Making Figures Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not For Us

As species, and as a culture, we recognize ourselves by our capacity for possession, so that personhood is made equivalent to ownership. If, however, the way in which we imagine objects predisposes our behavior toward them, art can encourage us to reorder how we comport ourselves in a world that is not meant to be owned, that is not even meant for us. To frustrate the desolation of avarice, we must enrich our view of things, and "Making Figures" takes the reader through the writing of Virginia Woolf, both the fiction and the nonfiction, at the service of this imperative.

Bruce Bromley is senior lecturer in expository writing at New York University, where he won the 2006 Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence. Bromley earned his BA from Columbia University, and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from New York University. He has performed his music throughout Europe and the US; his essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in such journals as Environmental Philosophy and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, among many others.