Book talk and signing with Philip Weinstein

Swarthmore Professor Emeritus Philip Weinstein will discuss his new essay collection SOUL-ERROR.

Soul-Error explores the ways in which, stubbornly yet creatively, we go through life misreading ourselves and our world. Heraclites claimed, long ago, that no one steps in the same river twice. Reprising that riddle, Soul-Error explores how our lives, kaleidoscopically, take on new contours, abandoning old ones.Put some flesh on these bones. A man divorcing a spouse of 30 years' standing declares (to himself, to others), "I never loved her." A friend once said just this to author Philip Weinstein. He and his wife had been close to them both; countless conversations, shared meals and travel, their kids growing up as friends. Did he never love her? Or did his present need to divorce her keep him from recognizing who he had been-who they both had been-earlier?It needs no Heraclitus to tell us that an experience-looked forward to-will not coincide with the experience that later arrives. No surprise here: we are all failed soothsayers. But reckoning with our past may involve more intractable error. What to make of the gap between how our past seemed at the time and how we understand it later? What if seeing through it means losing it? Two-dimensional now, a set of images satisfyingly seen around, our revised past has shed its living density-when it was present. Does re-seeing our past amount to lobotomizing our actual life over time? We are resourceful actors moving through time and space; we span them both as we enact our evolving identity. No less, space and time span and play us in return. Soul-Error attempts to take the measure of this double-edged play.

Philip Weinstein grew up in the South, got his bachelor's degree at Princeton and then his doctorate in English at Harvard. Teaching at Harvard and then at Swarthmore, he has written nine books of literary criticism, beginning with Henry James, moving through British and European fiction, and eventually centering on the life and work of William Faulkner. He served as President of the Faulkner Society, and his Becoming Faulkner received the Hugh Holman Award as the best book published on Southern literature in 2009.For the last several years, his writing has turned from a professional audience to a more inclusive one. He has published two essays in Raritan, the last of which--"Soul-Error"--was chosen for Best American Essays 2020. That essay's central idea gave birth to a cluster of kindred essays, all of them concerned with our unpredictable trajectory through time and space. His new book of essays, entitled Soul-Error, explores what is both our gift and our curse: that we stubbornly misread--and creatively reread--ourselves and others as we move through our lives.