Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language

by Ronald Schleifer

Overview

Taking as his point of departure Norbert Weiner’s statement that information is basic to understanding materialism in our era, Ronald Schleifer shows how discoveries of modern physics have altered conceptions of matter and energy and the ways in which both information theory and the study of literature can enrich these conceptions. Expanding the reductive notion of “the material” as simply matter and energy, he formulates a new, more inclusive idea of materialism.

Schleifer’s project attempts to bridge the divisions between the humanities and the sciences and to create a nonreductive materialism for the information age. He presents a materialistic account of human bodily experience by delving into language and literature that powerfully represents our faces, voices, hands, and pain. For example, he examines the material resources of poetic “literariness” as it is revealed in the condition of Tourette’s syndrome. Schleifer also investigates gestures of the hand in the formation of sociality, and he studies pain as both a physiological and phenomenological experience.

This ambitious work explores physiological analyses, evolutionary explanations, and semiotic descriptions of materialism to reveal how aspects of physical existence discover meaning in experience. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816644681
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	07/13/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Professor of English and adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Oklahoma.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Materialist Literature xiii

1 Intangible Materialism 1

2 The Faces of Consilience: Levels of Understanding and the Negative Science of Semiotics 35

3 Material Voices: Tourette Syndrome, Neurobiology, and the Affect of Poetry 71

4 The History of the Hand: Peirce's Index, Attention, and the Power of Narrative 97

5 Pain, Memory, and Religious Suffering: Materiality and the Subject of Poetry 127

Notes 171

Bibliography 207

Index 221