Augustine of Hippo, a central figure in the history of Western thought, is also the author of a theory of reading that has had a profound influence on Western letters from the ages of Petrarch, Montaigne, Luther and Rousseau to those of Freud and our own time. Brian Stock provides a full account of this theory within the evolution of Augustine's early dialogues, his "Confessions", and his systematic treatises. Augustine was convinced that words and images play a mediating role in our perceptions of reality. In the union of philosophy, psychology and literary insights that forms the basis of his theory of reading, the reader emerges as the dominant model of the reflective self. Meditative reading, indeed the meditative act that constitutes reading itself, becomes the portal to inner being. At the same time, Augustine argues that the self-knowledge reading brings is, of necessity, limited, since it is faith rather than interpretive reason that can translate reading into forms of understanding. In making his theory of reading a central concern, Augustine rethinks ancient doctrines about images, memory, emotion and cognition.
In judging what readers gain and do not gain from the sensory and mental understanding of texts, he takes up questions that have reappeared in contemporary thinking. He prefigures, and in a way he teaches us to recognize, our own preoccupations with the phenomenology of reading, the hermeneutics of tradition, and the ethics of interpretation.
- ISBN10 0674052765
- ISBN13 9780674052765
- Publish Date 31 October 2003 (first published 11 February 1998)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 21 April 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 476
- Language English