Certain questions are basic to the human condition: how we imagine the world, and ourselves and others within it; how we confront the constraints of language and the limits of our own minds; and how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones. These are the questions James Boyd White addresses in The Edge of Meaning, exploring each through its application to great works of Western culture--Huckleberry Finn, the Odyssey, and the paintings of Vermeer among them. In doing so, White creates a deeply moving and insightful book and presents...

Certain questions are basic to the human condition: how we imagine the world, and ourselves and others within it; how we confront the constraints of language and the limits of our own minds; and how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones. These are the questions James Boyd White addresses in "The Edge of Meaning," exploring each through its application to great works of Western culture "Huckleberry Finn," the "Odyssey," and the paintings of Vermeer among them. In doing so, White creates a deeply moving and insightful book and presents an inspiring...

White extends his theory of law as constitutive rhetoric, asking how one may criticize the legal culture and the texts within it.
"A fascinating study of the language of the law. . . . This book is to be highly recommended: certainly, for those who find the time to read it, it will broaden the mind, and give lawyers a new insight into their role." New Law Journal"

Through fresh readings of texts ranging from Homer's Iliad, Swift's Tale of a Tub, and Austen's Emma through the United States Constitution and McCulloch v. Maryland, James Boyd White examines the relationship between an individual mind and its language and culture as well as the "textual community" established between writer and audience. These striking textual analyses develop a rhetoric--a "way of reading" that can be brought to any text but that, in broader terms, becomes a way of learning that can shape the reader's life.
"In this ambitious and demanding...

To which institutions or social practices should we grant authority? When should we instead assert our own sense of what is right or good or necessary?
In this book, James Boyd White shows how texts by some of our most important thinkers and writers including Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela, and Lincoln answer these questions, not in the abstract, but in the way they wrestle with the claims of the world and self in particular historical and cultural contexts. As they define afresh the institutions or practices for which they claim (or resist) authority, they create authorities of...

The contributors address such fundamental copies as the sufficiency of "reason" for a full life, the adequacy of our methods of describing and analyzing religion, the degree to which any serious confrontation with the religious experiences of others will challenge our own, and whether there can be a pluralism that does not dissolve into universal relativism.

The law has traditionally been regarded as a set of rules and institutions. In this thoughtful series of essays, James Boyd White urges a fresh view of the law as an essentially literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity. Defining and elaborating his conception, he artfully bridges the fields of jurisprudence, literature, philosophy, history, and political science. The result, a new approach that may change the way we perceive the legal process, will engage not only lawyers and law students but anyone interested in the relationship between ethics, persuasion, and community.

White's...

In this collection of essays, James Boyd White continues his work in the rhetorical and literary analysis of law, seeing it as a system for the creation of social meaning. White's focus is on the intellectual and ethical possibilities of law, based on the view that law is not merely a logical enterprise, nor a mere matter of politics and power, but rather an activity of the whole mind, including its imaginative and affective capacities.
The essays here are united by two basic themes. First, the essays suggest that law can usefully be regarded not only as a set of rules designed to produce...

How can we connect the Gospels--the fundamental texts of Christian faith--to our own experience of inner and outer life? This is the question that animates Connecting to the Gospel. In it James Boyd White presents a series of Gospel passages, together with the sermons he gave on these passages as a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church, with brief commentaries and questions on each as well. The whole is designed as an aid to thought and reflection about the issues raised by the Gospel passages, as they relate both to our own larger culture and to our internal religious experiences. The texts...

Description: How are we to read the Gospels and bring them into our lives? The idea of this book is that the Gospels are not merely rules for life, or stories illustrating moral lessons, or statements of theological doctrine, but invitations to thought and conversation. The Gospels are full of problems, uncertainties, and tensions; these difficulties call upon us to engage with the Gospels in a new way: to read them, to ask questions about them, to live with them, alone and together. The way we do that is by a kind of conversation, with each other, or within ourselves. The Gospel as...