Author and title: Donald E. Morse, Reflections through Literature: Life, Death, Baseball
Publisher: Sciendo
Date of publication: 2026
Volume in the series: HJEAS Books
ISBN: PDF ISBN: 978-83-68412-56-7 |
E-Pub ISBN: 978-83-68412-57-4 |
Paperback ISBN: 978-83-68412-55-0 |
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/9788368412567
Presentation
Reflections through Literature by Donald E. Morse has grown out of a long career teaching at universities in several countries and raises basic questions about life such as the nature of mortality, the importance of love, the practice of attention, the need for heroism, the necessity of renunciation, the possibility of suicide, the importance of baseball, as well as the threat of nuclear annihilation, the difficulty of surviving brutal dictatorships, and so forth. These issues and others equally important have been examined by authors through their imaginary characters in literature from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim. Since fictional lives unlike human lives are complete; we as readers know more about Frodo or Leopold Bloom than we do about most people. Literature is therefore an excellent medium for focusing on issues central to living.
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Praise for Reflections through Literature on Life, Death, Baseball
Reading the book [Reflections through Literature on Life, Death, Baseball. . .] was a pleasure for all sorts of reasons, but particularly because it reminded me so vividly of two qualities that always stood out in my interactions with Professor Morse, which are his sense of urgency and also his commitment to attention. That word, attention, runs all the way through the book and it works in many ways. It refers to attention to detail, to language, but also to context and it’s exemplary in the sense that it just displays repeatedly the conviction that the world of art merits our undivided attention. It’s that commitment to attention that in turn explains the book’s sense of urgency. All the way through it, there is a sense that these subjects, these books matter, they are worth discussing, they’re worth returning to, they must be shared.
The book has a very clear structure. It works across three loose movements, it gathers keynote addresses, plenary lectures, and a more varied section of other writings. But what’s really striking is how within that structure, it just moves so freely and coherently across genres, across forms, and across national traditions. So America is there, of course, Ireland is there too. Hungary is there, of course, as well, and it holds together for so many reasons, but I think one of them is a commitment to the craft of writing itself.
This is a book that’s gathering essays from the past to say something very urgent about the present. Something that really struck me is that the study of science fiction and fantasy, which Professor Morse has been doing for a long time, has gained a lot of impetus and maybe new urgency in recent years because of the climate crisis. People are beginning to understand what Ursula LeGuin meant when she said that science fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive. And I think something similar might be true on the ground they describe what it’s like to live at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.
Patrick Lonergan
Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, University of Galway