Galen Johnson’s Merleu-Ponty’s Poetic of the World, 2019 Subvention Grant Winner

Merleau-Ponty’s Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature, co-authored with Mauro Carbone and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, will be published by Fordham University Press in 2020. Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics have focused on visual art.  This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty’s extensive engagement with major modernist literary authors including Proust, Claudel, and Valéry.  Literature also provokes the questions of expression and its paradoxes, metaphor and figuratives, creation and inspiration, ultimately the nature of literary language and the true, in sum the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetic.