Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
V. Joshua Adams is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville, USA, as well as being a published poet, translator and critic.What if one’s experience were merely personal––unshared, incoherent, and sealed off from meaningful engagements with things? Joshua Adams shows how major modernist poets have responded to this all too natural skeptical fear by producing shareable, intense animations of experience, thus achieving poetry in the service of human life.
Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, USA
Modern literature is often described in terms of its impersonality. What is the significance of this fact?
In Skepticism and Impersonality, V. Joshua Adams follows the history of impersonality in modern poetry from Mallarmé and Eliot through to the present, engaging with work by major poets and critics, but also contemporary philosophers. Rather than seeing impersonality exclusively as a literary historical phenomenon, Adams argues that we should understand it as an attempt to address skeptical problems arising from the limitations of first-person experience.
Defending impersonality as a response to skeptical problems, including doubts about the publicity of our experiences, our knowledge of other minds, the capacity of our language to describe the world, the relationship between mind and body, and the fictionality and continuity of our sense of self, Adams analyzes what he calls “experiments in impersonality” as means of working through skeptical doubt. The writers discussed transform this doubt into art, whilst also ironizing it as corrosive and self-defeating. Ultimately this leads Adams to reinterpret literary impersonality as a therapeutic philosophical project.
Skepticism and Impersonality promises a new theoretical justification for our practical interest in literary texts, to renovate our conception of how those texts might do philosophical work, and to expand our sense of what a philosophical poem can be.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Emily Dickinson’s “It”: Privacy and Non-Conceptual Content
2. T.S. Eliot and Other Minds
3. Impersonality as Anti-Philosophy in Monsieur Teste
4. Elizabeth Bishop, Dramatic Monologue, and the Art of Impersonating Your Self
5. No Puzzle: The Self in James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation”
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Although an alleged quarrel between philosophy and poetry has ancient roots and a history extending into the present, rigid distinctions between the two have been difficult to maintain. Philosophy is a mode of writing, and one that often utilizes literary and poetic devices, sometimes without explicit awareness or design on the philosopher’s part, while poetry can reveal philosophical lines of questioning and modes of response that go to the heart of human existence.
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry explores ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in ways that are sensitive to philosophical themes and problems that can be fruitfully addressed through poetic modes of writing, and focused on questions of style, the relations between form and content, and the conduciveness of literary modes of expression to philosophical inquiry. With a keen interest in the intertwining of poetry and philosophy in all forms, the series will cover the philosophical register of poetry, the poetics of philosophical writing, and the literary strategies of philosophers.
The series provides a home for work on figures across geographical landscapes, with contributions that employ a wide range of methods across academic disciplines, and without regard for divisions within philosophy, between analytic and continental, for example, that have outworn their usefulness. Featuring single-authored works and edited collections, curated by an international editorial board, the series aims to redefine how we read and discuss philosophy and poetry today.
Daniel Brown, University of Southampton, UK
Kristen Case, University of Maine Farmington, USA
Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Cassandra Falke, University of Tromsø, Norway
Luke Fischer, University of Sydney, Australia
John Gibson, University of Louisville, USA
James Haile III, University of Rhode Island, USA
Kevin Hart, Duke University, USA
Eileen John, University of Warwick, UK
Troy Jollimore, California State University, USA
David Kleinberg-Levin, Northwestern University, USA
John Koethe, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, USA
John T. Lysaker, Emory University, USA
Karmen MacKendrick, Le Moyne College, USA
Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Indian Institute of Technology, India
Kamiyo Ogawa, Sophia University, Japan
Kaz Oishi, University of Tokyo, Japan
Yi-Ping Ong, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Anna Christina Soy Ribeiro, Texas Tech University, USA
Karen Simecek, University of Warwick, UK
Ruth Rebecca Tietjen, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, Philipps University Marburg, Germany