Miguel Tamen – författare

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.

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.

Philosophy and literary theory have devoted a great deal of their analysis to the problem of the origin and modalities of argumentation, but there has been an almost total lack of interest in the question of its procedural limits. Manners of Interpretation is an essay on ways of ending interpretations in literary studies as well as on patterns of controversy and consensus in the humanities. Tamen examines two major families of indisputable arguments in post-Enlightenment literary criticism and addresses the question of how one recognizes the proper time to use a given argument, especially and specifically an indisputable argument. The former aim leads to a tentative history of the constitution of literary theory as a set of identifiable ways of using arguments. The latter, meanwhile, points to a theory of argument and controversy and to a contribution to the discussion of human activities that, in spite of not being teachable, are nevertheless learnable. Such a theory seems to be particularly relevant both to the study of the interpretive dimension of literary criticism as it is now practiced and also to the knowledge and description of an area of the humanities that has often been neglected.

This book questions the presupposition that "interpretation" is the basic problem of language and examines how assumptions about the constructed nature of the object of interpretation affect current discussions about interpretation in the humanities.The author is not taken by the universalizing claims of hermeneutics that everything is reducible to interpretation, but he is not interested in quarreling directly with those claims either. And with respect to the notion of invention—that things don't simply exist but are produced, made up—he likewise is interested neither in the objections usually brought against it nor in the strength of that notion in resisting them. Instead, he is interested in problematics that emerge from considering interpretation and invention together, as exemplified in close readings of three texts: Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, texts in which "in very different ways, a recognizable claim is made according to which 'the facts' (biographical in one case, historical in another case, and cognitive in a third case) are produced by their own descriptions and interpretations."The author sees Wilde's and Nietzsche's texts as inventions gone wrong: Wilde's attempt to invent his own life and Nietzsche's suggestion that one can make up the art of the future. He sees Kant's text as a theory of the roots of invention and discusses it in relation to the production of both facts and knowledge. The Critique of Pure Reason is therefore understood as the result of Kant's dissatisfaction with, and constant rediscription of, the problem of invention.

This collection of original essays traces the history of Portuguese literature from the medieval period to the present, providing provocative new interpretations of this previously neglected literary history. The volume serves as a comprehensive introduction to Portuguese literature to students new to the field, and provides new insight into the ongoing controversies on the subject. The Introduction and Afterword explore the relationship between literary history and revisionism.

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.