Ariane Mildenberg - Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism

The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination.

Series Editors

Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison

Volumes in the Series

Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism , edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison

Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism , edited by S. E. Gontarski, Paul Ardoin and Laci MattisonUnderstanding Wittgenstein,

Understanding Modernism, edited by Anat MatarUnderstanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism, edited by David Scott

Understanding James, Understanding Modernism , edited by David H. Evans

Understanding Rancire, Understanding Modernism, edited by Patrick M. Bray

Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism , edited by Christopher Langlois

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, edited by Ariane Mildenberg

Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Douglas Burnham and Brian Pines

Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Jean-Michel RabatUnderstanding Adorno,

Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Robin Truth GoodmanUnderstanding Cavell,

Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Paola Marrati

Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, and Michael F. Miller

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming), edited by Mark Steven

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism

Edited by
Ariane Mildenberg

Contents

This book would not exist without the encouragement, help, and support of a number of people. First and foremost, I would like to thank Derek Ryan for encouraging me to write a proposal on Merleau-Ponty and modernism for the Bloomsbury series Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism . I am grateful to the series editors, Paul Ardoin, S.E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, for accepting the proposal and supporting my choices for such a large volume. My heartfelt thanks go to this volumes contributors for their commitment, hard work, and patience. I owe a special debt to Haaris Naqvi, the editorial director at Bloomsbury, who has been an absolute delight to work with. I am also grateful to the editorial and production teams at Bloomsbury: Katherine De Chant, Amy Martin, James Tupper, and Amy Jordan. Special thanks should be given to Ole Birk Laursen, Rajiv Kaushik, Ben Hutchinson, Derek Ryan, and Carole Bourne-Taylor for their intellectual generosity and helpful criticism. I am thankful to my colleagues and students in the School of English at the University of Kent, Canterbury. My family members are always there for me (thanks to all of you!) and Ole, you remain my rock.

I spent a part of the summer of 2016 at Gladstones Library in Wales to edit a large part of this book. I want to thank the library, kitchen, and reception staff for taking good care of me during my writing retreat there. One day, while editing a chapter, I was reminded of Merleau-Pontys reflections on Husserl in his Preface in Phenomenology of Perception : we mustprecisely in order to see the world and to grasp it as a paradoxrupture our familiarity with it, and this rupture can teach us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world ( PP Landes, Ixxvii). It is this openness to the worldan openness to difference and to othersthat both enabled this volume and helped bind it together.

Thomas Baldwin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and edited the journal MIND from 2005 until 2015. He has published several papers on Merleau-Ponty and edited Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings (2003) and Reading Merleau-Ponty (2007). He has also published extensively on central topics in analytic philosophy, especially concerning G. E. Moore, and has edited several of Moores works.

Jason M. Baskin is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Modernism beyond the Avant-Garde: Embodying Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His essays and reviews have appeared in Cultural Critique, Mediations, Postmodern Culture and the edited volume Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture (2017).

James Bodington is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of New Mexico, where he has taught Current Moral Problems, Introduction to Philosophy, and Reasoning and Critical Thinking. His dissertation research focuses on the applicability of phenomenological and post-structuralist approaches for the understanding of mood and mental health. He has presented papers on issues in applied ethics, the philosophy of death, and on the work of Julia Kristeva and Martin Heidegger. James is the author, with Iain Thomson, of Against Immortality: Why Death Is Better than the Alternative (2014).

Carole Bourne-Taylor is a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. She is the author of Lunivers imaginaire de Virginia Woolf (2001) and a co-editor (with Ariane Mildenberg) of Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (2010). She wrote the introductions to Charles Morgans Plays and Selected Reviews (2013). Her recent research is in the field of contemporary French poetry, especially of Michel Deguy. Her current project is an edition of The Aesthethics of Mourning in Modern Literature in French, to which she is also contributing a chapter on Yves Bonnefoy and Emmanuel Merle. She is also working on Jeremy Thurlows musical adaptations of texts by Woolf and English and French poets (including Yves Bonnefoy).

Matthew Carbery is a poet and Associate Lecturer at the University of Plymouth. His book Phenomenology and the Late 20th Century American Long Poem is forthcoming in the Modern and Contemporary Poets and Poetics series at Palgrave MacMillan in 2019. He is Editor of EPIZOOTICS! literary magazine, and his poetry has been published in Tears in the Fence, Blackbox Manifold, CTRL ALT DEL, Otoliths, Stride, and Dead King Magazine. His interests include American poetics, long poems, phenomenology, existentialisms, ecopoetics, jazz studies, and philosophical pessimism.

Sarah Cooper is Professor of Film Studies at Kings College London. She is the author of several books, including Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (2006), Chris Marker (2008), and The Soul of Film Theory (2013). Currently she is writing a book on film and imagination.

Amanda Dennis is a visiting Assistant Professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. Her current book project, Bodying Space: Samuel Beckett and the Question of Agency, engages phenomenology to explore how the physical bodyespecially in relation to its environmentsuggests alternative forms of subjective agency. She has published on Nietzsche, Beckett, philosophy, modernism, and literary aesthetics, and she has held fellowships and visiting lectureships in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Spain.

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei is the Kurrelmeyer Professor of German at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (2018); Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (2011); The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (2007); Heidegger, Hlderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (2004); and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns (2003), which won the Paris Review Prize.