Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature

by Angus Fletcher

Overview

Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain thinking activities. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674334137
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2014
Edition description:	Reprint 2013
Pages:	319
Sales rank:	678,492
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Angus Fletcher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate School.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. Representing Thought

1. Iconographies of Thought

2. Two Frames in the Iconography of Thinking: The Satanic and the Quixotic

3. The Distractions of Wit in the English Renaissance

4. Standing, Waiting, and Traveling Light: Milton and the Drama of Information

Part II. Representative Thinking

5. Allegorical Secrecy, Gnomic Obscurity

6. The Language-Game of Prophecy in Renaissance Poetics

7. The Father of Lies

8. Dipintura: The Visual Icon of Historicism in Vico

9. Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge

10. Silence and the Voice of Thought

11. Music and the Code of the Ineffable: Visconti's Death in Venice

12. The Image of Lost Direction

13. Style and the Extreme Situation

14. Stevens and the Influential Gnome

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Fletcher (English and comparative literature, CUNY) provides an intensely focused compendium of essays, each of which addresses the theme of thought's relation to literary work. Skillfully weaving description and conjecture that utilizes the scope and rich texture of Western literature from the Greeks to Wallace Stevens, he examines both the place and the product of active mentation in drama, poetry, and discursive and fictional narrative. Each essay can stand independently; as a whole, the book is extraordinarily rich and demanding. Informed lay readers, as well as scholars of literature and philosophy, will find this fascinating and worth the time needed to absorb its vast dimensions.-- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.

Library Journal

Describes how the German economy collapsed under Allied bombing in the last year of World War II. A broad-based, original study of German wartime industry and transportation, and of Allied air force planning and intelligence. Draws on previously unexamined files of private German manufacturing companies, the Reich Transportation Ministry, and Allied air intelligence agencies. Thought and its relation to the literary work are the thread upon which most of these essays by renowned theorist Fletcher (English and comparative literature, CUNY) are strung. As conjectures, they point to aspects of thinking and suggest some of the different ways that literary language and literary form manage to project or express such thinking. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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