On Dwelling

Dennis E. Skocz holds a PhD in philosophy from Duquesne University and works at the U.S. State Department in Washington D.C.

• IntroductionPart I. Dwelling: The Testimony of PoetsChapter 1: Prairie and City: The Poetry of Carl SandburgChapter 2. Property and the Land: Xenophon and FrostChapter 3. Nature and Democracy: Whitman’s New World MetaphysicsPart II. Phenomenologies of PlaceChapter 4. Property and Home: Mine and ThineChapter 5. On the Road with Herodotus: The Strange, the Familiar, and the EarthboundChapter 6. Nature and the WildPart III. The Politics of Place and DisplacementChapter 7. The Perils of Comfortable Estrangement: A Micro-Phenomenology Chapter 8. Whose Land Is It Anyway? Xenophobe and Alien FoeChapter 9. Wall Street and Main Street in Schutzian Perspective Part IV. The “Big Picture”: A Whole-Earth ViewChapter 10. From Market Place to “Marketspace”Chapter 11. Body-Mapping and the AnthropoceneChapter 12. Earthling or Cosmopolitan? The Limits and Prospects of Interlocution

Dennis Skocz's On Dwelling: Poetry, Place, and Politics demonstrates the diverse resources of phenomenology to address a broad range of issues. Poetic dwelling, exhibited in the work of Sandburg, Frost, Xenophon, and Whitman, bestows meaning on underlying notions of space. Skocz intriguingly explores how Whitman’s poetry can undo the polarizations at the time of the United States Civil War by highlighting the shared beauty of the national landscape. Skocz reveals phenomenology’s spatial underpinnings, with Husserlian localized ownness opening to intersubjectivity, with Herodotus appreciating others in their spatial context, and with humanity being engaged with nature as an independent dialogic partner. Skocz analyzes xenophobia, which manifests the tension between localized and the abstract—which the Schutzian phenomenology of Consociates and Contemporaries illuminates; and he situates within this same tension the contrasts between Main Street and Wall Street. This polarity between the local and universal overflows into discussions of globalization and the contrasts between earthly and the cosmopolitan, both of which call for interlocution between representative of the poles at odds with each other. Besides showing the richness of phenomenology, this book displays remarkable multidisciplinary scope, encompassing philosophy, poetry, history, social science, economics, and ethics in a comprehensive synthesis