Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis

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University of California Press, 1 de set. de 2023 - 250 páginas
Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books Life Against Death and Love's Body, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war . . . that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and Finnegan's Wake. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death.

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Conteúdo

Apocalypse The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind
1
Daphne or Metamorphosis
8
My Georgics A Palinode in Praise of Work
23
Metamorphoses II Actaeon
31
The Prophetic Tradition
46
The Apocalypse of Islam
69
Philosophy and Prophecy Spinozas Hermeneutics
95
The Turn to Spinoza
117
Metamorphoses III The Divine Narcissus
142
Revisioning Historical Identities
158
Dionysus in 1990
179
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Página 39 - After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.
Página 35 - To-day, my lord of Amiens and myself Did steal behind him, as he lay along Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this wood...
Página 14 - When we have run our passions' heat Love hither makes his best retreat: The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race: Apollo hunted Daphne so Only that she might laurel grow; And Pan did after Syrinx speed Not as a nymph, but for a reed.
Página 11 - Fair youth , beneath the trees , thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;' Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve ; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love , and she be fair ! Ah, happy, happy boughs!
Página 49 - Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner : this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.
Página 43 - Midst others of less note came one frail form, A phantom among men, companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell.
Página 28 - Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind...
Página 36 - Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us, that are squires of the night's body, be called thieves of the day's beauty : let us be — Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon : And let men say, we be men of good government; being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we — steal.
Página 171 - So they loved, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none; Number there in love was slain.
Página 67 - The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM...

Sobre o autor (2023)

Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) was Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His Love's Body (1966) is available from University of California Press in paperback.

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