Download or read book Mystical Discourse in Wordsworth and Whitman written by D. J. Moores and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mystical Discourse D.J. Moores builds on the work of current transatlantic scholarship in a lucid analysis of the connections between William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman. As he demonstrates, the "transatlantic bridge" between both poets lies in their privileging of a type of mystical language he calls "cosmic" rhetoric, which served the function of ideological resistance, as it enabled them to rebel against Enlightenment modes of thinking and being. In a thorough engagement with the work of Wordsworth and Whitman, Moores shows that the cosmic rhetoric of both writers involves a subversive reorientation towards self and society, nature and God, and knowledge and religion, as well as a radical revisioning of language and poetics.

Download or read book Worshipping Walt written by Michael Robertson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite his protests, Anne Gilchrist, distinguished woman of letters, moved her entire household from London to Philadelphia in an effort to marry him. John Addington Symonds, historian and theorist of sexual inversion, sent him avid fan mail for twenty years. And volunteer assistant Horace Traubel kept a record of their daily conversations, producing a nine-volume compilation. Who could inspire so much devotion? Worshipping Walt is the first book on the Whitman disciples--the fascinating, eclectic group of nineteenth-century men and women who regarded Walt Whitman not simply as a poet but as a religious prophet. Long before Whitman was established in the canon of American poetry, feminists, socialists, spiritual seekers, and supporters of same-sex passion saw him as an enlightened figure who fulfilled their religious, political, and erotic yearnings. To his disciples Whitman was variously an ideal husband, radical lover, socialist icon, or bohemian saint. In this transatlantic group biography, Michael Robertson explores the highly charged connections between Whitman and his followers, including Canadian psychiatrist R. M. Bucke, American nature writer John Burroughs, British activist Edward Carpenter, and the notorious Oscar Wilde. Despite their particular needs, they all viewed Whitman as the author of a new poetic scripture and prophet of a modern liberal spirituality. Worshipping Walt presents a colorful portrait of an era of intense religious, political, and sexual passions, shedding new light on why Whitman's work continues to appeal to so many.

Download or read book The Ecstatic Poetic Tradition written by D.J. Moores and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is not only a general inquiry into ecstatic states of consciousness and an historical outline of the ecstatic poetic tradition but also an intensive study of five representative poets--Rumi, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, and Tagore. In a refreshingly original, wide-ranging engagement with concepts in psychology, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and history, this book demonstrates that the poetics and aesthetics of ecstasy represent an ancient, ubiquitous theory of poetry that continues to influence writers in the current century.

Download or read book American Metempsychosis written by John Michael Corrigan and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human.” With these words, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates the formation of American individualism: to evolve and become fully human requires a heightened engagement with history. Americans, Emerson argues, must realize history’s chronology in themselves—because their own minds and bodies are its evolving record. Whereas scholarship has tended to minimize the mystical underpinnings of Emerson’s notion of the self, his depictions of “the metempsychosis of nature” reveal deep roots in mystical traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Platonism and Christian esotericism. In essay after essay, Emerson uses metempsychosis as an open-ended template to understand human development. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman transforms Emerson’s conception of metempsychotic selfhood into an expressly poetic event. His vision of transmigration viscerally celebrates the poet’s ability to assume and live in other bodies; his American poet seeks to incorporate the entire nation into his own person so that he can speak for every man and woman.

Download or read book Cosmic Consciousness and Human Excellence written by Mahmoud Masaeli and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmoconsciousness, or cosmic consciousness, is a term used to characterize a transcendence of the limits of self-consciousness. As an ultra-state of illumination of the mind, the roots of the conception are embodied in the quest for a spiritual connection with multi-dimensional cosmos. This quest searches for spiritual development as a pathway to human excellence, and can be associated with the mystics of ancient wisdom, as well as contemporary psycho-spiritual analysts. After its emergence in the late 19th century, cosmic consciousness rapidly became a source of inspiration for transpersonal psychology, moral therapy, and a thoughtful link to mystical quantum physics. By encouraging a spiritual way of perceiving the real world, cosmic consciousness also provides a source of inspiration for human excellence as the central idea of global ethics. In this perspective, the world cannot be changed for the better without changing individual consciousness. Global concerns, including ecological issues, violence and acts of terrorism, materialistic gratification and hedonism, could not be addressed effectively unless people’s consciousness is changed. Cosmic consciousness, by the very perception of the inner life, has the potential to struggle with global concerns, and hence, it holds a promise of human excellence. This book discusses cosmic consciousness against the backdrop of the emergence of the rational and autonomous conception of the self, and the modern psychological depiction of selfhood. It places the idea of cosmic consciousness at the centre of contemporary arguments on the nature of consciousness.

Download or read book 30 Great Myths about the Romantics written by Duncan Wu and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex and confusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity to what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important periods in literary history. Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated with Romanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarify several of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of this era Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romantics that have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for example that they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in free love; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with his sister Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideas that have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture – from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of the vampire Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarly introduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applying the most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths that continue to shape our appreciation of their work

Download or read book Jim Morrison Secret Teacher of the Occult written by Paul Wyld and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Reveals Jim Morrison as a shamanic initiate and esoteric teacher who used his role as a rock singer to promote the adventure of the spirit and express the power of inner experience • Examines Morrison’s deep occult and artistic influences, including Kurt Seligmann’s The Mirror of Magic, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, and the works of Jack Kerouac • Draws on Morrison’s lyrics and poems, his intimate writings, and the recollections of friends like photographer Paul Ferrara and Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek The groundbreaking 1960s band The Doors, named for Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, achieved incredible acclaim and influence, ultimately serving as a key group in the development of psychedelic and progressive rock. At the center of it all was front man Jim Morrison, who died in 1971 at age 27. Yet, as author Paul Wyld reveals, despite Morrison’s reputation as a lewd, drunken performer, he was a full-fledged mystical, shamanic figure, a secret teacher of the occult who was not merely central to the development of rock music, but also to the growth of the Western esoteric tradition as a whole. Wyld looks at the mystical works that inspired Morrison, including Kurt Seligmann’s The Mirror of Magic, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, and the writings of Nietzsche and Jack Kerouac. Drawing on Morrison’s lyrics and poems, his intimate writings, and the recollections of friends like photographer Paul Ferrara and Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek, the author makes the case that Morrison was not simply a superficial dabbler in the occult but an actual secret teacher transmitting knowledge through the golden thread stretching back to Egypt and Thoth-Hermes. Explaining how Morrison sought to use his role as a rock singer to express the power of inner experience, Wyld shows how praxis was at the heart of Morrison’s approach, revealed in his journey through the arduous ordeals of shamanic initiation. He was a shaman, mystic, and sage—and an essential part of a great spiritual awakening to which he gave himself over fully.

Download or read book The Eudaimonic Turn written by James O. Pawelski and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In much of the critical discourse of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, scholars employed suspicion in order to reveal a given text's complicity with various undesirable ideologies and/or psychopathologies. Construed as such, interpretive practice was often intended to demystify texts and authors by demonstrating in them the presence of false consciousness, bourgeois values, patriarchy, orientalism, heterosexism, imperialist attitudes, and/or various neuroses, complexes, and lacks. While it proved to be of vital importance in literary studies, suspicious hermeneutics often compelled scholars to interpret eudaimonia, or well-being variously conceived, in pathologized terms. At the end of the twentieth century, however, literary scholars began to see the limitations of suspicion, conceived primarily as the discernment of latent realities beneath manifest illusions. In the last decade, often termed the "post-theory era," there was a radical shift in focus, as scholars began to recognize the inapplicability of suspicion as a critical framework for discussions of eudaimonic experiences, seeking out several alternative forms of critique, most of which can be called, despite their differences, a hermeneutics of affirmation. In such alternative reading strategies scholars were able to explore configurations of eudaimonia, not by dismissing them as bad politics or psychopathology but in complex ways that have resulted in a new eudaimonic turn, a trans-disciplinary phenomenon that has also enriched several other disciplines. The Eudaimonic Turn builds on such work, offering a collection of essays intended to bolster the burgeoning critical framework in the fields of English, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies by stimulating discussions of well-being in the "post-theory" moment. The volume consists of several examinations of literary and theoretical configurations of the following determinants of human subjectivity and the role these play in facilitating well-being: values, race, ethics/morality, aesthetics, class, ideology, culture, economics, language, gender, spirituality, sexuality, nature, and the body. Many of the authors compelling refute negativity bias and pathologized interpretations of eudaimonic experiences or conceptual models as they appear in literary texts or critical theories. Some authors examine the eudaimonic outcomes of suffering, marginalization, hybridity, oppression, and/or tragedy, while others analyze the positive effects of positive affect. Still others analyze the aesthetic response and/or the reading process in inquiries into the role of language use and its impact on well-being, or they explore the complexities of strength, resilience, and other positive character traits in the face of struggle, suffering, and "othering."

Download or read book Mothers of the Village written by C.J. Schneider and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So many mothers feel like something is out of joint, something is missing—and maybe the truth is that we’re all just missing each other. C. J. Schneider found herself in the middle of a perfect storm after giving birth to her third child and moving to a new neighborhood. Conditions for misery and postpartum depression were ideal: she was isolated, lonely, and exhausted with three young children at home. As she started talking with other mothers, she realized that she was not alone in her experience of feeling alone. In her unique voice, Schneider intelligently and compassionately offers practical advice on how to create the essential community that mothers need. Given the many examples of communal mothering from the past and around the world, as well as modern examples of communities in which mothers are thriving, the research is clear: since the beginning of womankind, mothering has been a communal effort. Mothers of the Village affirms that as mothers connect with each other and learn to work with each other, despite the challenges, they may find a piece of themselves that they have felt missing all along.

Download or read book The French Language and British Literature 1756 1830 written by Marcus Tomalin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1750s to the 1830s, numerous British intellectuals, novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, translators, educationalists, politicians, businessmen, travel writers, and philosophers brooded about the merits and demerits of the French language. The decades under consideration encompass a particularly tumultuous period in Anglo-French relations that witnessed the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1802 and 1803-1815, respectively), the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830), and the July Revolution (1830) - not to mention the gradual expansion of the British Empire, and the complex cultural shifts that led from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In this book, Marcus Tomalin reassesses the ways in which writers such as Tobias Smollett, Maria Edgeworth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Cobbett, and William Hazlitt acquired and deployed French. This intricate topic is examined from a range of critical perspectives, which draw upon recent research into European Romanticism, linguistic historiography, comparative literature, social and cultural history, education theory, and translation studies. This interdisciplinary approach helps to illuminate the deep ambivalences that characterised British appraisals of the French language in the literature of the Romantic period.

Download or read book The Persistence of Beauty written by Mark Sandy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This significant collection of essays examines the cultural, literary, philosophical and historical representation of beauty in British, Irish and American literature. Contributors use the works of Charles Dickens, T S Eliot, W H Auden and Stephen Spender among others to explore the role of beauty and its wider implications in art and society.

Download or read book Formation and the Person written by Alessandro Manenti and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers the foundational concepts which characterise the approach to the person, as human and as Christian, which has been developed at the Institute of Psychology of the Pontifical Gregorian University during its more than 35 years of activity. The book directs these concepts towards further paths for investigation and puts them in dialogue with sister schools of depth psychology and with other areas of scholarship (in particular philosophy and theology) which are equally interested in exploring the human mystery. Hence the variety of authors - psychologists, philosophers and theologians - brought together by a common interest in understanding and forming the human person in better ways. The reflections contained in this book gain concrete expression in an educative-therapeutic practice, and they review the nodal points which are part of every journey of growth and of psychotherapy: personal identity, interaction with the external world and the attainment of personal truth, inner imagination, desires and affections, conflicts. Instruments are offered to enable the formator and the psychotherapist to make the best possible use of the great energies which are made available by their application: how to identify the real problem, where to concentrate one's attention, what to listen to, how to handle the relationship, on what element to act in order to promote improvement/cure, what kind of change to propose. While accompaniment and psychotherapy are different procedures, they nevertheless have many similarities and points of contact. The dynamic relations and the factors involved in growth which this book describes are valid for both modalities of intervention and will be of interest to anyone who wishes to help others in a more enlightened educative dialogue.

Download or read book On Human Flourishing written by D.J. Moores and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-09-02 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great literature is more often praised for compelling depictions of conflict and tragedy than for moving portrayals of happiness and well-being. This collection of verse brings together poems of felicity, capturing what it means to be well in the fullest sense. Presented in 14 thematic sections, these works offer inspiring readings on wisdom, self-love, ecstasy, growth, righteousness, love and lust, inspiration, oneness with nature, hope, irreverence, awe, the delights of the senses, gratitude and compassion, relation to the sacred, justice, and unity. At times elegant, at others blunt, these poems reflect on what it means to live a rich, fulfilling life.

Download or read book Reading Keats s Poetry written by Merve Günday and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-04 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book claims that Keats’s poetry is a reaction against the discourse of modernity which traumatized the human subject by creating a divide between human and nature, subject and object. It argues that by transcending this divide and acknowledging the agency of both subject and object, Keats makes an ideological statement and offers a new site of existence or relationality to readers. This site also implies a response to the accusations that the Romantics were not interested in the realities of their time. What Keats does is to give an aestheticized response to the hardcore facts of his time. Departing from previous studies due to its emphasis on subjectivity and relationality, the book discusses Keats with regard to post/non-anthropocentric, alternative subject positions and subject-object relations in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” “In drear nighted December,” “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,” “Lamia,” “La Belle Dame sans Mercy,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Drawing on Lacanian and Braidottian epistemologies in its discussion of the intricacy between the imaginary and the symbolic, the irruption of the psychotic into the symbolic, and the agency of the object on the subject in Keats’s poetry, the book suggests that the inner dynamics of both the subject and the object acquire agency, which shatters Oneness and totality assumed in the Cartesian self.

Download or read book Violent Games written by Gareth Schott and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was over a decade ago that experimental psychologists and media-effects researchers declared the debate on the effects of violent video gaming as “essentially over,” referring to the way violence in videogames increases aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors in players. Despite the decisive tone of this statement, neither the presence nor popularity of digital games has since diminished, with games continuing to attract new generations of players to experience its technological advancements in the narration of violence and its techniques of depiction. Drawing on new insights achieved from research located at an intersection between humanities, social and computer sciences, Gareth Schott's addition to the Approaches in Digital Game Studies series interrogates the nature and meaning of the “violence” encountered and experienced by game players. In focusing on the various ways "violence" is mediated by both the rule system and the semiotic layer of games, the aim is to draw out the distinctiveness of games' exploitation of violence or violent themes. An important if not canonical text in the debates about video games and violence, Violent Games constitutes an essential book for those wishing to make sense of the experience offered by games as technological, aesthetic, and communicational phenomena in the context of issues of media regulation and the classification of game content “as” violence.

Download or read book Liberating Sociology From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations Volume 1 Unriddling the Quantum Enigma written by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi and published by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 1001 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge, social theorist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi reports having unriddled the so-called ‘quantum enigma.’ This book opens the lid of the Schrödinger’s Cat box of the ‘quantum enigma’ after decades and finds something both odd and familiar: Not only the cat is both alive and dead, it has morphed into an elephant in the room in whose interpretation Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and others were each both right and wrong because the enigma has acquired both localized and spread-out features whose unriddling requires both physics and sociology amid both transdisciplinary and transcultural contexts. The book offers, in a transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framework, a relativistic interpretation to advance a liberating quantum sociology. Deeper methodological grounding to further advance the sociological imagination requires investigating whether and how relativistic and quantum scientific revolutions can induce a liberating reinvention of sociology in favor of creative research and a just global society. This, however, necessarily leads us to confront an elephant in the room, the ‘quantum enigma.’ In Unriddling the Quantum Enigma, the first volume of the series commonly titled Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian toward Quantum Imaginations, sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi argues that unriddling the ‘quantum enigma’ depends on whether and how we succeed in dehabituating ourselves in favor of unified relativistic and quantum visions from the historically and ideologically inherited, classical Newtonian modes of imagining reality that have subconsciously persisted in the ways we have gone about posing and interpreting (or not) the enigma itself for more than a century. Once this veil is lifted and the enigma unriddled, he argues, it becomes possible to reinterpret the relativistic and quantum ways of imagining reality (including social reality) in terms of a unified, nonreductive, creative dialectic of part and whole that fosters quantum sociological imaginations, methods, theories, and practices favoring liberating and just social outcomes. The essays in this volume develop a set of relativistic interpretive solutions to the quantum enigma. Following a survey of relevant studies, and an introduction to the transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framing the study, overviews of Newtonianism, relativity and quantum scientific revolutions, the quantum enigma, and its main interpretations to date are offered. They are followed by a study of the notion of the “wave-particle duality of light” and the various experiments associated with the quantum enigma in order to arrive at a relativistic interpretation of the enigma, one that is shown to be capable of critically cohering other offered interpretations. The book concludes with a heuristic presentation of the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of what Tamdgidi calls the creative dialectics of reality. The volume essays involve critical, comparative/integrative reflections on the relevant works of founding and contemporary scientists and scholars in the field. This study is the first in the monograph series “Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation” of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (XIII, 2020), published by OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). OKCIR is dedicated to exploring, in a simultaneously world-historical and self-reflective framework, the human search for a just global society. It aims to develop new conceptual (methodological, theoretical, historical), practical, pedagogical, inspirational and disseminative structures of knowledge whereby the individual can radically understand and determine how world-history and her/his selves constitute one another. Reviews “Mohammad H. Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations, Volume 1, Unriddling the Quantum Enigma hits the proverbial nail on the head of an ongoing problem not only in sociology but also much social science—namely, many practitioners’ allegiance, consciously or otherwise, to persisting conceptions of ‘science’ that get in the way of scientific and other forms of theoretical advancement. Newtonianism has achieved the status of an idol and its methodology a fetish, the consequence of which is an ongoing failure to think through important problems of uncertainty, indeterminacy, multivariation, multidisciplinarity, and false dilemmas of individual agency versus structure, among many others. Tamdgidi has done great service to social thought by bringing to the fore this problem of disciplinary decadence and offering, in effect, a call for its teleological suspension—thinking beyond disciplinarity—through drawing upon and communicating with the resources of quantum theory not as a fetish but instead as an opening for other possibilities of social, including human, understanding. The implications are far-reaching as they offer, as the main title attests, liberating sociology from persistent epistemic shackles and thus many disciplines and fields connected to things ‘social.’ This is exciting work. A triumph! The reader is left with enthusiasm for the second volume and theorists of many kinds with proverbial work to be done.” — Professor Lewis R. Gordon, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and author of Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge/Paradigm, 2006), and Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, forthcoming 2020) "Social sciences are still using metatheoretical models of science based on 19th century newtonian concepts of "time and space". Mohammad H. Tamdgidi has produced a 'tour de force' in social theory leaving behind the old newtonian worldview that still informs the social sciences towards a 21st century non-dualistic, non-reductionist, transcultural, transdisciplinary, post-Einsteinian quantum concept of TimeSpace. Tamdgidi goes beyond previous efforts done by titans of social theory such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Kyriakos Kontopoulos. This book is a quantum leap in the social sciences at large. Tamdgidi decolonizes the social sciences away from its Eurocentric colonial foundations bringing it closer not only to contemporary natural sciences but also to its convergence with the old Eastern philosophical and mystical worldviews. This book is a masterpiece in social theory for a 21st century decolonial social science. A must read!" — Professor Ramon Grosfoguel, University of California at Berkeley​​​​​​​ "Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology succeeds in adding physical structures to the breadth of the world-changing vision of C. Wright Mills, the man who mentored me at Columbia. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics can help us to understand the human universe no less than the physical universe. Just as my Creating Life Before Death challenges bureaucracy’s conformist orientation, so does Liberating Sociology“liberate the infinite possibilities inherent in us.” Given our isolation in the Coronavirus era, we have time to follow Tamdgidi in his journey into the depth of inner space, where few men have gone before. It is there that we can gain emotional strength, just as Churchill, Roosevelt and Mandela empowered themselves. That personal development was needed to address not only their own personal problems, but also the mammoth problems of their societies. We must learn to do the same." — Bernard Phillips, Emeritus Sociology Professor, Boston University

Download or read book Walt Whitman Quarterly Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: