May 29, 2019
An engaging look at the aphorism, the shortest literary form, across time, languages, and cultures
From press.princeton.edu/titles/14222.html
Aphorisms—or philosophical short sayings—appear everywhere, from
Confucius to Twitter, the Buddha to the Bible, Heraclitus to
Nietzsche. Yet despite this ubiquity, the aphorism is the least
studied literary form. What are its origins? How did it develop?
How do religious or philosophical movements arise from the
enigmatic sayings of charismatic leaders? And why do some of our
most celebrated modern philosophers use aphoristic fragments to
convey their deepest ideas? In A Theory of the
Aphorism, Andrew Hui crisscrosses histories and cultures to
answer these questions and more.
With clarity and precision, Hui demonstrates how aphorisms—ranging
from China, Greece, and biblical antiquity to the European
Renaissance and nineteenth century—encompass sweeping and urgent
programs of thought. Constructed as literary fragments, aphorisms
open new lines of inquiry and horizons of interpretation. In this
way, aphorisms have functioned as ancestors, allies, or antagonists
to grand systems of philosophy.
Encompassing literature, philology, and philosophy, the history of
the book and the history of reading, A Theory of the
Aphorism invites us to reflect anew on what it means to
think deeply about this pithiest of literary forms.
Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.
From https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/about/faculty/andrew-hui/
Associate Professor Andrew Hui loves to read, think, write, and talk to other humans (and occasionally trees). His speciality is the classical tradition of early modern Europe and the Global Renaissance. He occasionally thinks about: allegory and algorithm, afterlife of antiquity, cultural philology, encyclopedias and epics, theatrum mundi, wonder, grace, and kairos. He likes to practice deep reading and slow humanities.
His work has been generously supported by the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, a Berenson fellowship at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, a National Endowment of Humanities grant for a summer of reading Dante in Florence, a Brian Crawford Award at the Warburg Library in London and a stint at the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
He received his PhD from Princeton University in Department of Comparative Literature and is a graduate of St John’s College, Annapolis. From 2009-2012, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the humanities at Stanford University. He joined the faculty of Yale-NUS College in 2012.