Perceiving-Thinking-Writing: Merleau-Ponty and Literature

Donald Wesling is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at University of California San Diego. He has published on Wordsworth, John Muir, Edward Dorn, and Bakhtin; on rhyme, meter, and avant-garde prosody; and on how voice and emotion get into writing. His 2019 book on Animal Perception and Literary Language expanded his concerns to question how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. This new book, on the one-in-another of perceiving-thinking-writing, develops his study on how perceptual content gets into pigment and words. Through the metaphor of interference, this book also advances an original argument on how literature and philosophy relate to each other.