Description
Book SynopsisThis book presents Czeslaw Milosz''s poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish Nobel laureate saw the reductive biologization of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The book argues that his response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body''s deeper meanings. Within the framework of a hesitant Christian faith, Milosz''s poetry and prose often suggest a paradoxical striving toward transcendence precisely through sensual experience. Yet his perspectives on bodily existence are not exclusively affirmative. The book traces his diverse representations of the body from dualist visions that demonize the flesh through to positive images of the body as the source of religious experience, the self, and his own creative faculty. It also examines the complex relations between masculine and feminine bodies or forms of subjectivity, as Milosz represents them. Finally, it elucidates his contention that poetry is the best vehicle for conveying these contradictions, because it also combines disembodied, symbolic meanings with the sensual meanings of sound and rhythm. For Milosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self.
Trade ReviewBill's analyses let readers see the human situations that ground seemingly abstract concepts. His fusion of biographical, historical and literary foci is so deftly managed that it seems almost beyond mention: this is the sort of grounded yet conceptually sophisticated reading strategy that makes sense now that the heyday of high theory has passed. * Magdalena Kay, Department of English University of Victoria, SEER *
Bill brings Miłosz's ideas together in a discussion of his view of poetic language as both an embodied and immaterial entity...Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice *
The volume is a welcome contribution to the field of Miłosz studies and will be an indispensable resource for scholars and students of Miłosz and religion, as well as those interested in twentieth-century literature, secularisation and the post-secular. * Joanna Rzepa, Modern Believing *
