Passions of the Earth in Human Existence, Creativity, and Literature

Abstract

Literature reveals that the hidden strings of the human `passional soul' are the creative source of the specifically human existence. Continuing the inquiry into the `elemental passions of the soul' and the Human Creative Soul pursued in several previous volumes of this series, the present volume focuses on the `passions of the earth', bringing to light some of the primogenital existential threads of the innermost bonds of the Human Condition and mother earth. In Tymieniecka's words, the studies purpose to unravel the essential bond between the living human being and the earth - a bond that lies at the heart of our existence. A heightened awareness of this bond should enlighten our situation and help us find our existential bearings. The Theme/The Passions of the Earth -- The Theme/The Passions of the Earth -- Section I -- Walking the Elemental Earth: Phenomenological and Literary 'Foot Notes' -- ... And Unto Dust Return: The Remembered Earth -- The Splendor of the Earth -- The Myth of the Fall in Walker Percy's Second Coming -- Coleridge and the Appearing Earth: An Essay on the Other in Language -- Section II -- Radical Empiricism and Phenomenological Descriptiveness in Friar Laurence's 'Earth Monologue' in Romeo and Juliet -- Re-seeding the Burnt Wasteland: W.S. Merwin's The Rain in the Trees -- The Concept of 'Earth' in Heidegger: History and the 'Oblivion of Being' -- Section III -- Phenomenology of the Amorous Life: Literature, Earth, and the Absence of the Interval -- Earth, Home, and Exile: Being in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger -- Toward the Poetic Constitution of Nature: Remarks on José María Heredia's Work -- Motherland: Sally Mann's Proustian Song of the Earth -- Gadamer's Debt to Husserl -- Section IV -- The Common Grounds of Philosophic and Tragic Wisdom: Reflections upon Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy -- An Incongruous Life-World: A Cultural Phenomenology of The Tailor and Ansty -- The Presence of Absence: Mirrors and Mirror Imagery in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas -- Section V -- Performing the Gendered Self in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and the Discourse on Fashion -- The Voice of Enchantment in Massenet's Manon -- The Splices in My Life: A Documentary or a Fictionary? -- Aesthetics and Negativity: Reading Mallarmé's 'Victorieusement Fui ... ' -- The Imaginative Mind: William Blake's Self-renewing Creative Imagination.