American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens: 171 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 171)
Cambridge University Press, 12/15/2014
EAN 9781107084506, ISBN10: 1107084504
Hardcover, 242 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
Language: English
In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who rethink the human in material terms. Do our experiences correlate to our material elements? Do visions of a common physical ground imply a common purpose? Noble proposes new readings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, George Santayana and Wallace Stevens that explore a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism. At a moment when several new models of the relationship between human experience and its physical ground circulate among critical theorists and philosophers of science, this book turns to poets who have long asked what our shared materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.
1. Intimate atomisms
toward a history of aporetic materialism
2. Whitman's atom
sex and death in the 'wide flat space' of Leaves of Grass
3. Emerson's atom
the matter of suffering
4. Santayana's Lucretius
the chance for an ethical atomism
5. Matter at the end of the mind
Stevens and the call for quantum poetics.