Emily Dickinson and the problem of others
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Emily Dickinson and the problem of others
University of Massachusetts Press, 1984
Available at 41 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. [119]-128
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this well-crafted study, Christopher E. G. Benfey seeks to demonstrate the depth and coherence of Dickinson's thinking. He is concerned primarily with Dickinson's relation to skepticism, and he shows how her poems provide responses to the claim that we do not have access to the natural world or to other people. While granting the truth of skepticism--that we cannot know with certainty that the world exist, or exists as we experience it--Dickinson suggests that our ties with the world are deeper and more intimate than the ties of knowledge. One of her key terms for this intimacy is nearness, and her poems give sustained attention to the problems encountered in our seeking intimacy with other people. Benfey also examines the complex place of privacy in Dckinson's work, in terms of both the writing and the reading of her poems. By looking at the beginnings of privacy law, early sociological attempts to define privacy, theories of poetry that stress privacy, and more recent philosophical discussions of privacy, he is able to provide a useful historical context for reading Dickinson's poetry. Benfey differs from previous critics in his willingness to accord Dickinson's poetry a philosophical depth and ambition that we are discovering in the writing of Emerson and Thoreau.
by "Nielsen BookData"