Current Works

Leaving Literature Behind

The professionalization of the field is turning students off

Chronicle of Higher Education, December 19, 2008

University Press of America, 2008

Many otherwise competent adults are wobbly writers, whether they're college students or already thriving in a job. They need a little help from Bill the Goat,  the mascot of the U.S. Naval Academy, where Bruce Fleming has taught literature and writing for over twenty years.

Bill the Goat's Adult Refresher Guide to Writing isn't a reference book, to be kept tucked into your office bookshelf for crisis management. Even its grammar section is different from usual grammar brush-ups. It's a book to be read and internalized, a book to re-align the way you conceive.

University Press of America, 2008

What is the taste of life as we really live it, rather than the way we imagine it in others? What does it feel like to become aware of the hand of cards we've been dealt, to play them as well as we can, to understand what has happened to us, and to try to control the future? Journey to the Middle of the Forest answers these questions in a way that celebrity memoirs, where events seem so much more intense than happenings in our own lives because of our perspective and the writer's fame, cannot.

In Journey to the Middle of the Forest, Bruce Fleming considers the slippages between presupposition and reality in a life begun and continued in Maryland, with intervals in pre-civil war Rwanda, the walled-in city of West Berlin, and the central European Freiburg im Breisgau, once Austrian, then part of the Duchy of Baden, now part of Germany. Like all lives, it has its crises—more, it may be, than an average life: a childhood marked by an alcoholic and abusive father, a marriage gone horribly awry, an autistic child and a bipolar stepchild, a dragged-out divorce, the death of a brother to AIDS, and the re-tooling of hopes to meet the new givens of the world. And, then re-marriage, two little boys, and the threat of childhood leukemia.

Fleming's intense and vivid memoir asks us to consider this fundamental question: Do we gain wisdom as we age? We may tell ourselves we do, as a way of summarizing what's happened to us: we figure everything we've been through has to be good for something. But if we do become wiser, it's not with a wisdom that can help us with any subsequent challenge-and the challenges never cease. Life gets no easier as we age, we just get deeper into the forest.

University Press of America, 2007

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was informed by the belief that it was possible to get clarity once and for all on fundamental philosophical issues, and so to think our way to a silence where philosophy was no longer necessary. This is The New Tractatus: it sympathizes with Wittgenstein's impatience with the endless cycle of argument, but reacts to this impatience and takes it in different directions than Wittgenstein did.

Wittgenstein was concerned with questions like these: What is the meaning of language? What is our relationship to the universe? What is the nature of philosophy? These questions are covered in The New Tractatus, along with many other topics, such as: Why is sex a controversial issue? Why are we so interested in celebrities? What is the nature of love? Why do liberals and conservatives argue about so many things? What is magic? Can miracles occur? Is science objective? Does art lie to us? How do we win arguments? What is the meaning of life?

What The New Tractatus shares with the old is the fundamental perception that we can never transcend what is. The world is all that is the case: whatever comes to be is part of the world.

The Aesthetic Sense of Life

University Press of America, 2007

The Aesthetic Sense of Life is a fast-moving book about how to see the world and get value from living every day with the "everyday." Do the infinite number of sensations we're surrounded with every day have intrinsic value? If not, what gives them value? Who appreciates the sunrise if we don't? Is it enough for just us to appreciate it? Or do we have to share it? The Aesthetic Sense of Life considers and answers to questions such as these in clear, readable prose, offering a way of looking at life that makes clear its value and its meaning.

Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash: A View from Annapolis. New York:  Routledge, 2006.

 Liberal and conservative are two coherent world-views.  Conservatives define their ethics in terms of actions; liberals in terms of actors. The two inevitably clash, but each should acknowledge the virtues of the other.

University Press of America, 2005.

What do Wordsworth, the gold death mask of King Tut, and Robert Frost’s “Birches” have in common? They all express what I call “disappointment,” in a technical sense: the world-view of someone who realizes that both the state of blind high energy of youth and the more reflective alternative of age are part of the human condition. The book considers the phenomenon of “coloring,” whereby we decide that we have been confusing a single quality of something with the thing itself—something that can happen at any time, and thus undermines our search for absolute certainty—and the question of whether war is inevitable.

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Annapolis Autumn

New Press, 2005

 

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Art and Argument: What Words Can’t Do and What They Can. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003.

Can we ever be convinced by arguments? If so, under what       circumstances? Is a novel arguing with us? Is it communicating with us? Is art true and false? What is the purpose of literary studies? What is the future of literary theory?

“This work contains wonderful insights into everyday occurrences and helps make certain life experiences seem simple again, in a field that tends to complicate some of the most basic such experiences.” Philosophy in Review.

Sexual Ethics: Liberal vs. Conservative. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004.

Why are people embarrassed to talk about sex? Does sex have a purpose? Is sex part of the personal or the social spheres? Why do liberals and conservatives butt heads so absolutely regarding sexual subjects? Why is abortion such a hot potato? What is the nature of ethical objections to pornography?

Science and the Self: The Scale of Knowledge. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004.

What is the relationship between scientific knowledge and other kinds of knowledge? What are these other kinds of knowledge? In what way is science objective? Can we predict the future in the objective world?

A Structure Opera.  Geneva, OH: Six Gallery Press, 2002.

Drawing on Gertrude Stein’s attempts to write “operas” in words, answers the question: how does the individual relate to the world?

“Fleming builds a postmodern sandwich that even Dagwood could admire.” Review of Contemporary Fiction

Dance Essays: Sex, Art, and Audience.  New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

 “Fleming excels as reporter, observer, and soothsayer.”  Village Voice April 12, 2000

One of its essays, “Gender in Dance,” excerpted and translated into Swedish for the program book of the Gothenburg Opera, Gothenburg Sweden, Fall 2002

Publisher: Turtle Point Press, 1997

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