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"Water floats memories. Think of any phase in your experience and soon you will find some stream twisting through your thoughts. . . . Scott McMillin revives them for me in "The Meaning of Rivers". His effort is both ambitious and disarmingly simple. He wants, as his title suggests, to set us thinking not about the surface of rivers, whether smooth and shiny or turbid and rough, but rather about their philosophical significance. 'What do rivers mean?' he insists on asking us at the outset, and he will not let us off easy. We cannot reply that rivers are about the endless flow of experience, or that they mirror the fluid uncertainty of our souls--such cliches will not do. For one thing, he conceives of rivers in their intransigent "thereness", their actuality. If rivers are to mean something, it will not be because we can forget actual flows of water, with the debris they carry and the work they do. It is because we remember their material reality that we will earn the right to ask
"Rivers not only wind their way across the American continent, but course through American literature and art. T. S. McMillin offers a learned and lively primer for our reading of river literature and of rivers themselves--and in the process a primer for understanding how the human mind derives meaning from all of nature."--Scott Slovic, author, "Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility"
Water floats memories. Think of any phase in your experience and soon you will find some stream twisting through your thoughts. . . . Scott McMillin revives them for me in "The Meaning of Rivers." His effort is both ambitious and disarmingly simple. He wants, as his title suggests, to set us thinking not about the surface of rivers, whether smooth and shiny or turbid and rough, but rather about their philosophical significance. What do rivers mean? he insists on asking us at the outset, and he will not let us off easy. We cannot reply that rivers are about the endless flow of experience, or that they mirror the fluid uncertainty of our souls such cliches will not do. For one thing, he conceives of rivers in their intransigent "thereness," their actuality. If rivers are to mean something, it will not be because we can forget actual flows of water, with the debris they carry and the work they do. It is because we remember their material reality that we will earn the right to ask the deeper questions he wants us to consider. Wayne Franklin, from the foreword
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Rivers not only wind their way across the American continent, but course through American literature and art. T. S. McMillin offers a learned and lively primer for our reading of river literature and of rivers themselves and in the process a primer for understanding how the human mind derives meaning from all of nature. Scott Slovic, author, "Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility"
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T. S. McMillin is a professor in the Department of English at Oberlin. He is the author of "Our Preposterous Uses of Literature: Emerson and the Nature of Reading." .""
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