American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 171)

In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who rethink the human in material terms. Do our experiences correlate to our material elements? Do visions of a common physical ground imply a common purpose? 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. In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens , Mark Noble examines writers who share the assumption that personhood can be understood as a material event. Through new readings of Whitman, Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens, Noble uncovers a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism, and asks what this account of shared materiality can tell us about the most profoundly secular models of the modern subject. 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, American Poetic Materialism explores poets who have long asked what our materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves. 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 Content: 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. 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, Mark Noble explores poets who have long asked what our shared materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.