Augustine the reader : meditation, self-knowledge, and the ethics of interpretation / Brian Stock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stock, Brian.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. Confessiones.

Augustine.

Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430--Books and reading.

Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430--Knowledge and learning.

Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430--Influence.

Books and reading.

Spirituality--History.

Spirituality.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 463 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1996.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Augustine of Hippo, a central figure in the history of Western thought, is also the author of a theory of reading that has had a profound influence on Western letters from the ages of Petrarch, Montaigne, Luther, and Rousseau to those of Freud and our own time. Brian Stock provides the first full account of this theory within the evolution of Augustine's early dialogues, his Confessions , and his systematic treatises. Augustine was convinced that words and images play a mediating role in our perceptions of reality. In the union of philosophy, psychology, and literary insights that forms the basis of his theory of reading, the reader emerges as the dominant model of the reflective self. Meditative reading, indeed the meditative act that constitutes reading itself, becomes the portal to inner being. At the same time, Augustine argues that the self-knowledge reading brings is, of necessity, limited, since it is faith rather than interpretive reason that can translate reading into forms of understanding. In making his theory of reading a central concern, Augustine rethinks ancient doctrines about images, memory, emotion, and cognition. In judging what readers gain and do not gain from the sensory and mental understanding of texts, he takes up questions that have reappeared in contemporary thinking. He prefigures, and in a way he teaches us to recognize, our own preoccupations with the phenomenology of reading, the hermeneutics of tradition, and the ethics of interpretation.

Contents:

Introduction I CONFESSIONS 1-9 Learning to Read Words Reading and Writing Self-Improvement Intellectual Horizons Manichaeism Ambrose Neoplatonism Reading and Conversion Alypius Simplicianus Ponticianus Augustine From Cassiciacum to Ostia Cassiciacum Ostia II THE ETHICS OF INTERPRETATION Beginnings The Letters The Dialogues Speaking and Reading On Dialectic The Teacher Defining the Reader Toward Theory Tradition and Beliefs The "Uninstructed" Christian Doctrine Memory, Self-Reform, and Time Remembering Conduct Time The Self A Language of Thought The Reader and the Cogito The Road toward Wisdom Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [419]-453) and index.

ISBN:

9780674044043

0674044045

OCLC:

923117188