Table of Contents

Tractatus Brevis.- The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the Onto-Poiesis of Culture: The Life-Significance of Literature.- I The Dialectic of the Passions and the Elemental Passions in Literature - surveying the foundations -.- Descartes and Hobbes on the Passions.- Beware of the Beasts! Spinoza and the Elemental Passions in German Literature: Lessing, Goethe, Stifter.- Speakable and Unspeakable Passions in English Neoclassical and Romantic Poetry.- Desire: An Elemental Passion in Hegel's Phenomenology.- German Expressionism and the Human Passions.- II The Sublime, an Essential Factor in the Elemental Passions of the Soul.- Longinus' On the Sublime and the Role of the Creative Imagination.- The Passion of Finitude and Poetic Creation: On Pedro Salinas's El Contemplado.- Juilo Cortazar: La pasion de ser y del ser.- Nostalgia and the Child Topoi: Metaphors of Disruption and Transcendence in the Work of Joseph Brodsky, Marc Chagall and Andrei Tarkovsky.- Apollonian Eros and the Fruits of Failure in the Poetic Pursuit of Being: Notes on the Rape of Daphne.- III Elemental Passions of the Soul: Love and Death.- A Tragic Phenomenon: Aspects of Love and Hate in Racine's Theater.- "The Gulf of the Soul": Melville's Pierre and the Representation of Aesthetic Failure.- Love and Will in The Awakening.- The Passionate Self-Destruction of Hester Prynne.- Death, and the Elemental Passion of the Soul: An Ancient Philosophical Thesis, with Poetic Counterpoint.- Erotic Modes of Discourse: The Union of Mythos and Dialectic in Plato's Phaedrus.- The Plight of the Couple in Beckett's All Strange A way.- Narration and the Face of Anxiety in Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle".- IV The Passional Expansion of the Soul: Mind, Body, Space, Being.- Czeslaw Milosz's Passion for "Place": Soul's Knowing under "The Wormwood Star".- L'espace poetique - pour une analogie phenomenologique sans entrave (Bachelard et Calinescu).- The Plight of the Siamese Twin: Mind, Body, and Value in John Barth's "Petition".- Hecuba's Grief, Polydorus' Corpse, and the Transference of Perspective.- Elemental Substances and Their Drama in the Mayan Imagination as Perceived in Popol Vuh.- Fusion of Feeling and Nature in Wordsworthian and Classical Chinese Poetry.- V The Inward Recesses of the Passional Soul.- The Passion of Apprehension: The Soul's Activity as the Agent Intellect in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.- Nietzsche and Creative Passion in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.- Obsessive Passion: A Structuring Motif in Flaubert's Work.- Boundaries: The Primal Force and Human Face of Evil.- Poe's "Loss of Breath" and the Problem of Writing.- Milan Kundera's Polyphonic Compositions: Appropriations or Disseminations?.- The Semiotics of Self-Revelation in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.- From Passion to Self-Reflexivity: A Holistic Approach to Consciousness and Literature.- The Passions Observed: The Visionary Poetics of Ezra Pound.- Is Life in Literature a Fiction?.- Closure.- Finitude, Infinitude and the Imago Dei in Catherine of Siena and Descartes.- Index of Names.