Books by "Robert Pogue Harrison"
3 books found
The dramas of Eugene O'Neill--often called America's first "serious" playwright--exhibit an imagining of the natural world that enlivens the plays and marks the boundaries of the characters' fates. O'Neill's figures move within purposefully animated natural environments--ocean, dense forest, desert plains, the rocky soil of New England. This new approach to O'Neill's dramas explores these ecological settings as crucial to his characters' ability to carry out their conscious and unconscious desires. O'Neill's career is covered, from his youthful one-acts, to the middle years experimental dramas, to the mature tragedies of his late period. Special attention is paid to the connection of ecology and theological quest, and to O'Neill's persistent evocation of an exotic, natural "other." Combining an ecocritical approach with an examination of Classical and philosophical influences on the playwright's creative process, the author reveals a new, less hermetic O'Neill.
Alvar Aalto once argued that what mattered in architecture wasn’t what a building looks like on the day it opens but what it is like to live inside it thirty years later. In this book, architect and critic Robert McCarter persuasively argues that interior spatial experience is the necessary starting point for design, and the quality of that experience is the only appropriate means of evaluating a work after it has been built. McCarter reveals that we can’t really know a piece of architecture without inhabiting its spaces, and we need to counter our contemporary obsession with exterior views and forms with a renewed appreciation for interiors. He explores how interior space has been integral to the development of modern architecture from the late 1800s to today, and he examines how architects have engaged interior space and its experiences in their design processes, fundamentally transforming traditional approaches to composition. Eloquently placing us within a host of interior spaces, he opens up new ways of thinking about architecture and what its goals are and should be.
Exploring the connections between nature and culture, this volume discusses the works of three female American poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and Amy Clampitt (1920-1994). Though only Bradstreet was born outside North America, each poet is shown to grapple with the ways that European civilization was transformed on the new continent. The author's analysis highlights the interconnected themes of travel, geography, cartography and wildness.