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.

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Inhalt
The Representation of Limbo in Medieval Drama.- Robert Frost's Design as Deconstruction of Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Rhodora.- The Idea of the Wilderness in the English Renaissance.- In Caverns and Caves with Saul Bellow and Walker Percy.- Australia and the Mysterious Orient in C.J. Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously.- Racine's Berenice: Profane and Sacred Spaces and Places.- The Place of the Sublime.- Proust's Sacred Grove: A Study in Spatial Poetics.- Home: A Phenomenological Approach.- When I Came Home I Did Not Come Home. The Antinomies of the Experience of German and Austrian Exiles 19331945 and Beyond.- Philippe de Mézières' Sense of Patria.- The Poetics of Place.- The Architecture of Postmodern Ontology: Heidegger and Beckett.- Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons: From Idea to Idealism.- Evidence in the Mental Space.- The Secret Place of Literary Creativity in John Fowles's Daniel Martin: A Phenomenological Perspective.- Visva-Bharati Santiniketan: Outcome and Outgrowth of Tagore's Creative Passion.- Asolo, the Creative Work of Memory.- Journey through Anxiety: The Landscape Poetry of Hsieh Ling-yün.- The Place of Doubt in Kierkegaard.- Pale Maids and Bachelor's Buttons: Inverted Similitude in Melville's Tartarus.- Heidegger and the Poetic Human Dwelling.- Index of names.