our words and of the myths we might yet make of them. There is more than reassurance in these essays. There is a thrill of futurity."" --Donald Revell, emeritus professor of English, UNLV, and author of Canadaigua

Author Information

David Bosworth is the author most recently of The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America (2014) and Conscientious Thinking (2020). The recipient of N.E.A and Ingram Merrill fellowships, as well as the Drue Heniz Prize and a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation for his fiction writing, he is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Washington.

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