Description
Book SynopsisOn Dwelling: Poetry, Place, and Politics unfolds the meaning of dwelling as both being in the world, and being on the earth with others. Dennis E. Skocz traces a path from the places we call home, through the global market place (said to foster a “world without borders”), to the planet we co-inhabit. The book addresses themes of displacement, contested space, and estrangement along with specific issues like migration, ethnic division, and resource use. Embracing the discourses of poetry, philosophy, and politics the book uses a cross-disciplinary approach to tackle the diversity and complexity of the topic. The investigation is grounded in phenomenology, with economics, jurisprudence, political theory, geo-physics, cultural anthropology, and other sciences coming into play. It builds on first-person “lived experience” and the “lifeworld” as a concrete basis for understanding. Challenged by real-world issues of co-existence, the book culminates in sketching a “political space” where stakeholders in the future of the planet can collaborate across the globe for the earth and its dwellers.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I. Dwelling: The Testimony of Poets
Chapter 1: Prairie and City: The Poetry of Carl Sandburg
Chapter 2. Property and the Land: Xenophon and Frost
Chapter 3. Nature and Democracy: Whitman’s New World Metaphysics
Part II. Phenomenologies of Place
Chapter 4. Property and Home: Mine and Thine
Chapter 5. On the Road with Herodotus: The Strange, the Familiar, and the Earthbound
Chapter 6. Nature and the Wild
Part III. The Politics of Place and Displacement
Chapter 7. The Perils of Comfortable Estrangement: A Micro-Phenomenology
Chapter 8. Whose Land Is It Anyway? Xenophobe and Alien Foe
Chapter 9. Wall Street and Main Street in Schutzian Perspective
Part IV. The “Big Picture”: A Whole-Earth View
Chapter 10. From Market Place to “Marketspace”
Chapter 11. Body-Mapping and the Anthropocene
Chapter 12. Earthling or Cosmopolitan? The Limits and Prospects of Interlocution
