Phenomenology of Love and Reading

"The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything -- more than cognition and more than our own concept of being. Drawing on phenomenological descriptions of perception, Falke shows how reading, like love, can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love's habits -- attention, empathy and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Because phenomena of love only unfold completely in embodied encounters with other people, a practice of reading grounded in a phenomenology of love compels readers to set aside their books to embrace encounters with real, embodied others whose developing selfhood cannot be separated from our own. This is the first book to introduce Marion's important work in phenomenology to a discussion of literary theory."--Bloomsbury Publishing. "Explores literature's relationship to our ethical lives through the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Marion"--Bloomsbury Publishing.