Louise Westling | University of Oregon (original) (raw)
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Papers by Louise Westling
The Yearbook of English Studies, 1977
New Literary History, 1999
'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and ... more 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest? a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delu sion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal ...
PMLA, 1999
A number of converging imperatives have prompted widespread professional at-tention to environmen... more A number of converging imperatives have prompted widespread professional at-tention to environmental readings in the humanities recently, generating ideas that can only promise increasingly focused development in the future. One gen-eral response to greater awareness of environmental ...
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2004
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 1993
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2009
... Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001), 173186; Glen A. Mazis, Earthbodies, Rediscovering Our P... more ... Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001), 173186; Glen A. Mazis, Earthbodies, Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002); John Russon,Embodiment and Responsibility: Merleau-Ponty and the Ontology of Nature, Man and ...
History of Education Quarterly, 1990
... They lost two horses and a buggy, and most of Page 27. 5 Early Days in Clio and Birmingham th... more ... They lost two horses and a buggy, and most of Page 27. 5 Early Days in Clio and Birmingham their possessions. But they did not give up, because they felt they were included in God's plan. Then Papa got a church in Clio, where I was born in 1909. I was named Sarah Lucille for ...
Environmental History, 1998
Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics are reprinted editions of... more Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics are reprinted editions of key works that explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. Drawn from many different disci-plines, they examine how natural ...
Contemporary Literature, 1986
American Literature, 1986
This essay demonstrates how, fifty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had moved far beyond Heidegge... more This essay demonstrates how, fifty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had moved far beyond Heidegger to accomplish the kind of profound reconsideration of human relations with other animals that Derrida urged in his late writings but could not himself pursue.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered the imaginary to be a fundamental dimension of the real, indeed ... more Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered the imaginary to be a fundamental dimension of the real, indeed the very foundation or institution of Being (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 262; also Dufourcq 2012, 187-189 and 342-398). Works of art and literature, as well as dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and idealizations, bring this invisible realm into visibility. From the time of our most ancient homo sapiens ancestors, painted and carved images and words have recorded ecological understandings and experiences in forms that speak to us mysteriously, even nightmarishly, as cultural memories. Cave paintings preserve enormous panoramic visions of animals overlapping and morphing into each other--mammoths, lions, oryx, bulls, reindeer, horses. Occasionally tiny human forms dance among them wearing lion or oryx heads, wound them with darts, or lie dead at their feet. Bone carvings show flowering plants, seeding grasses interspersed with spawning salmon, gravid horses, and symbols of human reproduction. All these works are sedimentations of an ancient ecological imaginary nourishing all human cultures. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature restores that understanding of the dynamic intertwining flesh of the world which literary works have witnessed and preserved and to which they now increasingly turn with new urgency. This essay will describe Merleau-Ponty's ecological sense of the intertwining and synergies of all beings and things in the world and the wild or Brute Being that is their underlying reality (cf. Rigby, "Earth's Poesy" and Wheeler, "The Lightest Burden" in the present volume). It will extend into environmental consciousness the radical concept of the imaginary which Annabelle Dufourcq has defined in Merleau-Ponty's writings and demonstrate how literary works explore this imaginary to reconnect us to memories of the deep past and the wild Being, allowing us to glimpse the unknown 'forces' and 'laws' of the natural world. According to Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary, Louise Westling Dufourcq, Merleau-Ponty described the crisis of modernity in which "modern art reveals a changing and unfinished world" where "everything is completely enigmatic again" and man seems to be again undergoing "the Dionysian ordeals of Greek mystery plays: a terrifying but perhaps fertile exaltation of irrational forces of life, madness, loss of the self, ecstasy"(20143, 7091). Merleau-Ponty conducted an ontological revolution by re-opening a full sense of that imaginary, with all its pregnancy, promiscuity, terror, and promise which is sedimented in language and art and carries our cultural history into the present. Similarly our bodies carry invisible sedimentations of species memories and indeed the history of all life. Danish biologist and biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer explains that "every single life-form in existence today has, lodged inside its genetic matierial, the sinuous trail of its evolutionary past harking all the way back to the dawn of life--while it is itself busy incorporating the experiences of today into the future." (1996: 13) Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the imaginary and invisible dimensions of the real allow us to see how cultural sedimentations in literature as in the other arts, in history, and in philosophy, serve parallel functions for those who share that culture or can gain some access to it. Biosemiotics and recent genomic and evolutionary biology confirm Merleau-Ponty's insights from more than fifty years ago about the sedimentation of memory in the earth itself, in organisms, and outside their bodies through culture. These are intertwined, chiasmic dimensions of the flesh of the world which is the profound ecology that Merleau-Ponty's ontology describes (cf. Berressem, "Ecology and
The Yearbook of English Studies, 1977
New Literary History, 1999
'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and ... more 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest? a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delu sion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal ...
PMLA, 1999
A number of converging imperatives have prompted widespread professional at-tention to environmen... more A number of converging imperatives have prompted widespread professional at-tention to environmental readings in the humanities recently, generating ideas that can only promise increasingly focused development in the future. One gen-eral response to greater awareness of environmental ...
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2004
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 1993
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2009
... Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001), 173186; Glen A. Mazis, Earthbodies, Rediscovering Our P... more ... Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001), 173186; Glen A. Mazis, Earthbodies, Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002); John Russon,Embodiment and Responsibility: Merleau-Ponty and the Ontology of Nature, Man and ...
History of Education Quarterly, 1990
... They lost two horses and a buggy, and most of Page 27. 5 Early Days in Clio and Birmingham th... more ... They lost two horses and a buggy, and most of Page 27. 5 Early Days in Clio and Birmingham their possessions. But they did not give up, because they felt they were included in God's plan. Then Papa got a church in Clio, where I was born in 1909. I was named Sarah Lucille for ...
Environmental History, 1998
Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics are reprinted editions of... more Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics are reprinted editions of key works that explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. Drawn from many different disci-plines, they examine how natural ...
Contemporary Literature, 1986
American Literature, 1986
This essay demonstrates how, fifty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had moved far beyond Heidegge... more This essay demonstrates how, fifty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had moved far beyond Heidegger to accomplish the kind of profound reconsideration of human relations with other animals that Derrida urged in his late writings but could not himself pursue.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered the imaginary to be a fundamental dimension of the real, indeed ... more Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered the imaginary to be a fundamental dimension of the real, indeed the very foundation or institution of Being (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 262; also Dufourcq 2012, 187-189 and 342-398). Works of art and literature, as well as dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and idealizations, bring this invisible realm into visibility. From the time of our most ancient homo sapiens ancestors, painted and carved images and words have recorded ecological understandings and experiences in forms that speak to us mysteriously, even nightmarishly, as cultural memories. Cave paintings preserve enormous panoramic visions of animals overlapping and morphing into each other--mammoths, lions, oryx, bulls, reindeer, horses. Occasionally tiny human forms dance among them wearing lion or oryx heads, wound them with darts, or lie dead at their feet. Bone carvings show flowering plants, seeding grasses interspersed with spawning salmon, gravid horses, and symbols of human reproduction. All these works are sedimentations of an ancient ecological imaginary nourishing all human cultures. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature restores that understanding of the dynamic intertwining flesh of the world which literary works have witnessed and preserved and to which they now increasingly turn with new urgency. This essay will describe Merleau-Ponty's ecological sense of the intertwining and synergies of all beings and things in the world and the wild or Brute Being that is their underlying reality (cf. Rigby, "Earth's Poesy" and Wheeler, "The Lightest Burden" in the present volume). It will extend into environmental consciousness the radical concept of the imaginary which Annabelle Dufourcq has defined in Merleau-Ponty's writings and demonstrate how literary works explore this imaginary to reconnect us to memories of the deep past and the wild Being, allowing us to glimpse the unknown 'forces' and 'laws' of the natural world. According to Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary, Louise Westling Dufourcq, Merleau-Ponty described the crisis of modernity in which "modern art reveals a changing and unfinished world" where "everything is completely enigmatic again" and man seems to be again undergoing "the Dionysian ordeals of Greek mystery plays: a terrifying but perhaps fertile exaltation of irrational forces of life, madness, loss of the self, ecstasy"(20143, 7091). Merleau-Ponty conducted an ontological revolution by re-opening a full sense of that imaginary, with all its pregnancy, promiscuity, terror, and promise which is sedimented in language and art and carries our cultural history into the present. Similarly our bodies carry invisible sedimentations of species memories and indeed the history of all life. Danish biologist and biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer explains that "every single life-form in existence today has, lodged inside its genetic matierial, the sinuous trail of its evolutionary past harking all the way back to the dawn of life--while it is itself busy incorporating the experiences of today into the future." (1996: 13) Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the imaginary and invisible dimensions of the real allow us to see how cultural sedimentations in literature as in the other arts, in history, and in philosophy, serve parallel functions for those who share that culture or can gain some access to it. Biosemiotics and recent genomic and evolutionary biology confirm Merleau-Ponty's insights from more than fifty years ago about the sedimentation of memory in the earth itself, in organisms, and outside their bodies through culture. These are intertwined, chiasmic dimensions of the flesh of the world which is the profound ecology that Merleau-Ponty's ontology describes (cf. Berressem, "Ecology and
This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics ... more This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question 'Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?'. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdisciplinary engagement with biosemiotics. We start with Donald Favareau, whose originary disciplinary home is ethnomethod-ology and linguistics, and then move on to Paul Cobley's contribution on general semiotics and Kalevi Kull's on biosemiotics. This is followed by Cobley (again) with Frederick Stjernfelt who contribute on biosemiotics and learning, then Gerald Ostdiek from philosophy, and Morten Tønnessen focusing upon ethics in particular. Myrdene Anderson writes from anthropology, while Timo Maran and Louise Westling provide a view from literary study. The essay closes with Wendy Wheeler reflecting on the movement of biosemiotics as a challenge, often via the ecological humanities, to the kind of so-called 'postmodern' thinking that has dominated humanities critical thought in the universities for the past 40 years. Virtually all the matters gestured to in outline above are discussed in much more satisfying detail in the topics which follow.