My gratitude to Skip Zilla for introducing me to Arnold Weinstein's work. Click here to follow Skip Zilla on Twitter.
Quotes from A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life by Arnold Weinstein ~
"When we are in pain, we feel we are alone...This book takes the premise that the opposite is true: human feeling connects us. Works of literature and art can be the bridge. A scream goes through the house. Pain, hurt, feeling, can be shared." (p4)
"In art we can find and tap into a reservoir of feeling, and this encounter not only breaks open our solitude but also makes audible and visible to us the emotional lines of force that bathe individual life, separate us, yet connect us to one another." (p5)
"...literature and art...constitute no less than a mirror and echo chamber, a universe in which our personal stories might be seen and aligned with or against those others on show." (p6)
"...art offers us a prodigious resource here—here in the realm of feeling, whether it be pain or pleasure—and it is a resource utterly unimagined and untapped by the scientific paradigm that governs Western thinking... "(p7)
"In making visible the revolutionary potency and range of feeling—feeling as collective rather than self-contained—art makes available to us...a new understanding of ‘connective tissue.’" (p7)
"I am claiming that art overwhelms us with its news of feelings and relationships, that it brothers and sisters us, binds us in some almost visceral way beyond our choosing." (p8)
"Our lives are so filled with days and years, with details and routines, that few of us possess that magic thread, that figure in the carpet, which would give us a distilled picture of who we really are, of what our life really means."
Arnold Weinstein links ~
Arnold L. Weinstein, Brown University Research
Arnold Weinstein, Brown University, Department of Comparative Literature
Book discussion ~
Join the discussion at Twitter Readers Bookclub
Book discussion ~
Join the discussion at Twitter Readers Bookclub
Nicole, your interest in the power of literature to help us open ourselves to learning who we are and to relating our stories to those of fictional characters and real friends is one that resonates with me. Communicating is key to community.
ReplyDeleteSimon Schama is a favorite historian and art historian/interpreter of mine. He produced a BBC television series, shown on PBS as well, titled "The Power of Art"(DVD version at http://tinyurl.com/mpry9b) which also emphasizes the evocation of emotions through experiencing work of ten great painters and sculptors. There is a book which I have and love which Schama's written which stands on its own on the same material. If you have not seen or read this work, I highly recommend that you do.
See you at the Twitter Readers Bookclub and on Twitter, my wonderful friend.
Skip