» John Zuern -- What's Philosophically At Stake In Literature?

Came across John Zuern's CriticaLink through Denis Dutton's website. (Don't know who that is? You probably know the site he founded and edits, Arts and Letters Daily.) John Zuern put CriticaLink together to help people come to see and to understand their philosophical presuppositions in reading literature.

What's at Stake?
One of the fundamental convictions guiding this project is that any position we take about literature is shaped by a theory of literature, although we may not be fully conscious of what that theory is. Even positions we might characterize as naive, reactionary, and anti-intellectual are theoretical insofar as they are based on conceptions about what literature is (and should be) and how literary art functions in the world. In order to make viable arguments about literature--to participate in the ongoing "defense of poetry" as writers and as literary and cultural critics--we must come to terms with the basic assumptions that shape our beliefs, our opinions, and our passions about literature. Something is always philosophically at stake whenever we think seriously about what literature means for us. I've tried to design CriticaLink as a resource for people who want to explore the philosophical stakes of their own relationship with literature.

I haven't looked through his Reading Guides thoroughly yet, to see just how good they are, but he does treat some good and important texts--Aristotle's Poetics, Heidegger’s' The Question Concerning Technology, Plato's Phaedrus, among others. Zuern's guides seem helpful resources.

By assembling a linked set of reading guides to important texts in philosophy and literary theory, glossaries, discussion questions, biographical sketches, timelines, and lists of resources, CriticaLink aims at assisting visitors in learning and thinking about a variety of responses to the question of what literature is and what it means to be "creative" in the domain of the literary. By involving students and faculty in the development of this online resource, the CriticaLink project also seeks to foster a lively intellectual community in which these questions can be explored.

I'll have to look more closely. Having said that, I must say that if learning the "variety of responses" truly is desired, Zuern might want to reconsider some of his translations, some are questionably limited translations--Butcher’s Poetics is one. And, while I don't know anything about Nehamas/Woodruff's Phaedrus, I do know that James H. Nichols' translation has a high reputation--as does Seth Benardete/Michael Davis' and the new Joe Sachs' translation of the Poetics--with the authorities I trust.