Title
Inventing the Language to Tell It : Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness / George Hart.
ISBN
9780823254910
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2013]
Copyright
©2013
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (192 p.)
Item Number
10.1515/9780823254910 doi
Call Number
PS3519.E27 Z634 2013
Dewey Decimal Classification
811.52
Summary
From 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on the natural world was Robinson Jeffers's obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers's poetic experiment is an important contribution to American literary history-no other twentieth-century poet attempted such a thorough engagement with a crucial scientific problem. Jeffers invented a sacramental poetics that accommodates a modern scientific account of consciousness, thereby integrating an essentially religious sensibility with science in order to discover the sacramentality of natural process and reveal a divine cosmos.There is no other study of Jeffers or sacramental nature poetry like this one. It proposes that Jeffers's sacramentalism emerged out of his scientifically informed understanding of material nature. Drawing on ecocriticism, religious studies, and neuroscience, Inventing the Languageto Tell It shows how Jeffers produced the most compelling sacramental nature poetry of the twentieth century.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
Available in Other Form
print 9780823254897
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Robinson Jeffers's Sacramental Poetics
1. Rock, Bark, and Blood: Sacramental Poetics and West Coast Nature Poetry
2. The Strain in the Skull: Biopoetics and the Biology of Consciousness
3. The Whole Mind: Brains, Biology, and Bioregion in the Middle Period
4. To Keep One's Own Integrity: "The Inhumanist" and the Crisis of Holism
5. The Wound in the Brain: The Discoveries of the Later Poetry
Conclusion: The Jeffers Influence and the Middle Generation
Notes
Bibliography
Index