Labor and Writing: Language and the Origins of Imagination

This book highlights the writing act, humanity's determinant cultural investment. Writing, which is labor, that is work against resistance, is the way we record and reconsider what we have been, and, at its best, what our most useful imaginations and social constructions have been. Our greatest imaginations include a wide range of social achievements, from the initial brilliance of relating words to things and ideas, to the construction of social bonds, to our orientation in the natural or religious worlds, where we play for the ultimate game, salvation, Writing is at the heart of all those enterprises, and the essays in the present book range from the anatomy of one man's labor, the author's, through the first uses of language as identification of things, as tool for orientation in space or in religious value, or as a means for replacing undiscovered reality with fictional invention.