Philosophy and Poetry - by Ranjan Ghosh (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry.

Book Synopsis

Ever since Plato's Socrates exiled the poets from the ideal city in The Republic, Western thought has insisted on a strict demarcation between philosophy and poetry. Yet might their long-standing quarrel hide deeper affinities? This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry.

In wide-ranging reflections on thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Badiou, Kristeva, and Agamben, among others, distinguished contributors consider how different philosophers encountered the force and intensity of poetry and the negotiations that took place as they sought resolutions of the quarrel. Instead of a clash between competing worldviews, they figured the relationship between philosophy and poetry as one of productive mutuality, leading toward new modes of thinking and understanding. Spanning a range of issues with nuance and rigor, this compelling and comprehensive book opens new possibilities for philosophical poetry and the poetics of philosophy.

Review Quotes

[A] remarkable anthology.-- "Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics"

Recommended.-- "Choice"

This indispensable gathering of essays by some of the most compelling critics and philosophers writing today provides a comprehensive and decisive investigation of European philosophy's engagement with its ancient and enduring adversary. These studies are admirable for the clarity and attention to detail that they bring to often difficult texts. As a result, one begins to understand in new ways the ancient paradox that without poetry philosophy would be unable to recognize itself, and in the bargain philosophy becomes for poetry an indispensable poetics of words and things of the world.--Gerald L. Bruns, author of Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature

This very exciting collection offers admirably concise and often brilliant essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers and their relationship to, reliance on, commentaries about poetry. Any student of European thinking, especially of those central strains of the 'continental tradition' that take their origin in phenomenology, will learn a great deal not only from the specific essays in this collection but also from the interplay between them.--John Michael, author of Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

About the Author

Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Bengal. He is the author of Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet: From Philip Sidney to T. S. Eliot (2017) and coauthor (with J. Hillis Miller) of Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), among others.