Among the multiple, subliminal passions that inspire our life in innumerable ways, literature shows us one that seems to play a particularly penetrating role in human concerns. This passion, which Tymieniecka calls an esoteric passion', finds its projection and crystallization in space: it is *the esoteric passion for space*. This subliminal passion, investigated through literature, allows the philosopher to reach beneath the fallacious separations of nature, humanness and the cultural world, restoring the wholeness of experience that has become lost in the artificial one-sidedness of contemporary approaches, confined to language as they are. The elemental passion for place is investigated here in the literary fruits of creative imagination. Unravelled from the very depths of the primogenital, onto-poietic unfolding of life, the passion for place is revealed as projecting into the flux of life: it is a station' of life-significance. This collection presents papers from two conferences of the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature held in Cambridge, MA in 1993/4.

Inhalt

The Theme: The Esoteric Passion for Place. Part I: The Esoteric Passion for Place: Caverns, Wilderness, Mysteries, No-Place. The Representation of Limbo in Medieval Drama; J.S. Smith. Robert Frost's Design' as Deconstruction of Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Rhodora'; B. Ross. The Idea of the Wilderness in the English Renaissance; D.E. Litt. In Caverns and Caves with Saul Bellow and Walker Percy; B. Prochaska. Australia and the Mysterious Orient' in C.J. Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously; M. Haltof. Part II: Place of the Sublime and of the Sacred. Racine's Berenice: Profane and Sacred Spaces and Places; M. Kronegger. The Place of the Sublime; E.S. Casey. Proust's Sacred Grove: A Study in Spatial Poetics; B.S. Watson. Part III: Vital Roots, Identity, Home, Patria. Home: A Phenomenological Approach; M. Kule. When I Came Home - I Did Not Come Home'. The Antinomies of the Experience of German and Austrian Exiles 1993-1945 and Beyond; C. Eykman. Philippe de Mézières' Sense of Patria; J.B. Williamson. The Poetics of Place; L. Kimmel. Part IV: Idea and the Architecture of the Poetic Space. The Architecture of Postmodern Ontology: Heidegger and Beckett; H.H. Rudnick. Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons: From Idea to Idealism; R. Gray. Evidence in the Mental Space; M. Stafecka. Part V: Place in Creative Transformation. The Secret Place of Literary Creaivity in John Fowles' Daniel Martin: A Phenomenological Perspective; R.J. Wilson. Visva-Bharati Santiniketan: Outcome and Outgrowth of Tagore's Creative Passion; S. Ray. Asolo, theCreative Work of Memory; R.L. Brooks. Part VI: The Inward Landscapes. Journey through Anxiety: The Landscape Poetry of Hsieh Ling-yün; L. Sundararajan. The Place of Doubt in Kierkegaard; J. Izzi. Pale Maids and Bachelor's Buttons: Inverted Similitude' in Melville's Tartarus'; S. Abdoo.