Poetry is Philosophy

Do poems contain truths? I entertain the possibility that they do in a short piece I wrote for the Institute of Art and Ideas about how poetry can help us think. I maintain that poetry offers us so much more than images, fictions, and representations and, in fact, contains some of our sharpest and most persuasive ideas. Titled “Poetry is Philosophy,” the piece tries to show how poetry can be a powerful way of actually doing philosophy--or wondering aloud about who we are.

 https://iai.tv/articles/poetry-is-philosophy-auid-2899?_auid=2020

Review of Nancy Yousef's "The Aesthetic Commonplace"

For The Wordsworth Circle, I reviewed Nancy Yousef’s extraordinary book The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day. What an incredible synergy of thinking at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and intellectual history—a profoundly inspiring study.

How Should Literature Mean? A Conversation about Art and Ambiguity

This conversation at Aesthetics for Birds with philosophy scholars John Gibson and Hannah Kim was inspiring and fun. It turned on longstanding questions in aesthetics close to me: How do literature and art create meaning? How do we respond? Why do we respond as we do?

Wittgenstein and Literary Studies

I’m extremely excited to be a part of this inspiring collection, now available in the new series Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy. With huge thanks to the editors Rob Chodat and John Gibson. You can access the publisher’s page here.

Romanticism and the Everyday

I wrote for Literature Compass about Romantic studies and the concept of the everyday: the common, the ordinary, the pervasive, the invisible, the overfamiliar—what has been there all along but is, paradoxically, hard to see. You can read the essay here.

Emily Dickinson and the creative 'solitude of space'

In this piece for Psyche, I write about Emily Dickinson and sequestered life. I reflect on what Dickinson helps us see about the creativity that can inhabit spaces of solitude. We can learn something from the ways this poet uses isolation, unexpectedly, to generate—rather than to drain—creative energy. And in times of distance, such lessons are nothing trivial.

Interview: Storytelling is Foundational to All the Things We Do

I did an interview intended to be instructive for younger readers and writers: Why do we write? Why is storytelling important? How do we think about creativity? You can read the interview here.

Exploring Humanities Pedagogies

When students look at a particular text in the classroom (a poem, a novel, a sculpture, a document, a film), how do we orient that act of looking and reading toward public-facing questions? What concrete strategies can we use to ensure that the texts and artifacts we teach carry and retain the lines of relevance and reach we carve out for them?

I’ll give a talk titled “Outward Turns: Teaching Like a Public Intellectual” at the Humanities Pedagogy Collective Conference that takes up these questions.

https://sites.google.com/view/humanities-pedagogy-collective/home

MLA's Approaches to Teaching Austen's Persuasion

My pedagogical essay about teaching Jane Austen at the crossroads of literature and philosophy and about literature’s engagement with central questions in ethics comes out in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Persuasion. My essay “Thinking with Austen” reflects on Austen’s contributions as a novelist to perennial ethical topics—belonging and exclusion, generosity and indifference, living with others and living inwardly—and ways of approaching them in the classroom when teaching this final melancholy novel and its beautiful, muted, quietly sequestered protagonist, Anne Elliot.

Thank you to the editors, Marcia Folsom and John Wiltshire, for bringing together this volume and great resource.

https://www.mla.org/Publications/Bookstore/Approaches-to-Teaching-World-Literature/Approaches-to-Teaching-Austen-s-Persuasion

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives

I am inordinately excited to have written something in earnest about the lyric poems of Emily Dickinson. And lucky for a year or two to have been able to sit with them, incredible Nothings full of everything.

Like me and you, Dickinson was Nobody too. My essay on identity in her poems comes out in the new series Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature.

Thank you to Elisabeth Camp, this volume’s editor, for bringing together this inspiring group of essays and for valuable feedback throughout.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-poetry-of-emily-dickinson-9780190651206?cc=us&lang=en&

Form and Feeling in Photography: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels

I wrote about the ways photographs bring to light unique questions about chance, intention, and agency in art for a symposium at nonsite.org.

Thanks to the editors for the invitation to write something about the philosophy of art out of my normal range and alongside other inspiring respondents (Rob Chodat, Joshua Landy, Mathew Abbott, John Schwenkler).

https://nonsite.org/form-and-feeling-in-photography/

Wittgenstein and Literature: BU Colloquium on Philosophy, Literature, & Aesthetics

Join us in a few weeks for the BU Colloquium on Literature, Philosophy, and Aesthetics. Thanks to Rob Chodat and John Gibson for organizing this exciting group and conversation.

https://sites.bu.edu/litphilcolloquium/