A Truly Common Culture Is Not One

Reading Is Not A Straightforward Linear Movement, A Merely Cumulative Affair: Our Initial Speculations Generate A Frame Of Reference Within Which To Interpret What Comes Next, But What Comes Next May Retrospectively Transform Our Original Understanding, Highlighting Some Features Of It And Backgrounding Others.

For Aristotle, Goodness Is A Kind Of Prospering In The Precarious Affair Of Being Human.

Literary Texts Do Not Exist On Bookshelves: They Are Processes Of Signification Materialized Only In The Practice Of Reading. For Literature To Happen, The Reader Is Quite As Vital As The Author.

Literature Transforms And Intensifies Ordinary Language, Deviates Systematically From Everyday Speech.

Virtue Is Something You Have To Get Good At, Like Playing The Trombone Or Tolerating Bores At Parties. Being A Virtuous Human Being Takes Practice; And Those Who Are Brilliant At Being Human (what Christians Call The Saints) Are The Virtuosi Of The Moral Sphere - The Pavarottis And Maradonas Of Virtue.