Thomas Sorensen

Thomas Sorensen is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Western Ontario. His work has appeared in The Arizona Quarterly and is forthcoming in The Wallace Stevens Journal.

Contributions

Simone Weil and the Text as Organ of Perception

Literature is a protean phenomenon. Nobody seems quite sure how to classify it. Is it an object, immutable and self-contained? Or is it an event that happens when a self makes contact with a line of letters on a page? Nowadays, critics regard the text primarily as a resource. “There’s a lot of useful knowledge here,” we say, and our job is to show how this knowledge can help us in real life. Recently, I have come upon a fourth option. What if the text were an organ of perception, an extension of the body that structures our muddled, all-too-narrow picture of reality?