Introduction
1 Phenomenology and Literature
2 The Erotic Reduction
3 The Lover’s Advance
Interlude
4 Empathy
5 Attention
6 Being Overwhelmed
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Explores literature's relationship to our ethical lives through the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Marion.
Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her previous books include Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820-1848 (2013) and, as editor, Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (2010). She has also published articles about English Romanticism, literary theory, and liberal arts education.
To write on phenomenology and literature requires an author who
reads with exacting delicacy and who construes demanding philosophy
with a high level of clarity. Cassandra Falke is just this person.
The Phenomenology of Love and Reading is a book of twofold
significance: at once an invitation to read literature with
Jean-Luc Marion, eminent phenomenologist of love, and a study of
what is involved when we read—really read—narrative fiction and
poetry.
*Kevin Hart, Edwin B Kyle Professor of Christian Studies,
University of Virginia, USA*
In order for we readers to know a literary text on its own,
multiple terms, our love has to be in play: this is the key insight
that Cassandra Falke develops in this clearly written,
illuminating, and extraordinarily wise book. Through a series of
incisive chapters that unfold Jean-Luc Marion’s rich phenomenology
of love in relation to the historical features of the
phenomenological method, various phenomenologies of reading, and
contemporary literary theory, Falke persuasively offers not only an
argument for but a performance of what she terms “charitable
reading”: an approach to reading characterized by specifically
“erotic” modes of receptivity and attention to the literary text’s
burgeoning givenness. Falke shows how and why the loving reader’s
experiences with the text’s phenomenality form the way he or she
encounters embodied persons outside the text, such that erotic
reading becomes a pedagogy of love. Falke’s book invites us to
understand nothing less than how the knowing we achieve through
loving reading is integral to the loving relations that constitute
the very flesh and blood of our lives.
*Stephen E. Lewis, Professor and Chair of English Department,
Franciscan University of Steubenville, USA*
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
Marion’s work had not reached the field of literary theory, and
this book attempts to forge that connection. Falke (English
literature and culture, Univ. of Tromsø, 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 seems, one can cultivate the capacity
for love through reading that enhances love’s virtues, including
attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Falke
reflects thoughtfully on the phenomenology of reading, and shows
the relevance of Marion’s claim that “erotic reduction” is the key
to who one is. Summing Up: Recommended.
*CHOICE*
For Falke—love is a submission of the ego to the other, not in
submitting to the domination by the other, but in putting aside
one’s ego desires, and opening one’s self to becoming changed by
the other—whether or not the other reciprocates the love … That in
short form is the challenge Falke poses to the reader of her book:
allow at least the literary book, if not the theoretical and
argumentative book, for the most part, to change your inner self,
rather than coming to the book with a sense of a need to control,
own, and dominate. Moreover, not only does Falke construct a
theoretical structure for developing her thesis of reading as
erotic love, as a form of allowing the book to speak to you in its
own terms, from its own frame of reference, Falke also, provides a
practicum for how to perform the erotic reduction of a text … The
adoption of erotic reduction is a logical necessity, even when
psychologically difficult, if our goal is to get inside the mind of
the book, as it were.
*Literature and Theology*
Falke’s book reaffirmed my conviction of the high aesthetic
significance of Marion’s phenomenology. Exemplary are the lovely
pages she devotes to Marion’s discovery of everyday life’s richness
... Phenomenology conjoins art and life—this is Falke’s chief,
invaluable insight.
*The Heythrop Journal*
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