David Arndt: On Why We Read Literature
In this interview, author David Arndt discusses his changed philosophy while writing his new book, Philosophy of Writing.
David Arndt studied at Deep Springs College, got a B.A. in Literature summa cum laude from Yale, and earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he studied with Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, and where he worked for three terms as Derrida’s research assistant. He has taught at Deep Springs, Bilkent University, Kutztown University, and most recently in Integrated Arts and Sciences, a Great Books program at Saint Mary’s College of California. He lives in Oakland and is currently serving a life sentence in academia. Follow him on Facebook.
In this interview, David discusses his changed philosophy while writing his new book, Philosophy of Writing, his advice for other writers, and more.
Name: David Arndt
Book title: Philosophy of Writing
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Release date: January 8, 2026
Genre/category: Philosophy
Previous titles: Arendt on the Political
Elevator pitch: Writing can be a kind of philosophical meditation—a daily practice conducive to the search for wisdom.
What prompted you to write this book?
I actually didn’t set out to produce a book. I just started making notes to myself on questions I wanted to understand: Why read literature? Why write?
The questions had been answered for me in grad school, but the answers seemed narrow and misguided. I wanted to move toward a broader and clearer view of things, and to do that I had to work out my own thoughts by writing them down.
But I also had to read. To think at a high level, it helps to be in dialogue with great thinkers of the present and the past. When I found passages that seemed truly illuminating, I wrote them down as quotations, and those quotations became the passages I quote in the book.
So, I started writing notes to myself, and the notes eventually turned into a book. Writing was like clearing a path of thought uphill to a point with a broader and clearer view of things. My hope is that, by working through the book, readers can follow that path of thought and come to see things from a new point of view.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
A long time—25 years from notes to publication.
It took forever because writing the book forced me to change the way I think. At the start I took for granted common concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty. But the more carefully I tried to apply those concepts, the less adequate they seemed. I had to rethink my initial assumptions in order to truly understand the topic of the book.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I’ve been surprised at the generosity of total strangers, who have offered to help simply because they read the proofs and thought it was a good book.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Yes—two surprises.
The first was that the concepts I started with were inadequate. Most of the writing process was a process of refining the way I thought.
But near the end of the process there was a second surprise—I was led to a conclusion that was completely unexpected. I don’t want to ruin the book for everyone by revealing the ending. Suffice to say that the book pushed me not just to rethink my view of writing—it also pushed me to rethink my view of philosophy.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
That writing at its best can be a way to move toward truth.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
If I had known how hard it would be to write the book, I never would have started. What kept me going was just a love of writing itself. Some of the greatest joys I have ever known have come in the moments of truth that occurred in the writing process. So, my advice is: Don’t give up. Just keep going. But the way to keep going is to write for the sake of the insights that come to us in the actual experience of writing.
