Background
Bruns, Gerald L. was born on April 10, 1938 in Minneapolis. Son of Lew John and Lucien (Kirsch) Bruns.
(-- Gerald Bruns's ground-breaking analysis compares two c...)
-- Gerald Bruns's ground-breaking analysis compares two contrasting functions of language: the hermetic, where language is self-contained and self-referencing, and the Orphic, which originates from a belief in the mythical unity of word and being. Bruns lucidly depicts the distinctions and convergences between these two lines of thought by examining the works of Mallarme, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, and others.
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(In this meditation on the nature and purpose of hermeneut...)
In this meditation on the nature and purpose of hermeneutics, Gerald L. Bruns argues that hermeneutics is not merely a contemporary theory but an extended family of questions about understanding and interpretation that have multiple and conflicting histories going back to before the beginning of writing. What does it mean to understand a riddle, an action, a concept, a law, an alien culture, or oneself? Bruns sets out to expand our sense of the horizons of hermeneutics by situating its basic questions against a background of different cultural traditions and philosophical topics. He discusses, for example, the interpretation of oracles, the silencing of the muses and the writing of history, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, the canonization of sacred texts, the nature of allegorical exegesis, Rabbinical midrash, the mystical exegesis of the Qur'an, the rise of literalism and the individual interpreter, and the nature of Romantic hermaneutics. Dealing with thinkers ranging from Socrates to Luther to Wordsworth to Ricoeur, Bruns also ponders several basic dilemmas about the nature of hermeneutical experience, the meaning of tradition, the hermeneutical function of narrative and the conflict between truth and freedom in philosophy and literature.
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( As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice ...)
As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice Blanchot has earned tributes from authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Emmanuel Levinas. But their praise has told us little about what Blanchot's work actually says and why it has been so influential. In the first comprehensive study of this important French writer to appear in English, Gerald Bruns ties Blanchot's writings to each other and to the works of his contemporaries, including the poet Paul Celan. Blanchot belongs to the generation of French intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s, survived the Occupation, and flourished during the quarter century or so after World War II. He was one of the first French intellectuals to take a systematic interest in questions of language and meaning. His focus in the mid-1930s on extreme situations -- death, madness, imprisonment, exile, revolution, catastrophe -- anticipated the later interest of the existentialists. Like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, Blanchot was a self-conscious writer of fragments, and he has given us one the most developed investigations that we have on the fragment as a kind of writing. In a series of close readings, Bruns addresses the philosophical and political questions that have surrounded Blanchot and his writings for decades. He describes what is creative in Blanchot's readings of Heidegger's controversial works and examines Blanchot's conception of poetry as an inquiry into the limits of philosophy, rationality, and power.
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( In this wide-ranging meditation on the nature and purpo...)
In this wide-ranging meditation on the nature and purpose of hermeneutics, Gerald L. Bruns argues that hermeneutics is not merely a contemporary theory but an extended family of questions about understanding and interpretation that have multiple and conflicting histories going back to before the beginning of writing. What does it mean to understand a riddle, an action, a concept, a law, an alien culture, or oneself? Bruns expands our sense of the horizons of hermeneutics by situating its basic questions against a background of different cultural traditions and philosophical topics. He discusses, for example, the interpretation of oracles, the silencing of the muses and the writing of history, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, the canonization of sacred texts, the nature of allegorical exegesis, rabbinical midrash, the mystical exegesis of the Qur'an, the rise of literalism and the individual interpreter, and the nature of Romantic hermeneutics. Dealing with thinkers ranging from Socrates to Luther to Wordsworth to Ricoeur, Bruns also ponders several basic dilemmas about the nature of hermeneutical experience, the meaning of tradition, the hermeneutical function of narrative, and the conflict between truth and freedom in philosophy and literature. His eloquent book demonstrates the continuing power of hermeneutical thinking to open up questions about the world and our place in it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300063032/?tag=2022091-20
(Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make ...)
Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art. As William Carlos Williams says, A poem can be made of anything,even newspaper clippings.At this point, art turns into philosophy, all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the distinctive genre of modernism. This book takes seriously this transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas.As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and what sort of communitydefines the work of art-or, for that matter, the work of philosophy.In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience-or, indeed, an alternative form of life-as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823226336/?tag=2022091-20
(Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very...)
Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers--have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FBBNS8Y/?tag=2022091-20
( Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of ve...)
Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers--have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of contemporary literary theorists investigates the intersection of literature and philosophy, analyzing the emerging preferences for practice over theory, particulars over universals, events over structures, inhabitants over spectators, an ethics of responsibility over a morality of rules, and a desire for intimacy with the world instead of simply a disengaged knowledge of it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810116758/?tag=2022091-20
Bruns, Gerald L. was born on April 10, 1938 in Minneapolis. Son of Lew John and Lucien (Kirsch) Bruns.
Bachelor, Marquette University, 1960. Master of Arts, Marquette University, 1962. Doctor of Philosophy, University Virginia, 1966.
Assistant Professor of English, Ohio State University, Columbus, 1965-1970; associate Professor of English, U. Iowa, Iowa City, 1970-1974; Professor of English, U. Iowa, Iowa City, 1974-1984; William B. and Hazel P. White professor, U. Notre Dame, Indiana, since 1985. Aerol Arnold visiting professor University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1981-1982.
(Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very...)
( Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of ve...)
(-- Gerald Bruns's ground-breaking analysis compares two c...)
(-- Gerald Bruns's ground-breaking analysis compares two c...)
( As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice ...)
( As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice ...)
(Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make ...)
( In this wide-ranging meditation on the nature and purpo...)
(In this meditation on the nature and purpose of hermeneut...)
(Brand New. In Stock. Will be shipped from US. Excellent C...)
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Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences. Member Modern Language Association, Midwest Modern Language Association (executive director, editor Bulletin MMLA 1973-1978), International Association for Philosophy and Literature, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, American Philosophical Association.
Married Margaret Leahey, September 5, 1964 (divorced August 1980). Children: Anne Louise, Margaret Lucien, John Edward Gerald. Married Nancy G. Moore, July 13, 1986.
1 child, Jacob Matthew.