Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Rilke’s poetry issues a critique of modern alienation from the natural world and is held in philosophical and ecocritical interpretations to effect an alternative revealing of nature. This essay investigates nature in Rilke’s writings by tracing its relation to poetic imagination and considers in that light the prospects of a Rilkean vision of nature for literary ecocriticism. Nature in Rilke’s work, it is argued, does not appear primarily as a prelinguistic given to be salvaged, but must be both retrieved and constituted through a productive imaginative consciousness, a prospect lyrically thematized in _The Sonnets to Orpheus_. The play between revelation of nature and its imaginative generation underlies the ecological import of Rilke’s poetry, despite the risk it poses to the idea of privileged poetical access to nature itself and its celebration in both phenomenological accounts of poetic revealing and traditional literary ecocriticism.

Several recent approaches to literature—what the chapter describes as moral, aesthetic, and cognitive models of literary experience—allow us to consider its relevance in epistemic terms. Through an examination of the insights and limits of these approaches, the chapter presents the case for the experiential, generative, and expressive dimensions of understanding the literary work, and for their implications beyond literary reading. That literary understanding is experiential will mean that, beyond knowledge of what the text is about, one must have acquaintance with what it is like to undergo the imaginings prompted by the text. That literary understanding is generative means that what we understand in literary experience is not merely the objects or events in the world from which the work may draw, but how these are transformed in the specific literary presentation created by the work. That literary understanding is expressive will mean that the object of understanding issues from, and brings us into contact with, a point of view, even if one known only through and as the work itself. These dimensions of literary understanding, I suggest, enable understanding beyond the experience of literature as such.

Philosophical debates about poetry center on its relation to truth. While even its critics tend to admit that poetry can convey truth, others propose a mode of truthfulness that is distinctly poetic. Phenomenological hermeneutics claims that poetry enacts a form of revealing disclosure, while critical theory promotes poetry predominantly in its illusory character. These positions will be considered against the backdrop of the historical debate and the tension therein between poetry’s mimetic relation to reality and its generation of images and ideas. Poetry both reveals reality and creates ideas in light of possibility, generating alternatives to the real that may be revelatory by contrast. Poetry’s truest disclosures may pertain not so much to the world itself than to the ways we experience and come to know it.

Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of _ecstasis_—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, Cézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent _ecstasis._ The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.

This essay outlines the possibilities and limits of phenomenology as an ecophilic mode of thought in the context of a heightened, posthuman scrutiny of anthropocentrism, and advocates a self-reflexive environmental humanities informed by phenomenological insight. It aims to demonstrate that, despite its privileging of human consciousness, phenomenology offers important ecocritical resources, including methodological reflection on the constitution and limits of a human perspective; a vision of a meaningful lifeworld; a rendering of subjectivity as embodied within a larger vital materiality; and a critical response to human-induced crisis. It is argued that the methodological openness of phenomenology to imaginative variation can foster explorations beyond the human, while curbing the hubris of claiming to speak for the nonhuman world, and that a phenomenological orientation may avoid neutralizing the perspectives of those suffering intra-human harms in the context of environmental injustice while maintaining the human as the respondent in calls for environmental reckoning.

On Being and Becoming offers a new approach to existentialist philosophy and literature, as responding to competing demands for universal truth and the defense of the irreducible singularity of the individual. On Being and Becoming traces the heterogeneity of existentialist thinking beyond the popular wartime philosophers of the Parisian Left Bank, demonstrating their critical dependence on sources from the nineteenth century and their complements in modernist works across the European continent and beyond. While quintessentially modern, existentialism inherits ideas of the past and anticipates challenges of the present. Despite its individualism, existentialist attention to the human self is related to conceptions of world, others, the earth, and the more encompassing concept of being. The predominance of ideas of authenticity, individuality, and self-determination makes any existentialist manifesto self-contradictory, while existentialist thinkers above all wanted to make their philosophy relevant to concrete human existence as it is lived. Prevailing models of existential authenticity life tend to overlook the rich diversity of its prospects, which, as this volume shows, involve not only anxiety, absurdity, awareness of death and of the loss of religious reassurances, but also hope, the striving for happiness, and a sense of the transcendent—all of these grounded our human capacity to create meaning. In spite of the diversity of existentialism, all of its thinkers recognize the self as becoming, and recognize the courage and creativity human individuality demands. On Being and Becoming elaborates pragmatic and philosophical relevance of existentialism for being human in the contemporary world.

Although the reception of Nietzsche’s thought has complicated its relation to ecologically-oriented philosophy, a recent flurry of interpretations has demonstrated the ecological relevance of Nietzsche in a number of ways, attending to Nietzsche’s interest in animal life, the importance of natural topography in his works, and his critique of anthropocentric views of nature. The present study traces Nietzsche’s philosophy of immanence, his Zarathustra’s exhortation to remain faithful to the earth, to his earlier view of language and its tendency toward an abstraction that supports idealist thinking and, according to Nietzsche, alienates human consciousness from its more aesthetic and vital origins. Nietzsche’s greatest relevance to ecology, it is suggested here, is rooted not primarily in the description of nature in his works, in the sacred rendering of natural topographies, or even in his attempts to imagine animal perspectives, but rather in his critical cognitive ecology, by which I mean an ecocritical critique of human cognition itself. Nietzsche identifies epistemic habits and metaphysical fixations in human thought that must be overcome in order for humans to live vitally rather than destructively within the natural world. Nietzsche’s cognitive critique remains relevant for ecocritical thinking-particularly for reimagining our possible relations to nature-even if Nietzsche underestimated the actual and potential environmental consequences of human alienation.

Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a groundbreaking new understanding of its place in everyday experience as well as the heights of creative achievement. The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.

This essay engages ways in which the manifestation of ‘world’ occurs in poetry specifically through images, and how we can conceive of the imagination in this regard without reducing the imagination to a mimetic faculty of consciousness subordinate to cognition. Continental thought in the last century offers rich resources for this study. The notion of a ‘world’ is related to the poetic image in ways fundamental to the Heidegger’s theory of language, and may be seen in Continental poetics following Heidegger, including Blanchot’s examination of poetry in his account of the space of literature. By means of images, I shall demonstrate, poetic language is exemplary in relation to ‘world’ in two ways. (1) Images, poetically arranged, generate and open up a sense or experience of a world, specific to that poem, for its reader. Poetic images then, exhibit a generative evocation of world. (2) Through images, a poem may evoke the way in which space and time are inhabited as a world of human dwelling in an ontologically or existentially meaningful way. The relation of images to world is, then, an illumination or a disclosure of world. The first of these relations remains, to a large extent, immanent to the poem, but may be seen as an analogue of the essentially human experience of inhabiting a world. The second relation transcends the poem and relates the poem immediately to the existential framework of human dwelling

Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Hölderlin are central to Heidegger's later philosophy and have determined the mainstream reception of Hölderlin's poetry. Gosetti-Ferencei argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hölderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, she argues, resist the more politically distressing aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including Heidegger's nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood, or Heimat.In the context of Hölderlin's poetics of alienation, exile, and wandering, Gosetti-Ferencei draws a different model of poetic subjectivity, which engages Heidegger's later philosophy of Gelassenheit, calmness, or letting be. In so doing, she is able to pose a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a "new poetics of Dasein," or being there.

When we are most immersed in literary reading, and when that immersion is most significant, we may experience a literary work as constitutive of a ‘world’. With reference to the phenomenological tradition, it can be shown how this world is both a novel creation and serves to disclose, not least by shifting our perspective from, the world of ordinary experience. In this light, it will be shown how the problem of mimesis poses a challenge for recent neuroscientific approaches to literature. At the same time, neuroscientific findings show the insufficiency of phenomenological accounts which fail to acknowledge the physiological and cognitive processes that underlie literary imagining. I introduce the notion of the ‘mimetic dimension’ in order to clarify what accounts based on phenomenology and neuroscience can and cannot explain about literary mimesis and the experience of a literary world

The present study of the philosophical orientation within the poetics of Rilke and Stevens aims to show that in the context of modern poetry, transcendence, or “crossing beyond,” must be understood in two distinct senses, as vertical and horizontal projections. The usurpation of one by the other or the transfer between them distinguishes the poetry of Rilke and Stevens and makes a comparative reading particularly illuminating. The fact that Rilke and Stevens are two of the most widely invoked poets in the phenomenological tradition will help to establish a modern sense of transcendence distinct from a traditional or Romantic longing for a realm above and beyond earthly existence. This would be an “immanent” transcendence, a crossing of horizons between perception and imagination or imagination and reality, by the disclosures and inventions of which, it is argued here, the more traditional notion of transcendence is usurped in distinct ways.

What is factical life, and what sort of philosophical approach is needed to grasp it? Life is for Heidegger a basic phenomenon. Because factical life is immensely rich, evasive, manifold, fluid, and dynamic, one cannot hope to grasp it in static definitions which aim to exhaust its object, to take it as an immediate given. The importance of tailoring one’s mode of access to the subject matter is certainly an Aristotlelian insight, but Heidegger conceives it as a question of phenomenological authenticity. Perhaps the most important contribution is the treatment of the formal indication, which appears often in Heidegger’s early writings, but is given a significant clarification here. Heidegger devises the notion of a formal indication as an alternative to traditional philosophical definition, the latter of which also arises from tendencies of life to grasp reality in static presence. Formal indication remains empty as to its content, but draws out a formal structure through which the categorical movements of life become visible from a certain preserved distance. Despite their formal qualification, it is clear that Heidegger’s interpretation of these movements is existentially oriented, their currents tending toward lostness from which life must be turned around. As in Being and Time, care is identified as life’s relational sense, which manifests four categorical directions: inclination, a pull toward something ; distance, or rather, the tendency to abolish the distance between itself and the things which stand before it; sequestration, wherein life avoids itself, looking away from itself, attempting to escape its worriedness about itself; and the “easy,” where life seeks to lose itself in mundane difficulties and/or carefreeness. Readers of Being and Time will notice characteristics of fallenness, Dasein’s inauthentic self-forgetfulness due to insatiable absorption in the world.