Thinking with Words

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.

• Introduction PART I LANGUAGE1. Use and Mention2. Words and Sentences3. Meaning and Meaningfulness4. Propaganda and AmbiguityPART II LITERATURE5. Mimesis and Catharsis6. Character and Character7. Fictions and Stop Signs8. Poems and ParticularityPART III READING9. Familiar and Unfamiliar10. Attitudes and Words11. Paraphrase and Example12. Persons and LifePART IV ART13. Poems and Eyes14. Making and Finding15. Actions and Art16. Closeness and DistancePART V CULTURES17. Actions and Events18. Context and Text19. Us and Them20. Thinking with Words