Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh

Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh PDF Author: Stanley Bill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192658417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book presents Czesław Miłosz'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, Miłosz'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 Miłosz 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 Miłosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self.

Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh

Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh PDF Author: Stanley Bill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192658417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents Czesław Miłosz'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, Miłosz'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 Miłosz 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 Miłosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self.

Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh

Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh PDF Author: Stanley Bill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192844393
Category : Human body in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This 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.

The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind PDF Author: Czesław Miłosz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description


On Czeslaw Milosz

On Czeslaw Milosz PDF Author: Eva Hoffman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691212694
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century, in no small part because he very much lived the events and ideologies of that century. Born into a Polish family in what was then the western fringe of the Russian Empire, and what is now Lithuania, a young man Milosz found his life upended by the First World War and his father's conscription in the Russian army. In the Second World War, he provided aid to Jews in Warsaw as a partisan and a member of the Polish socialist underground. But after the war he lived as a permanent exile, from Poland, from Soviet communism, from his early fervent Catholicism and then, later, even from the almost garish extremes and inequalities of the American society in which he chose to live. His work is a lasting legacy. His poetry remains in print, whether in Polish or English or the other languages into which it has been translated, and his two classic works of prose non-fiction, The Captive Mind, his reflection on the hypnotic effect of ideology, and Native Realm, his memoir on his life in Poland and his life away from it, have been reissued in Penguin Classics. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. In this new volume of the Writers on Writers series, writer Eva Hoffman draws on her conversations with Milosz during their encounters and her own private engagement with his work, in order to comprehend someone whose intellectual and geographic trajectory serves as a mirror to her own, as someone who emigrated with her family from her native Poland and who has since lived and pursued a literary career in the anglophone world. Hoffman concentrates on several important themes in Milosz's life and work, such as his resistance to dogma and fanaticism, his fascination with place and geographic separation, his awareness of his own exile, his attraction to all life, his capacity for pleasure, and finally his basic humanism, which underpinned his poetry"--

Milosz

Milosz PDF Author: Andrzej Franaszek
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674495047
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Andrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz—winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—recounts the poet’s odyssey through WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion of Poland, and the USSR’s postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. This edition contains a new introduction by the translators, along with maps and a chronology.

Second Space

Second Space PDF Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060755245
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning," he writes in "Late Ripeness." Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- "My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands and cities, islands and oceans" -- only to discover a new light that defies the limits of physical sight: "Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in." Second Space is typically capacious in the range of voices, forms, and subjects it embraces. It moves seamlessly from dramatic monologues to theological treatises, from philosophy and history to epigrams, elegies, and metaphysical meditations. It is unified by Milosz's ongoing quest to find the bond linking the things of this world with the order of a "second space," shaped not by necessity, but grace. Second Space invites us to accompany a self-proclaimed "apprentice" on this extraordinary quest. In "Treatise on Theology," Milosz calls himself "a one day's master." He is, of course, far more than this. Second Space reveals an artist peerless both in his capacity to confront the world's suffering and in his eagerness to embrace its joys: "Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. / Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! / How will I live without you, my consoling one! / But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, / And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth."

Between Fire and Sleep

Between Fire and Sleep PDF Author: Jaroslaw Anders
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030015531X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
A collection of essays representing Anders's thinking over several decades, 'Between Fire and Sleep' offers a fresh understanding of modern Polish cultural identity.

Collected Poems

Collected Poems PDF Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Publisher: Ecco
ISBN: 9780880011747
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. No to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. -- Czeslaw Milosz

A Deeper Vision

A Deeper Vision PDF Author: Robert Royal
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 158617990X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging and ambitious volume, Robert Royal, a prominent participant for many years in debates about religion and contemporary life, offers a comprehensive and balanced appraisal of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the twentieth century. The Catholic Church values both Faith and Reason, and Catholicism has given risen to extraordinary ideas and whole schools of remarkable thought, not just in the distant past but throughout the troubled decades of the twentieth century. Royal presents in a single volume a sweeping but readable account of how Catholic thinking developed in philosophy, theology, Scripture studies, culture, literature, and much more in the twentieth century. This involves great figures, recognized as such both inside and outside the Church, such as Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, Joseph Pieper, Edith Stein, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Romano Guardini, Karl Rahner, Henri du Lubac, Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar,Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, George Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Dawson, Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, J. R. R. Tolkien, Czeslaw Milosz, and many more. Royal argues that without rigorous thought, Catholicism – however welcoming and nourishing it might be – would become something like a doctor with a good bedside manner, but who knows little medicine. It has always been the aspiration of the Catholic tradition to unite emotion and intellect, action and contemplation. But unless we know what the tradition has already produced – especially in the work of the great figures of the recent past – we will not be able to answer the challenges that the modern world poses, or even properly recognize the true questions we face. This is a reflective, non-polemical work that brings together various strands of Catholic thought in the twentieth century. A comprehensive guide to the recent past - and the future.

"Down a Spiral Staircase, Never-ending"

Author: Judith Ann Dompkowski
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This meticulous study is a literary biography of Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, contemporary of Tadeusz Borowski and Witold Gombrowicz. Judith Dompkowski closely examines various patterns of motion and unrest in both the early collections of Milosz's poetry (Selected Poems and Bells in Winter) and prose (The Issa Valley and Seizure of Power), indicating how they offer new insights into four crucial areas of his life: his role in history, his exile, his estimations of self, and his role as a poet. The book offers an excellent introduction to the work of this complex and gifted emigré writer.