Unforced flourishing : understanding Jaan Kaplinski / Thomas Salumets.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Salumets, Thomas, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kaplinski, Jaan, 1941-2021.

Kaplinski, Jaan.

Kaplinski, Jaan, 1941-2021--Criticism and interpretation.

Kaplinski, Jaan, 1941-.

Poets, Estonian--20th century--Biography.

Poets, Estonian.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Biographies.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xiv, 239 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Are we ill-suited for this world? Among Europe's major contemporary poets, Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski offers a rare vision of human advancement and fulfillment: the less we intervene the more we nourish. But how then can we remain involved in what evolves of its own accord? How can we move away from a life forged by human design towards a quietly attentive yet spontaneous responsiveness? In Unforced Flourishing, Thomas Salumets seeks access to Kaplinski's life and work and rinds a path to the signature of his thinking. He uncovers a man who craves human closeness that few, if any, can provide, a writer drawn towards wordless communication in a world of words, signs, and symbols, who yearns for the sacred in secular times, and who detects more richness in nature than in the human imagination. Salumets describes Kaplinski as an intellectual attracted to a contrarian sense of self, art, and culture, who searches for his homeland's mystical connections at a time when Estonia firmly aligns with values and modes of thought vastly different from his own. What emerges is a mentality firmly rooted in the belief that the greatest risk to human fulfillment results from human beings themselves. The first major study in English of one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures, Unforced Flourishing details Kaplinski's embrace of that which is undifferentiated, intuitive, non-calculative, and natural in the modern world. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Troubled Sage 15

2 Don't Touch that Rock, Sisyphus 25

3 The Medium Is Not the Message 41

4 Body Signals 67

5 Desire for Dependence 87

6 Beyond Dissidence 101

7 Self-colonization 131

8 The Art of Unforced Flourishing 149.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Salumets, Thomas, author. Unforced flourishing.

ISBN:

9780773543713

0773543716

9780773543720

0773543724

OCLC:

864505032