Miguel Tamen

Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork provides a unique foundational introduction to the depths and glories of literature and its study. It is a book about why literature matters, and why it always will. Readers will explore the roots of literature and art in the interplay between life and language, actions and events, and culture and texts. This is not a book about theories; it is a book about our complex engagement with language and literature, from which theories, interpretations, and insight arise. As this is a groundwork, confusions are dissolved and analytical tools for thinking are developed and honed. Readers will discover that their ways of talking about literature can powerfully contribute to their ways of talking about life. The book resituates literary studies within fundamental arguments about language, knowledge, and ethics.Thinking with Words is essential reading for anyone interested not just in literature, but in art, culture, and language.

Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork provides a unique foundational introduction to the depths and glories of literature and its study. It is a book about why literature matters, and why it always will. Readers will explore the roots of literature and art in the interplay between life and language, actions and events, and culture and texts. This is not a book about theories; it is a book about our complex engagement with language and literature, from which theories, interpretations, and insight arise. As this is a groundwork, confusions are dissolved and analytical tools for thinking are developed and honed. Readers will discover that their ways of talking about literature can powerfully contribute to their ways of talking about life. The book resituates literary studies within fundamental arguments about language, knowledge, and ethics.Thinking with Words is essential reading for anyone interested not just in literature, but in art, culture, and language.

Miguel Tamen’s enquiry into what it means to be an “artistic” person is a light-hearted dive into the philosophy of art. Uncovering basic assumptions about what it means to encounter an artwork by way of examples such as the city of Naples, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Tamen’s characteristic style handles weighty problems with ease. Horace, Bertrand Russell, Franco Moretti, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are all at play in this plea for a renewed understanding of closeness and its importance.

What Art Is Like is a comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art. It provides welcome relief from prevailing modes of explaining art that involve definitions, philosophical claims, and critical judgments put forth by third parties. Scrapping all such chatter, Miguel Tamen’s aphoristic lark with aesthetic questions proceeds by taking its technical vocabulary only from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.According to Tamen, it would be ridiculous to think of poems or paintings or films or any variety of artistic production as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about many other relevant and important matters. Tamen offers a series of analogies and similes to help us imagine these connected experiences. One, taken from the analytical table of contents where the book is writ small, suggests that “understanding a poem is like understanding a cat; neither ever says anything back and you can’t keep a conversation with them. All art is like this, but not only art is like this; nature, the past, numbers are also like this.”Tamen takes up many central issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including the connection between art and having fuzzy ideas about art, the mistake of imagining that art-decisions are put forth by art-courts where you are both judge and jury, and the notion that what happens with art also happens to you.

A strikingly original work, Friends of Interpretable Objects re-anchors aesthetics in the object of attention even as it redefines the practice, processes, meaning, and uses of interpretation.Miguel Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation--notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a "society of friends." Thus, Tamen suggests, our inveterate tendency as human beings to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects not only a life but also a society. As his work unfolds, "friends" also takes on a legal sense, as advocates, introduced to advance the argument that the social life of interpreted and interpretable objects engenders a related web of social obligations.Focusing on those who, through interpretation, make objects "speak" in settings as different as churches, museums, forests, and distant galaxies--those who know the best interests of corporations, endangered species, and works of art--Tamen exposes the common ground shared by art criticism, political science, tort law, and science. Learned and witty, with much to teach art historians, environmentalists, anthropologists, curators, and literary critics, his book utterly reorients our understanding of how we make sense of our world.