Harold Schweizer – författare

Lingering and its decried equivalents, such as dawdling, idling, loafing, or lolling about, are both shunned and coveted in our culture where time is money and where there is never quite enough of either. Is lingering lazy? Is it childish? Boring? Do poets linger? (Is that why poetry is boring?) Is it therapeutic? Should we linger more? Less? What happens when we linger? Harold Schweizer here examines an experience of time that, though common, usually passes unnoticed. Drawing on a wide range of philosophic and literary texts and examples, On Lingering and Literature exemplifies in its style and accessible argumentation the new genre of post-criticism, and aims to reward anyone interested in slow reading, daydreaming, or resisting our culture of speed and consumption.

Lingering and its decried equivalents, such as dawdling, idling, loafing, or lolling about, are both shunned and coveted in our culture where time is money and where there is never quite enough of either. Is lingering lazy? Is it childish? Boring? Do poets linger? (Is that why poetry is boring?) Is it therapeutic? Should we linger more? Less? What happens when we linger? Harold Schweizer here examines an experience of time that, though common, usually passes unnoticed. Drawing on a wide range of philosophic and literary texts and examples, On Lingering and Literature exemplifies in its style and accessible argumentation the new genre of post-criticism, and aims to reward anyone interested in slow reading, daydreaming, or resisting our culture of speed and consumption.

'This is a quite remarkable book, a pleasure to read. Not only is it clear and informative but also by turns witty, melancholic and insightful. The book is astonishingly erudite, but wears this learning so lightly and so charmingly that it is both easy and gripping to read.' Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of LondonPenelope waits by her loom for Odysseus, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, all of us have to wait: for buses, phone calls and the kettle to boil. But do we know what the checking of one's watch and pacing back and forth is really all about? What is the relationship between waiting and time? Is there an ethics of waiting, or even an art of waiting? Do the internet, online shopping and text messaging mean that waiting has come to an end?On Waiting explores such and similar questions in compelling fashion. Drawing on some fascinating examples, from the philosopher Henri Bergson's musings on a lump of sugar to Kate Croy waiting in Wings of the Dove to the writings of Rilke, Bishop, and Carver, On Waiting examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon from diverse angles in fascinating style. On Waiting is the first book to present a philosophy of waiting. Philosophy/Literature

'This is a quite remarkable book, a pleasure to read. Not only is it clear and informative but also by turns witty, melancholic and insightful. The book is astonishingly erudite, but wears this learning so lightly and so charmingly that it is both easy and gripping to read.' Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of LondonPenelope waits by her loom for Odysseus, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, all of us have to wait: for buses, phone calls and the kettle to boil. But do we know what the checking of one's watch and pacing back and forth is really all about? What is the relationship between waiting and time? Is there an ethics of waiting, or even an art of waiting? Do the internet, online shopping and text messaging mean that waiting has come to an end?On Waiting explores such and similar questions in compelling fashion. Drawing on some fascinating examples, from the philosopher Henri Bergson's musings on a lump of sugar to Kate Croy waiting in Wings of the Dove to the writings of Rilke, Bishop, and Carver, On Waiting examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon from diverse angles in fascinating style. On Waiting is the first book to present a philosophy of waiting. Philosophy/Literature

Over the past decade, psychoanalysis has been a focus of continuing controversy for feminism, and at the centre of debates in the humanities about how we read literature and culture. In these essays, Jacqueline Rose continues her engagement with these issues while arguing for a shift of attention - from an emphasis on sexuality as writing to the place of the unconscious in the furthest reaches of or cultural and political lives. With essays on war, capital punishment and the dispute over seduction in relation to Freud, she opens up the field of psychopolitics. Finally in two extended essays on Melanie Klein and her critics, she suggests that it is time for a radical rereading of Klein's work.

This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study of suffering and literature examines how literature can give expression to the essentially wordless reality of suffering.This book suggests that a listening to suffering may profit from a literary hearing, and vice-versa. It is not only that literature tells of suffering but that suffering may tell us something about the nature of literature.The author examines works and texts that range from medicine to literature, philosophy to photography, prose to poetry, and from Antigone to W.H. Auden. The book presents individual instances, real and literary, of physical and mental wounds and diseases, of pain and death, endured by a little girl in a burn ward, a boy wounded in the war in Bosnia, a nameless Vietnamese woman, Job, Antigone, as well as a number of mostly lyrical elegists: a survivor of the holocaust, a wife bereft of her husband, a daughter bereft of her father. The autonomy of each chapter suggests that experiences of suffering are always incomparable. One must in every instance begin again and enter the scene of suffering on its own terms: the radically individual nature of suffering is prior or past to any theory or set of generalizations.

This is a book of meditative reading. Each of the sixty-one aphoristic entries aims to interpret Rilke’s poetry as a musician might play Debussy’s Clair de lune, to transpose into the key of language the song, the melody, and the refrain of Rilke’s gentle disposition: his recognition of the transience of things; his acknowledgment of the vulnerability and fragility of people, animals, and flowers; his empathy toward those who suffer. The cut flowers gently laid out on the garden table "recovering from their death already begun" in one of theSonnets to Orpheus form a thread now visible now faint through most of this book. And because of the flowers, the concept of gentleness forms another thread, and because of gentleness, hands—agents of gentleness throughout Rilke’s poetry—enfold these pages. The German word leise (gentle, tender, quiet) weaves the first thread; the second is woven by flowers, then by girls’ hands, then by angels, the beloved, the poor, the dying and the dead, animals, birds, dogs, fountains, things, vanishings. The purpose of this essay is to experience and to examine gentleness, how it shapes and pervades Rilke’s work, how his poetry might gently inspire us to become more gentle people.

This is a book of meditative reading. Each of the sixty-one aphoristic entries aims to interpret Rilke’s poetry as a musician might play Debussy’s Clair de lune, to transpose into the key of language the song, the melody, and the refrain of Rilke’s gentle disposition: his recognition of the transience of things; his acknowledgment of the vulnerability and fragility of people, animals, and flowers; his empathy toward those who suffer. The cut flowers gently laid out on the garden table "recovering from their death already begun" in one of theSonnets to Orpheus form a thread now visible now faint through most of this book. And because of the flowers, the concept of gentleness forms another thread, and because of gentleness, hands—agents of gentleness throughout Rilke’s poetry—enfold these pages. The German word leise (gentle, tender, quiet) weaves the first thread; the second is woven by flowers, then by girls’ hands, then by angels, the beloved, the poor, the dying and the dead, animals, birds, dogs, fountains, things, vanishings. The purpose of this essay is to experience and to examine gentleness, how it shapes and pervades Rilke’s work, how his poetry might gently inspire us to become more gentle people.

Rarity is a quality by which things flowers, leaves, light, sound fleetingly appear and disappear, leaving in their wake a resonance of something we just thought we had glimpsed. Each of the nine chapters in this book pursues such intimations of rarity in poetic ideas, images, and silences.