The Poetry of John Tyndall

John Tyndall (c.1822–1893) is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age. He discovered the physical basis of the greenhouse effect, explained why the sky is blue, and spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Few people were aware that he also wrote poetry. The Poetry of John Tyndall contains his 76 extant poems, the majority of which have not been transcribed or published before, and are succinctly annotated in a style similar to that used for the letters published in The Correspondence of John Tyndall. The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which was written by the three editors together as a multidisciplinary analysis. The essay aims to facilitate readings by a range of people interested in the history of Victorian science and of Victorian science and literature. It explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, the essay addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the nature and purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth centur

The Poetry of John Tyndall

John Tyndall (c.1822–1893) is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age. He discovered the physical basis of the greenhouse effect, explained why the sky is blue, and spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Few people were aware that he also wrote poetry. The Poetry of John Tyndall contains his 76 extant poems, the majority of which have not been transcribed or published before, and are succinctly annotated in a style similar to that used for the letters published in The Correspondence of John Tyndall. The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which was written by the three editors together as a multidisciplinary analysis. The essay aims to facilitate readings by a range of people interested in the history of Victorian science and of Victorian science and literature. It explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, the essay addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the nature and purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth centur

Spatial Poetics, Proprioception and Caring for Country in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems

This thesis looks at the significance of space and place within Charles Olson’s poetics of the archaic postmodern, as a means of clearing a field within which a poetics of custodianship is enunciated. It applies and extends the concept of “nomadology”, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to argue that Olson’s protagonist in The Maximus Poems can be seen as an exemplification of Pierre Joris’ concept of “a nomad poetics”. Olson’s triad of “topos, typos and tropos” helps structure the thesis and provides a means to approach and explain the Maximus gestalt as human geography: an organic entity arising from and embodying space in order to redefine place. This poesis needs a fully articulated sense of being and a poetics that can encompass human activity in a myriad of dimensions: physics and metaphysics, languages, images and sounds that express a full, corporal sense of the myths and history that Maximus embodies and re-enacts to ensure the survival of a liminal polis, or community of attentions. A specific scene of reading in this respect is Aboriginal Australia, as the thesis expands on tropes that connect ancient cultures to postmodern poetic concerns, and demonstrates that Olson’s ultimate aim is akin to that of recreating country itself. It should be noted that the recreation of country and ownership of the ground upon which Olson’s poetry and poetics are enacted remain the preserve of the original owners, and that his sense of recreation and expansion of a poetic field is not to be conflated with a desire for appropriation, while acknowledging that these operations are inevitably taking place in colonised locations. The thesis concludes by proposing that with due respect to these considerations, the Maximus project remains of vital relevance to a twenty-first century, international readership

Meanwhile/becoming: a postphenomenological position exploring vision and visuality in landscape photography

Meanwhile/Becoming is a practice-led research project that includes a written thesis and a final exhibition of work investigating methods of creating photographs that do not conform to the Cartesian perspective prevalent in photographs taken with a standard format camera. The research explores the opportunity of examining a visual space other than that offered by the standard single lens reflex camera through manipulation of the pinhole camera. The photographic series that constitutes Meanwhile/Becoming uses processes that produce what the research describes as a reinterpretation of phenomenology, postphenomenology and posthumanism through photographic practice; where the photographs are expressive of the what and how humans see and the lived experience of the situated perspectives of a specific space. The research question reflects and critiques this position asking, if multiple viewpoints are presented within a single photograph, does the resulting photograph incorporate the human experience of, relation to and presence in, the world? Once expressed within this framework, the research questions if these multiple viewpoints more closely represent the physiology of how humans see. The concept of the meanwhile is taken as the timespace between events, examining the “meanwhile” through the landscape of the domestic garden. “Becoming” refers to “the movement between events”, an interval between events that allows the processes of creativity and change through differentiation and duration, identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004) and Henri Bergson (1911). Together, my practice and thesis interrogate the restricted boundaries of the Cartesian model of constructed visual space through the apparatus of a unique purpose-built multiple pinhole camera. This apparatus mediates between me and the world, enabling me to develop a new method of making photographs that considers space/place and how we respond to it both physically and perceptually

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Tales of Research Misconduct: A Lacanian Diagnostics of Integrity Challenges in Science Novels

research integrity; scientific misconduct; science novels; Lacanian psychoanalysis; continental philosophy; falsification; plagiarism; ethic

Nihilism Inc.: Environmental Destruction and the Metaphysics of Sustainability

The spectre of global environmental destruction is before us, the legacy of the expansion and domination of the world by European civilization. Not even the threat to the continued existence of humanity is enough to move the members of this civilization to alter its trajectory. And Marxism, which had held out the possibility of creating a new social order, has been swept from the historical stage by the failure of Eastern European communism. Nihilism Inc. is an attempt to overcome this crisis. Examining the relationship between metaphysical assumptions, ideas, social practices, institutions and economic processes in the formation and evolution of European civilization, it offers a genealogy of its current nihilism. The theory and practice of Marxism are analysed to show why the Soviet Union proved even more environmentally destructive and even less responsive to the environmental crisis than the West. These analyses reveal the need for a radical cultural transformation, a transformation which can only be effected on the foundation of a new metaphysics. The final part of this work offers the required metaphysics, clearing the way for the creation of an environmentally sustainable civilization