After Augustine
Subtitle: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Material Texts)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: April 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780812236026
Subjects: Cultural studies; Literary studies: general; Literary Criticism; Education / Teaching; Teaching Methods & Materials - Reading; Literary Criticism & Collections / Medieval; General; Augustine,; Books and reading; Confessiones; History; Influence; Saint, Bishop of Hippo; Saint, Bishop of Hippo; Self-knowledge, Theory of
First sentence: The late ancient and medieval periods inherited a number of techniques for dealing with the classical philosophical problem of self-knowledge.
Description: "Augustine of Hippo was the most prolific and influential writer on reading between antiquity and the Renaissance, though he left no systematic treatise on the subject. His reluctance to synthesize his views on other important themes such as the sacraments suggests that he would have been skeptical of any attempt to bring his statements on reading into a formal theory.

Yet Augustine has remained the point of reference to which all later writers invariably return in their search for the roots of problems concerning reading and interpretation in the West.".

"Using Augustine as his touchstone, Brian Stock considers the evolution of the Western reader and of Western reading practices from antiquity to the Renaissance. He looks to the problem of self-knowledge in the reading culture of late antiquity; engages the related question of ethical values and literary experience in the same period; and reconsiders Erich Auerbach's interpretation of ancient literary realism."--BOOK JACKET.