Intimate atomisms: toward a history of aporetic materialism -- Whitman's atom: sex and death in the "Wide Flat Space" of Leaves of Grass -- Emerson's atom: the matter of suffering -- Santayana's Lucretius: the chance for an ethical atomism -- Matter at the end of the mind: Stevens and the call for a quantum poetics -- Coda: the material subject in theory.
Summary:
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.--Provided by publisher
Series:
Cambridge studies in American literature and culture
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