Search results for ""Author Richard Eldridge""

Richard Eldridge explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life. Beyond simple entertainment, difficult modern works cultivate reflective depth and help their readers order and interpret their lives as subjects in relation to complex economies and technological systems. By imagining themselves in the role of the protagonist or the authorial persona, readers become immersed in structures of sustained attention, under which concrete possibilities of meaningful life, along with difficulties that block their realization, are tracked and clarified. Literary form, Eldridge argues, generates structures of care, reflection, and investment within readers, shaping--if not stabilizing--their interactions with everyday objects and events. Through the experience of literary forms of attention, readers may come to think and live more actively, more fully engaging with modern life, rather than passively suffering it. Eldridge considers the thought of Descartes, Kant, Adorno, Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, and Charles Taylor in his discussion of Goethe, Wordsworth, Rilke, Stoppard, and Sebald, advancing a philosophy of literature that addresses our desire to read and the meaning and satisfaction that literary attention brings to our fragmented modern lives.

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This study presents an account of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", interpreting the text as displaying the human need to pursue an ideal of expressive freedom within the limits set by culture. The author sees Wittgenstein as a Romantic protagonist pondering on the nature of intentional consciousness, and ranging over ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of mind. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and scepticism. Eldridge aims to provide a careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work.

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