William Egginton ist ein Literaturkritiker und Philosoph, dessen Werk ein breites Themenspektrum abdeckt, darunter Theaterhaftigkeit, Fiktionalität, Literaturkritik, Psychoanalyse und Ethik. Er untersucht auch religiöse Mäßigung und Medientheorien. Seine akademische Laufbahn führte ihn an die Johns Hopkins University, wo er spanische und lateinamerikanische Literatur sowie die Beziehung zwischen Literatur und Philosophie lehrt. Eggintons Ansatz verbindet tiefgründige literarische Analyse mit philosophischer Reflexion und bietet den Lesern aufschlussreiche Einblicke in die Natur der Fiktion und ihre Rolle in der Gesellschaft.
In "How the World Became a Stage," William Egginton explores modernity as a spatial experience rather than a subjective one. He shifts the focus from philosophy to the practices of spectacle, analyzing historical stage practices in France and Spain, and how the perception of space evolved from a magical presence to a theatrical emptiness.
400 years after the publication of Don Quixote (1605-15), William Egginton reveals how Cervantes came to invent what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world
Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Exploring the intersection of love, science, and philosophy, this book delves into the insights of poet Jorge Luis Borges, physicist Werner Heisenberg, and philosopher Immanuel Kant. Each figure grapples with the complexities of human experience and knowledge, revealing that love inherently involves loss, reality is never fully describable, and human understanding has its limits. Through their reflections, the author highlights the profound mystery of existence and our relationship to it, offering a captivating examination of how these themes intertwine across disciplines.
At 90, Alejandro Jodorowsky continues to impact the arts, influencing figures like John Waters and Yoko Ono. While often seen as disjointed, William Egginton argues that Jodorowsky's diverse creations—spanning writings, theatre, mime, and films—are interconnected by a philosophical framework. This framework is further enriched by his therapeutic practice known as psychomagic, revealing a cohesive vision behind his seemingly random body of work.
Dedicated to the Officers and Sailors of the Alaska Marine Highway System, Past and Present.
We are living in a time of inflationary media. While technological change has periodically altered and advanced the ways humans process and transmit knowledge, for the last 100 years the media with which we produce, transmit, and record ideas have multiplied in kind, speed, and power. Saturation in media is provoking a crisis in how we perceive and understand reality. Media become inflationary when the scope of their representation of the world outgrows the confines of their culture's prior grasp of reality. We call the resulting concept of reality that emerges the culture's medialogy. Medialogies offers a highly innovative approach to the contemporary construction of reality in cultural, political, and economic domains. Castillo and Egginton, both luminary scholars, combine a very accessible style with profound theoretical analysis, relying not only on works of philosophy and political theory but also on novels, Hollywood films, and mass media phenomena. The book invites us to reconsider the way reality is constructed, and how truth, sovereignty, agency, and authority are understood from the everyday, philosophical, and political points of view. A powerful analysis of actuality, with its roots in early modernity, this work is crucial to understanding reality in the information age.
Thinking With Borges engages the most pressing and persistent questions of the philosophical tradition—including those of time, eternity, politics, law, justice, language, reality, identity and memory—through original and often brilliant readings of the Borgesian archive. Going beyond Borges’s self-deprecating claim that he deployed the philosophical canon only for aesthetic purposes, the contributors to Thinking With Borges demonstrate that he seeks to answer the most enduring philosophical questions in ways that both contest and extend the philosophical tradition.
