Overview

""A Whole, A Fragment"" presents a highly personal, experimental work by a great American social theorist, Kurt H. Wolff. In this extended prose poem - a text that reads as much as a work of art as important scholarship - Wolff has created a work of phenomenology that goes far beyond the typical methods of empirical social science to embrace field work as an extraordinary openness to being. Wolff employs a radical hermeneutical method in exploring his own humanity, taking key experiences, dreams and ideas, and continually revisiting them from different perspectives throughout the text in order to describe the self-construction of his life. Including personal letters to Wolff from Hannah Arendt and Hermann Bloch, the book portrays a fertile mind's reckoning with pre-phenomenal being in a way that dances between the realms of the intellectual consideration and the surrender of will to the intoxication of lived experience.

Full Product Details

9780739103906

Table of Contents

Reviews

A hermeneutic exploration of writing and meaning, describing and feeling, surrendering and catching-it is both poetically sensitive and evocative. -- George Psathas, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Boston University

A hermeneutic exploration of writing and meaning, describing and feeling, surrendering and catching--it is both poetically sensitive and evocative.--Psathas, George

A hermeneutic exploration of writing and meaning, describing and feeling, surrendering and catching it is both poetically sensitive and evocative.--Psathas, George

Author Information

Kurt H. Wolff is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Brandeis University. A prolific author of many books and essays, he is perhaps best known as a translator of the work of Georg Simmel and Karl Mannheim.

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