Experiencing Ways Through Words

We tend to think of ourselves using language. What if we thought instead about language working on us, or about language as something we experience rather than make use of? This book explores the generative capacities of language, suggesting that we need to pay much greater attention to the meaning-making capabilities, and political and moral implications, of more intangible aspects of language: atmosphere, mood, texture, the mode-of-being a use of language carries — and not only carries, but gives off, sends into both its reader and writer. Advancing an interpretation of language as fundamentally attitudinal and creative, Experiencing Ways Through Words explores literature in the light of such thinking, claiming that properties we tend to sideline as ‘aesthetic’ are profoundly constitutive of a text’s capacity for significance.

‘In this rich and intricately argued book, full of literary and philosophical instances, Abdeni-Holman explores the ways in which imaginative language discovers and sustains relationship with the human world. At its centre is a brilliant and sympathetic re-reading of the work of F.R. Leavis -- not as the heavy moralist of popular reputation, but rather as a deft celebrant of the “engagement, thoughtfulness, attention” which this splendid work identifies as the heart of the readerly encounter. An absorbing and championing piece of writing.’ — Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford

‘The many attractions of this remarkable book include its patient attention to complexity and its refusal (and exposure) of loaded binary oppositions.  It invites us to think of literature as offering “connections, echoes, beckonings, gestures”, and indeed on occasion practical advice.  Except that the advice doesn't look like advice, and it may arrive rather slowly. The book's many facetted claim is in already in its title.  Literature is words at work, and to read literature is to benefit from that work and to live with it.’ — Michael Wood, Princeton University

'A wonderfully engaging and insightful book on what John Henry Newman once called the two-fold Logos. Experiencing Ways Through Words conjures brilliantly with the paradoxical question of how thought and word may be distinct and yet inseparable from each other, bound together through the aesthetic as well as the semantic elements of language that define the reader’s experience.’  — Michael D. Hurley, Trinity College, Cambridge

Emily Abdeni-Holman is a British-Lebanese writer. She read for her doctorate at the University of Oxford and has held postdoctoral fellowships in Jerusalem, Beirut, and Oxford.