Romantic Immanence

Romantic Immanence examines literary examples of an alternative experience of otherness—an experience of alterity the Romantics understood as an embodied, immanent encounter with raw reality. The Romantics' enthusiasm for encounters in nature and the imagination that exceeded the limits of rational thought is well known. Yet these encounters have largely been interpreted in terms of the sublime or the Gothic. Drawing attention to the influence of Spinozist and Stoic philosophy on Romantic thought and aesthetics, Elizabeth A. Fay argues that immanence was another, perhaps even more important, form of alterity, particularly during this era of social and political upheaval. Investigating works such as Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, and Percy Shelley's Triumph of Life alongside Schelling's unfinished Ages of the World and Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments, Fay demonstrates how Romantic immanence, despite going largely unrecognized with the loss of its initial context, remains vividly present in these works.

Offers a new, Spinozist framework for understanding encounters with otherness in Romantic literature as experiences of immanence.

A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets. Ben Hickman argues that we must attend to Ashbery's radical conception of reading if we are to understand the originality of his writing. His study focuses on Ashbery's reading of English poets, including Andrew Marvell, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Clare, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and examines Ashbery's writing in terms of an 'aesthetic of inattention'. Hickman critiques the Americanisation of Ashbery's work as well as common assumptions about his Romanticism, his avant-garde Modernism and his engagement with the historical present. He demonstrates that Ashbery's generosity as a writer is closely tied to his generosity, inattention and situatedness as a reader.

This volume brings together a wide range of scholars to offer new perspectives on the relationship between Romanticism and philosophy. The entanglement of Romantic literature with philosophy is increasingly recognized, just as Romanticism is increasingly viewed as European and Transatlantic, yet few studies combine these coordinates and consider the philosophical significance of distinctly literary questions in British and American Romantic writings. The essays in this book are concerned with literary writing as a form of thinking, investigating the many ways in which Romantic literature across the Atlantic engages with European thought, from 18th- and 19th-century philosophy to contemporary theory. The contributors read Romantic texts both as critical responses to the major debates that have shaped the history of philosophy, and as thought experiments in their own right. This volume thus examines anew the poetic philosophy of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Clare, also extending beyond poetry to consider other literary genres as philosophically significant, such as Jane Austen’s novels, De Quincey’s autofiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, or Emerson’s essays. Grounded in complementary theoretical backgrounds and reading practices, the various contributions draw on an impressive array of writers and thinkers and challenge our understanding not only of Romanticism, but also of what we have come to think of as "literature" and "philosophy."

10 lectures at The Hague, March 20-29, 1913 (CW 145) Address in Berlin, February 3, 1913 "The future of spiritual esoteric movements such as ours will depend more and more upon the realization that human spiritual development is necessary. Whoever rejects or is hostile toward spiritual development will thus have identified with what is no longer useful on Earth, with what is withered and shriveled, and will have abandoned cosmic evolution as willed by the gods." --Rudolf Steiner On February 3, 1913, the first General Meeting of the newly formed Anthroposophical Society was convened in Berlin. Six weeks later, in Holland, Rudolf Steiner spoke for the first time to an anthroposophic audience in a detailed, intimate way about individual esoteric training and the subtle effects of spiritual development on every level of one's being. Beginning with questions regarding the body's experience of food and drink--meat, coffee, alcohol, and so on--he lays out the progression of anthroposophic spiritual inner work, up to direct perception of "Paradise" and the Holy Grail. He discusses the role of human beings in our evolution that takes place between the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. Included is Steiner's important lecture "The Being of Anthroposophy," which this volume introduces to the English-speaking world. This edition also includes Steiner's "introductory words," previously available only as an unpublished German typescript. The Effects of Esoteric Development is a translation from the German of Welche Bedeutung hat die okkulte Entwicklung des Menschen für seine Hüllen--physischen Leib, Ätherleib, Astralleib--und sein Selbst? (GA 145).

Practising Immanence: Living with Theory and Environmental Education makes creative contributions to both qualitative inquiry and environmental education by exploring how each of these ideas seep and fuse into one another, creating a space where methodology becomes pedagogy, and where each of these is already always environmental: indivisible with life. Clarke’s energising and innovative approach offers a challenge to conventional research practices and shows ways in which inquiry can be done differently. Drawing on new materialisms, affect theory and the practical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the book details the PhD journey of the author, merging stories and theory (and stories of theory) in the production of eight ‘haecceities’ – a philosophical concept which prioritises the thisness of a thing or event. This move allows a novel methodological approach whereby the haecceities act as sites of variation on the events of the book: the self as unstable and posthuman; the environment as everything (immanent) rather than as an overly romantic or a green version of nature; and the tensions that these moves create for ethical orientations in education, inquiry and life in the Anthropocene. Practising Immanence brings theory to life through a diffractively critical style and a unique approach to environmental pedagogic practice. This radical and vitalising book will be of interest to those inspired to explore environmental problems and inquiry with each other and to those drawn to creative-relational, narrative, embodied and post-qualitative approaches to research.

Dialectic of Romanticism presents a radical new assessment of the aesthetic and philosophical history and future of modernity. An exploration of the internal critique of modernism treats romanticism (later historicism and post-modernism) as central to the development of European modernism alongside enlightenment, and, like the enlightenment, subject to its own dead-ends and fatalities. An external critique of modernism recovers concepts of civilization and civic aesthetics which are trans-historical -simultaneously modern and classically inspired - and provides a counter both to romantic historicism and enlightened models of progress. Finally, a retrospective critique of modernism analyses what happens to modernism's romantic-archaic and technological-futurist visions when they are translated from Europe to America. Dialectic of Romanticism argues that out of the European dialectic of romanticism and enlightenment a new dialectic of modernity is emerging in the New World-one which points beyond modernism and postmodernism.

"The fundamental concern of Romanticism, which brought about its inception, determined its development, and set its end, was the need to create a new language for religion"--