Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Author�s Note -- Closing the Books: A Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story -- H. C. Witwer and Me: The Making of a Reader -- Stop the Presses: A Petition for Less Writing -- What Do You Know? What Don�t You Know? -- Death, It�s What Ails You -- Why Smart People Believe in God -- Taste, Too, Is an Art -- The Rule of Temperament -- Art and Craft -- Certitudes -- What Happened? The Rise and Fall of Theory -- How We Write When We Write About Writing -- Looking for a Good Argument: Argument and the Novel
Just Imagine: Three Hundred Years of the Creative ImaginationGoing, Going, Gone: The Place of Poetry in American Letters -- The Writing Life -- Credits
0
8
This book examines the role of temperament and taste in the forming of aesthetic and ideological opinions. In provocative chapters about reading and writing, about the relation between life and literature, about knowledge and certainty, about God and death, and about a gradual disaffection with the literary scene, the book demonstrates that opposing points of view are based more on innate predilections than on disinterested thought or analysis.