Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
13
result(s) for
"Emptiness (Philosophy) in literature."
Sort by:
The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place
From the moment the first English-speaking explorers and settlers arrived on the North American continent, many have described its various locations and environments as empty. Indeed, much of American national history and culture is bound up with the idea that parts of the landscape are empty and thus open for colonization, settlement, economic improvement, claim staking, taming, civilizing, cultivating, and the exploitation of resources. In turn, most Euro-American nonfiction written about the landscape has treated it either as an object to be acted upon by the author or an empty space, unspoiled by human contamination, to which the solitary individual goes to be refreshed and rejuvenated.InThe Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place, Wendy Harding identifies an important recent development in the literature of place that corrects the misperceptions resulting from these tropes. Works by Rick Bass, Charles Bowden, Ellen Meloy, Jonathan Raban, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Sullivan move away from the tradition of nature writing, with its emphasis on the solitary individual communing with nature in uninhabited places, to recognize the interactions of human and other-than-human presences in the land. In different ways, all six writers reveal a more historically complex relationship between Americans and their environments. In this new literature of place, writers revisit abandoned, threatened, or damaged sites that were once represented as devoid of human presence and dig deeper to reveal that they are in fact full of the signs of human activity. These writers are interested in the role of social, political, and cultural relationships and the traces they leave on the landscape.Throughout her exploration, Harding adopts a transdisciplinary perspective that draws on the theories of geographers, historians, sociologists, and philosophers to understand the reasons for the enduring perception of emptiness in the American landscape and how this new literature of place works with and against these ideas. She reminds us that by understanding and integrating human impacts into accounts of the landscape, we are better equipped to fully reckon with the natural and cultural crisis that engulfs all landscapes today.
eBook
WILLOW COURT
IN THE HEART of the sleepy Tasmanian town of New Norfolk, half an hour's drive out of Hobart, lies the Willow Court Precinct. As you wander down the tree-lined streets of the township, the crumbling buildings of Willow Court come slowly into view. On the banks of the Lachlan River, right next door to the new supermarket complex with its perfectly rendered frontage, shiny signs and sparkling clean windows, sit three of the saddest, loneliest-looking buildings you're ever likely to see.
Magazine Article
Emptiness Is to Womanism as Purple Is to Lavender: Buddhist Womanism Revisited in Alice Walker’s Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart
This paper argues that the philosophy of Buddhist emptiness not only finds expression in Alice Walker’s Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart with its two most salient manifestationsdependent origination and impermanence, but is applied to alleviate suffering in the poetry, and the two approaches the poetry collection are (1) to recognize emptiness in times of crisis and (2) to cultivate bodhicitta through using emptiness to extend loving kindness to all beings. Furthermore, it is argued that emptiness enriches Buddhist womanism by strengthening its theoretical underpinnings, redirecting the focus from practice to cognitive transformation, and harmonizing the priorities of individual and communal wellbeing.
Journal Article
Poetics of Emptiness
The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on \"transpacific Buddhist poetics,\" while the second maps the less well-known terrain of \"transpacific Daoist poetics.\" In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explores Ernest Fenollosa's \"The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry\" as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo (\"New Buddhism\"). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of \"emptiness\" in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose \"transpacific Daoist poetics\" has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.
eBook
Revisiting Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartani
In this paper, I attempt (1) a further elucidation and defense of some of the things I said in my article “Critical Reflections on Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī” (Sharma in Nagoya Stud Indian Cult Buddh 29:1–38, 2011) and (2) a response to Professor Claus Oetke’s criticisms (J Indian Philos 40(4):371–394, 2012) of “a number of views which have been propagated” by me in my article. Although some additional issues have been raised, broadly, the themes addressed here are the same three as were the object of my investigation in that paper: namely, Nāgārjuna’s emptiness (svabhāva–śūnyatā) doctrine; his denial that he has any thesis to advance or buttress; and his onslaught on the pramāṇa theory. Toward the end I argue that if I understand Nāgārjuna correctly, then what that thinker ends up providing is a criterion, not of reality, but of unreality, and that this stance, speaking philosophically, is tantamount to nihilism.
Journal Article
Ressonâncias indizíveis. O vazio em \Uma menina está perdida no seu século à procura do pai\
Procura-se demonstrar neste estudo que há formas de silêncio e de vazio presentes em Uma Menina Está Perdida no seu Século à Procura do Pai, de Gonçalo M. Tavares, que podem ‘solucionar’ a crise da palavra e dizer o indizível. Para a consecução deste estudo, elege-se o encontro de Marius com Moebius e, a partir da leitura e análise dessa passagem, inicia-se um diálogo com as teorizações de Lauro José Siqueira Baldini (2017), Santiago Kovadloff (2003, 2014), David Le Breton (1999, 2013), Renato Lessa (2014), e George Steiner (1988), entre outros autores, para tentar compreender como o vazio nesse romance possibilita dizer o indizível.
Journal Article
Poetics of Emptiness
The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on \"transpacific Buddhist poetics,\" while the second maps the less well-known terrain of \"transpacific Daoist poetics.\" In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explores Ernest Fenollosa's \"The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry\" as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo (\"New Buddhism\"). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of \"emptiness\" in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose \"transpacific Daoist poetics\" has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.
eBook
In Defense of His Guru: Dratsepa's Rebuttal to the Challenges Articulated by the Proponents of the Other-Emptiness Doctrine
The buddha-nature literature has a significant place within the Indian Mahāyāna tradition and Tibetan Buddhism. While it is usually included in the so-called Last Wheel of the Buddha's teachings, many Tibetan thinkers began to cast doubts about the textual significance of buddha-nature discourse in fourteenth-century Tibet. In this article, I will examine one particular case where there is apparent tension between multiple Tibetan masters over the importance of buddha-nature teachings. This paper primarily analyzes Dratsepa's commentary to the Ornament (mdzes rgyan) written by his teacher, Buton. Dratsepa construes the Ornament as a work critiquing Dolpopa's interpretation of the buddha-nature literature. He levels a barrage of criticisms against Dolpopa by referring to Indian śāstras and sūtras that are equally important to both of them, and also by tracing his own assessment of the tathāgata-essence teachings to early Tibetan scholars. In contradistinction to Dolpopa's claims, Dratsepa offers several nuanced readings of the buddha-nature literature and complicates the notion of what it means to have tathāgata-essence, what a definitive or provisional meaning entails, and the relationship between the Middle Wheel and the Last Wheel teachings. In brief, Dratsepa's text sheds light on one of the earliest discourses on the tension between self-emptiness and other-emptiness presentations.
Journal Article
Language, Understanding and Reality: A Study of Their Relation in a Foundational Indian Metaphysical Debate
This paper engages with Johaness Bronkhorst's recognition of a \"correspondence principle\" as an underlying assumption of Nāgārjuna's thought. Bronkhorst believes that this assumption was shared by most Indian thinkers of Nāgārjuna's day, and that it stimulated a broad and fascinating attempt to cope with Nāgārjuna's arguments so that the principle of correspondence may be maintained in light of his forceful critique of reality. For Bronkhorst, the principle refers to the relation between the words of a sentence and the realities they are meant to convey. While I accept this basic intuition of correspondence, this paper argues that a finer understanding of the principle can be offered. In light of a set of verses from Nāgārjuna's Sūnyatāsaptati (45-57), it is maintained that for Nāgārjuna, the deeper level of correspondence involves a structural identity he envisions between understanding and reality. Here Nāgārjuna claims that in order for things to exist, a conceptual definition of their nature must be available; in order for there to be a real world and reliable knowledge, a svabhāva of things must be perceived and accounted for. Svabhāva is thus reflected as a knowable essence. Thus, Nāgārjuna's arguments attacks the accountability of both concepts and things, a position which leaves us with nothing more than mistaken forms of understanding as the reality of the empty. This markedly metaphysical approach is next analyzed in light of the debate Nāgārjuna conducts with a Nyāya interlocutor in his Vigrahavyāvartanī. The correspondence principle is here used to highlight the metaphysical aspect of the debate and to point out the ontological vision of Nāgārjuna's theory of emptiness. In the analysis of the Vigrahavyāvartanī it becomes clear that the discussion revolves around a foundational metaphysical deliberation regarding the reality or unreality of svabhāva. In this dispute, Nāgārjuna fails to answer the most crucial point raised by his opponent—what is that he defines as empty?
Journal Article