Metaphor and Reality - Softcover

Wheelwright, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253201225 ISBN 13: 9780253201225

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1962

Synopsis

The sole excuse which a man can have for writing," says Remy de Gourmont, "is to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself in his individual glass." No doubt if we cared to quibble we could point to other and lesser excuses for writing, such as are assumed by makers of directories, committee reports, and literary excitants or sedatives. What the eminent critic had in mind, however, was the kind of writing which, whatever its particular incentives and aims, reveals the accents of a man speaking to fellow men. To speak forth honestly is to report the world as it is beheld (however precariously) in one's own perspective.

Things have contexts, but only a person has perspectives. The essential excuse for writing, then, is to unveil as best one can some perspective that has not already become ordered into a public map. The present book is concerned with the kind of writing that is radically perspectival. All writing, to be sure, is perspectival in the most general sense for even the most banal cliche or the most plainly factual report is formulated from a certain standpoint, and represents a certain trend of associations and expectations. The difference is not between the perspectival and the universal for every universal, at least every humanly intelligible universal, is perspectivally conceived. No, the difference is between perspectives that have become standardized and perspectives that are freshly born and individual.

The latter are perspectives in the making, rather than perspectives already publicly established it is with them that the following pages are concerned.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1962
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253201225
• ISBN 13: 9780253201225
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204