Reading Emptiness by Jeff Humphries

Reading Emptiness by Jeff Humphries

Reading Emptiness connects ancient Buddhist attitudes and ideas with postmodern theory and aesthetics, concluding that the closest thing in Western culture to the Middle Way of Buddhism is not any sort of theory or philosophy, but the practice of literature. The book draws on scholarship and criticism in literary theory, philosophy, and science to speculate about the possible common ground between literary and Buddhist practices, aiming not so much to elucidate the ancient traditions of Buddhism as to seek ways in which literature might be integrated into a truly Western practice of Buddhism that would remain philosophically true to its Eastern roots.

"Humphries's meditations upon Japanese Buddhism in relation to literary values, like his previous work on Villon, Proust, Stendhal, Poe, and Flannery O'Connor, follows a highly individual path, at once profoundly literary-critical and yet religious in sensibilityHis range, his critical acuteness, and his wise use of literary theory show him to be a first-rank scholar and an authentic person-of-letters." — Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

"The affinity between Buddhist thought and Western tendencies implicit in deconstruction represents an important intersection between different cultures, and Humphries' unique combination of literary theory, language skills, and wide knowledge of literature enables him to handle this difficult topic with success." — James Applewhite, Duke University

"Humphries has written an unusual book that attempts to take up one of the great questions of our day: the effect of literature on consciousness and consciousness on literature. I admire the risks he takes intellectually, bringing together, as he does, such diverse areas as Japanese Buddhism, Western literature and literary theory, theories of translation, the growth and care of bonsai trees, and issues of mystico-dream realities." — George Kalamaras, author of Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence

Jeff Humphries is LSU Foundation Professor of Comparative Literature, French, and English, and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Louisiana State University. His many books include The Otherness Within: Gnostic Readings in Marcel Proust, Flannery O'Connor and Francois Villon; and Losing the Text: Readings in Literary Desire.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780791442623
ISBN 10	0791442624
Title	Reading Emptiness
Author	Jeff Humphries
Series	Suny Series The Margins Of Literature
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	State University of New York Press
Year published	1999-08-12
Number of pages	191
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.