Is there meaning to life? Is there a purpose to existence? How do poetry and literature affirm life by exposing life's absurdities and the inevitability of death?
In The Affirming Flame: A Poetics of Meaning, Maurice S. Friedman explains the rich tapestry of our humanness as we strive to find meaning in our experiences even in the midst of the evil and death that threaten to put an end to it. This struggle is captured vividly in literary and poetic works that epitomize what Friedman describes as our effort to hold the tension between affirming and withstanding.
This fascinating work incorporates the Hegelian dialectic approach within many literary works as the human discovery of meaning in the particular "lived concrete" the here and now (the thesis) struggles with evil and the absurd (the antithesis) to emerge transformed as a new understanding of "what can be affirmed and what must be withstood . . . anew in each situation." With unmatched range, depth, and clarity, Friedman highlights the works of Blake, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Hesse, Kafka, Sartre, Whitman, Yeats, and many others, as they express this fundamental feature of the human condition.
While philosophy and religion pare the art from life to find an answer to the question of meaning, Friedman boldly asserts that the classic writers used literature objectively to arrive at a more purposeful, and powerful, optimism.
Maurice S Friedman (Solana Beach, CA) is professor emeritus of religious studies, philosophy, and comparative literature at San Diego State University, co-director of the Institute for Diological Psychotherapy in San Diego, and has authored over twenty books of literary criticism and psychology.
Approx 250 pages ISBN 1-57392-259-5
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