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Finding the body: Essays toward a new humanist poetics
Abstract
This book speaks for the view that the human body, "with its miracle of order," as Whitehead says, is the basis of both passion and intellectual clarity in the construction of texts by readers and writers alike. Critically, its antecedents are the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics which, in spite of being ignored by classicists of the old humanism, or alleged "humanities," have changed forever our sense of the relations between subjects and events, disorder and order in real life. And yet my ideas are equally derived from the work of poets and artists, scientists of feeling, who have proven in all eras, and not without risk, that the mind is not a transcendental authority but an occasion that constructs and reconstructs itself from the changing materials of sense and through the most precise recognitions of order inherent among them. The chapters are as follows: (I) "The Idea of Faith": a repudiation of classical dualism via a critique of Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith. (II) "Risking Belief: An 'Allegory of Reading' thinspace": an interpretation of the final scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a critique of the classical ideal of rational love. (III) "IF ...: Getting Beyond the Dynamics of Contradiction in Wallace Stevens' 'Palace of the Babies' thinspace": a demonstration of how textual ambiguities unthinkable to classical poetics are resolved through coenesthesis in the reader. (IV) "Wallace Stevens Reading: The Idea of Acoustic Order in 'The Idea of Order at Key West' thinspace": an argument via a computer-aided study of Stevens' vocal performance in favor of the idea that the grammar of a text is generated not from an extrinsic "competence" but within the act of enunciation itself. (V) "The Exquisite Corpse of Charles Baudelaire: The Female Imaginative Sublime in a Post-materialist Phenomenology of Experience": a demonstration of how Baudelaire, in cultivating "flowers from evil" subverts his narrators' and even his own male-dominant, idealist poetics with one rooted in the physical as represented not only by the artificiality of modern life about which he is candid, but by an underlying, creative vitality in the female erotic.
Subject Area
Modern literature|Philosophy|American literature|British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Peyster, Steven Jackson, "Finding the body: Essays toward a new humanist poetics" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9233132.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9233132