Inside Selfhood And History
Selfhood and History is a sequence of ten interrelated volumes by the American poet and philosopher Frederic Will. The titles contained therein are the culmination of work undertaken throughout the last ten years.
It is hard to extract the core from these daring and intimate texts of philosophies as aspect. Writing clearly emerges throughout as the fundamental human act, which marks both the creation of history and a step into history. While writing is itself a thing, and deals with things in the world - what it finds in history - it requires illumination from the noosphere, the sphere of ideation and thought (Platonism is an effort to plot this geography) to illuminate trends in human time. The inside of this entire drama, by which writing opens history to us, is selfhood, the dynamic of consciousness from which writing springs. Selfhood is as everyday as the kitchen sink - it’s us, after all, it’s us as increments to history, mirrors of history - yet from within itself selfhood creates infinite time-space, the Hindu kalpa, or the Greek apeiron, in which the creation of history and the death of history nestle. What is and what will be thus inter-create across the opening powers of writing, which is just us starting out with our consciousness and our signs, to help with the job of giving reality a name.
The books in Will’s decalogy all wrestle with the sweaty problem of writing or of constructing a world through writing. Ryerson and The Almanach de Gotha of Time and Downloading The Poetic Self dare an auto-critique which emerges directly out of a writing, or display of writings, by the author. Will has elsewhere used a pseudonym, Frank Shynnagh, to give him a verbal purchase on his own work: cf. the strategies in the earlier books Frederic Will’s Travel Writings: A Design of the World (2008) and Frederic Will’s Short Fiction: Literature as Social Critique (2009). Historia: Profiles of the Historical Impulse and Essays on the Condition of Inwardness: Pieces of Otherness both dwell on the drama of creating inner space in which to let the mind construct its private geographies. The Modernist Impulse and a Contemporary Opus: Replaced by Writing concerns itself with the transformation of reality through writing, and the self as vehicle of that transformation. The Everyday: essays on noticing the unnoticeable biopsies the slime out of which writing emerges. We feel the squeeze of existence around trapped psyche, and the tentacles psyche extrudes through language into a light and air in which it can flourish.
Frederic Will has published fifty-six books, ranging from cultural history, philosophy, poetry, translation, and fiction to travel narrative, and is currently completing a new sequence of ten interrelated volumes on the character of everyday existence. He has received six Fulbright Grants from the United States Government and multi-year support from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his journal of world poetry in translation, Micromegas, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bollingen Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was a founding editor, with William Arrowsmith, Donald Carne-Ross, and John Sullivan, of the journal of Classical culture, Arion. His poetry has received praise in the UK; the TLS has described his poetic work as “accomplished and insightful,” and his criticism as “brilliant.” His lifetime literary papers are collected in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, USA.
"These are wisdom texts, counterintuitive to today's craving for managed knowledge. A lifetime's thinking, learning from every conjunctural change, pondering the questions that need to be asked and answered, again and again—for all that underlies mere politics."
Gayatri Spivak
University Professor, Columbia University; founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
"As a traveller of geographies and philosophies, Will’s way has always been to tell his story as though he were really living it. Here is the penetration of philosophy by poetry and of poetry by philosophy—the fox’s way—as he leaps on Pegasus and escapes going to ground."
David Hamilton
Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa; Editor, The Iowa Review
"Don DeLillo reminds us that fiction exists to rescue history from its confusions. The work of Fred Will reminds us that autobiography, criticism and poetry (as well as output that does away with all of these categories) exist to rescue the self from its confusions—whether sets of facts, or social or political context. Like the rose in the poem of another Federico (Garcia Lorca), the self in Will's stunningly varied work is always "searching for something else", always on the way to transforming itself through language. We are fortunate to have this extensive record of his quest."
Frank Menchaca
SAE International
"Fred Will is one of our most restlessly innovative minds, writers of minds, and minders of rights."
Douglas Robinson
Dean, Faculty of Arts; Chair Professor of English, Hong Kong Baptist University
"Fred Will's writings are a library unto themselves—poetry and prose, history and geography, anecdote and sustained reflection. He is an original even among originals and a writer for all readers."
Berel Lang
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University at Albany-SUNY
"Following more than half a century of life as a writer, Fred Will has illumined the path that scholars and non-scholars alike have trod and will continue to tread down for generations to come. He has advanced a roadmap of how to read and understand ourselves that extends from the seminal literary foundations of early Western civilization to the digital and technological wilderness of the twenty-first century. He has singlehandedly charted the vast country of our literary heritage, of and for the modern human."
Philip Persaud
"I have known Fred Will and his work for sixty-five years. He and I are among the last survivors of our generation of critics. I have just lost a lifelong friend, the magnificent Angus Fletcher, and before that the wise Geoffrey Hartman. Fred Will is of their company. He is a free spirit of great originality and continuous insight."
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities and English, Yale University
