Hamlet's Mother, Jonah, The Diary of Anne Frank, Sand County Almanac, All Quiet on the Western Front

[alice wellintown]

http://www.csuchico.edu/phil/sdobra_mat/platopaper.html

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 12:03 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>  Can literature or art in general promote empathy, wisdom, change, or is that just a nice dream we like to entertain ourselves with for a while?
> Generally people don't want to commit to answer this kind of question, reluctant to choose between the appearance of cynicism and the appearance of naivete' .
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> Shakespeare seems to bounce between Tragedy and Comedy  with some weight of the tragic integrated  into the Tempest. I'm oversimplifying but  if tragedy is the warning and comedy the art of the happily possible, the presumption is magical, alchemical; we have choices.  And the words that give us those choices, and the correspondences of those words to what is real are important.
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> Words are alternately inspiring and dangerous but spoken words tend to dissipate, while writing does not. Maybe writing as a technology is inherently antithetical to human harmonics.
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