Quotes from Chapter Two, "Living in the Body," of A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life by Arnold Weinstein..."a book about the power of literature to heal and interact with our experiences" and simpático in spirit with Peace Through Fiction
"I want to examine the body as a kind of cultural grammar"(p111)
"(B)odies serve as parchment, slate, clay, record, text, the place where culture's story is told." (p111)
"(C)ertain kinds of damage are written on and into the body...injuries will eventually show, and the violence or abuse you have been subject to, far from disappearing or remaining just a dirty secret, comes out in the flesh." (p111)
"We assume that characters in both books and life do things, such as speaking, eating, loving, murdering, etc., but what about the ways they may be routinely penetrated and invaded: by air, by disease, by others' words, by images, by culture itself?" (p116)
(In) "Franz Kafka's dark story 'In the Penal Colony' (...), Kafka has devised a kind of fleshly semiotics that aims at no less than a miracle: the production of a language that would be one with what it says...Try to imagine a language that is immediate, so that the letters 'l-o-v-e' actually become 'love' rather than a word designating love." (p121, 123)
Arnold Weinstein links ~
Arnold L. Weinstein, Brown University Research Arnold Weinstein, Brown University, Department of Comparative Literature
Book discussion ~
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