American Literature Commons^™

Prelude To Artifact, Jaclyn Costello

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The book is a place, a moral and intellectual site. With any luck, a well-written book calls the real condition of a reader's perception into question. Amid books written for leisure, instruction, or the sake of sheer indulgence, there are those books which can be classified as fated providers of Truth. The function of such books is not mere representation, but rather transformation and transfiguration of the reader's soul--and consequently, the world. As writer/scholar Henry Corbin illustrates:

All the elements [in a work of Symbolic Art] are represented in their real dimension "in the present", in each case perpendicularly to …