Sheer Fiction

LIFE OBLIGES US to talk to people we would ignore. But that paradoxical otherwise is a poor alternative, and I invoke it only to put in context my suspicion that, if others over the years had not advanced the idea that is incompatible with art, I might not have hit on such twaddle myself (especially in regard to fiction, the art I engage in). First, there is the familiar slur, less argument than holy conviction, that discursive thinking isn't artistic. In other words, it isn't enough in its own right; it has to be deployed, invested in personable and ingratiating images, somehow transposed into action, made seductively three-dimensional. Not to make it so (according to this line) is to waste our mimetic, manipulative skills. Hence the fable and the parable, allegory, symbolism, and what we like to call characters

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Art, Technology, and Culture · History · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Visual Culture and Art Theory