Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Such a situation may be better understood if we consider that concepts with indefinite comprehension are concepts of Nature. As such, they are always in something else: they are not in Nature but in the mind which contemplates it or observes it, and represents it to itself. That is why it is said that Nature…
In “The Well Wrought Urn” — that well-known and well-wrought book of literary criticism — Cleanth Brooks described what he called “the heresy of paraphrase.” The main idea — that efforts at paraphrasing poetry into prose fail in ways that parallel attempts for prose do not — was not new. It has been generally agreed…
The mystical, Platonic identification of words with the essence of things is what many of Magritte’s canvases vigorously assault. Just as in Saussurean linguistics words do not “refer” to things, in Magritte’s Surrealism the painter’s images do not really “resemble” anything whose sovereign presence would lend it the aspect of a model or origin. When…