Disclosures: Essays on Art, Literature, and Philosophy

From "Prologue" of Professor Efraín Kristal, UCLA: This remarkable book brings together Herbert Morris' essays on literature and painting. Each is a self-contained investigation, as impressive for Morris' striking observations on a particular work as for his philosophical illuminations. Several have appeared in peer-reviewed journals of literary criticism or art history as sound contributions to the scholarship in these specialized areas of study, but they deserve to come together in a volume because the impact of the whole is greater than that of its parts, and the significance of the parts is hardly limited to literary criticism or art history: the essays share a fascinating approach to intellectual enquiry, driven by an ever-curious mind attentive to human predicaments as they play out in ethical, legal, psychological, artistic, and even theological realms....Morris does not present his essays in the form of a thesis followed by a cold demonstration, but as searching questions that call for responses, which will eventually yield illuminating disclosures, as the title of the book so aptly suggests...