The Long and Short of It - by Gary Morson (Hardcover)

About the Book

In clear and witty writing, Morson offers first serious study of the many kinds of aphorisms, their relation to longer works, and the philosophical wisdom they offer.

Book Synopsis

In clear and witty writing, Morson offers first serious study of the many kinds of aphorisms, their relation to longer works, and the philosophical wisdom they offer.

Review Quotes

"A book remarkable for its originality, breadth, insight, and engaging style . . . Succeeds not just in making readers think more clearly about the nature of the short genres and how they relate to each other, but also in showing how they can inform and even help structure longer works."--Barry Scherr "Slavic & East European Journal"

"Among living American Scholars of Russian literature, Gary Saul Morson has earned a reputation as one of the most thoughtful and productive among us. . . Morson's book is fun to read. It is thought-provoking and illuminating but delights over and over again with its sparkling specimens, culled from the whole literary heritage of man-kind, chiefly western, but with a few Asian gems from Confucius and Lao Tzu thrown in. . . Morson writes well, vividly, and without jargon. . . I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have been enlightened by it."--Hugh McLean "Slavic Review"

"Gary Saul Morson has created a passionate, imaginative book, full of energy and wisdom. The Long and Short of It is an exciting, horizon-opening essay on literary short forms that provide an interface between literature and philosophy."--Thomas Pavel "University of Chicago"

"Morson's delightful study, which aims to classify and examine [aphorisms], is both a work of serious scholarship and a feast itself . . . The Long and Short of It leaves readers illuminated and humbled, amused and enlightened and with their sense of literature's richness--its ironies and foibles, its mysteries and truths--enhanced."--Fernanda Moore "Commentary"

"This shrewdly analytic, generously appreciative inventory of a dozen microgenres breaks lots of new ground. Morson not only discriminates dictum from witticism, maxim from summons and thought, but also shows how aphorists in a wealth of cultures have invoked generic tradition and infighting to score points. He furthermore illuminates the role played by aphorisms, and the outlooks they epitomize, in the narrative shaping of works from Oedipus and Job to Middlemarch and Boswell's Johnson."--Herbert Tucker "University of Virginia"

About the Author

Gary Saul Morson is the Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. He has published nine books on major Russian authors, the human experience of time, and the cultural role of quotations, most recently The Words of Others: From Quotation to Culture (2011). Morson received a lifetime achievement award by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (1994) won the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.