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On the Atlantic Edge: A Geopoetics Project
The 'Sandstone Highliner' series follows and prolongs the high line of world culture as viewed by its director, Kenneth White, one of the liveliest and most comprehensive minds working in Europe today.
118 pages, Paperback
First published June 12, 2006
38 people want to read
About the author
Kenneth White
211 books28 followersKenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He spent his formative years in Fairlie in Ayrshire.
White obtained a double first in French and German from the University of Glasgow. From 1959 until 1963, he studied at the University of Paris, where he obtained a state doctorate. He purchased Gourgounel, an old farm in the Ardèche region of France, where he could spend the summers and autumns studying and working on what would become Letters from Gourgounel.
In 1963, White returned to the University of Glasgow, where he lectured in French literature until 1967. Then, disillusioned by the contemporary British literary and poetry scene, he resigned from the University and moved to the city of Pau, near the Pyrenees, in south-west France, where he lectured in English at the University of Bordeaux. He was expelled from the University after his involvement in the student protests of May 1968. After leaving the University of Bordeaux, White remained at Pau and lectured at the University of Paris VII from 1969 until 1983, when he left the Pyrenees for the north coast of Brittany, and a new position as the chair of 20th century poetics at Paris-Sorbonne.
In 1989, White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to further promote research into the cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade.
White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. He was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and a visiting professor at Scotland's UHI Millennium Institute.
White obtained a double first in French and German from the University of Glasgow. From 1959 until 1963, he studied at the University of Paris, where he obtained a state doctorate. He purchased Gourgounel, an old farm in the Ardèche region of France, where he could spend the summers and autumns studying and working on what would become Letters from Gourgounel.
In 1963, White returned to the University of Glasgow, where he lectured in French literature until 1967. Then, disillusioned by the contemporary British literary and poetry scene, he resigned from the University and moved to the city of Pau, near the Pyrenees, in south-west France, where he lectured in English at the University of Bordeaux. He was expelled from the University after his involvement in the student protests of May 1968. After leaving the University of Bordeaux, White remained at Pau and lectured at the University of Paris VII from 1969 until 1983, when he left the Pyrenees for the north coast of Brittany, and a new position as the chair of 20th century poetics at Paris-Sorbonne.
In 1989, White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to further promote research into the cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade.
White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. He was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and a visiting professor at Scotland's UHI Millennium Institute.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 16, 2022
After having enjoyed Tony McManus’ The Radical Field, an introduction to the work and life of Kenneth White, I was eager to deepen my understanding of White’s geopoetics through the writings of the man himself. ‘On the Atlantic Edge’ seemed as good any place to start. It is a set of three longish ‘Highland Lectures’, delivered in the late summer and fall of 2005, on the theme of ‘A New Light on the North’.
A shorter lecture delivered on the occasion of the Edinburgh Book Festival prepares the ground for the main part of the book. It sketches the contours of a Whitean reading of the Scottish Enlightenment from which two figures emerge as pivotal to the geopoetics project: the philosopher David Hume and the geologist James Hutton. Two savants who were brave enough to counter dusty metaphysics and ecclesiastical dogma with clearheaded thinking, ruthless curiosity and a thirst for experience.
There is a fascinating corollary to my reading of this introductory essay here. At one point White left Scotland more or less behind him as a permanent place of residence. He settled down in Brittany, in France. In his lecture White mentions that also Hume spent some time in France when he was a young man and working on his monumental A Treatise of Human Nature. A summary internet search led me to a fascinating essay by Alison Gopnik, a well-regarded developmental psychologist, who discovered that Hume’s stay in the Anjou town of La Flèche had been a unique opportunity to partake of first-hand insights on Buddhist culture and religion. La Flèche was a center of Jesuit learning where Hume almost certainly met missionaries with a deep knowledge of the East. This might (or might not) explain the resonances between Hume’s empiricism and Buddhist worldview and philosophy. In any case, these deep, hidden cultural cross-currents render Hume’s work even more ‘world opening’ than White could have suspected.
The lectures themselves survey a very varied terrain - “delving into history, looking at geography, re-examining the literary tradition” - seen through the nodal points of Scotland, the North and Atlanticity. In each essay White double backs to his central theme: the practice-theory of geopoetics. ‘On the Atlantic Edge’ doesn’t put forward a single, monolithic definition of geopoetics but the contours of the project take shape through the literary ‘textonics’ practiced by the author. Through his intellectual and ambulatory peregrinations White lays bare hidden cultural channels and opens up new horizons: “Geopoetics breaks familiarity, and recognizes a strangeness. Beginning with the lie of the land, remaining close to the elements, it opens up a space, and it works out a new mindset. Its basis is a new sense of the land in an enlarged mind.” The ambition of geopoetics is to retrace a path back to an originary point that regrounds the relationship between humans and our planetary habitat, and from that ontological ‘ground zero’ revitalize culture and interhuman relationships.
These lectures have been an unalloyed pleasure to read. The author's erudition, the incisiveness of his prose, and the scope and ambition of the geopoetic project are thrilling. I look forward to continuing the exploration of this rewarding territory.
A shorter lecture delivered on the occasion of the Edinburgh Book Festival prepares the ground for the main part of the book. It sketches the contours of a Whitean reading of the Scottish Enlightenment from which two figures emerge as pivotal to the geopoetics project: the philosopher David Hume and the geologist James Hutton. Two savants who were brave enough to counter dusty metaphysics and ecclesiastical dogma with clearheaded thinking, ruthless curiosity and a thirst for experience.
There is a fascinating corollary to my reading of this introductory essay here. At one point White left Scotland more or less behind him as a permanent place of residence. He settled down in Brittany, in France. In his lecture White mentions that also Hume spent some time in France when he was a young man and working on his monumental A Treatise of Human Nature. A summary internet search led me to a fascinating essay by Alison Gopnik, a well-regarded developmental psychologist, who discovered that Hume’s stay in the Anjou town of La Flèche had been a unique opportunity to partake of first-hand insights on Buddhist culture and religion. La Flèche was a center of Jesuit learning where Hume almost certainly met missionaries with a deep knowledge of the East. This might (or might not) explain the resonances between Hume’s empiricism and Buddhist worldview and philosophy. In any case, these deep, hidden cultural cross-currents render Hume’s work even more ‘world opening’ than White could have suspected.
The lectures themselves survey a very varied terrain - “delving into history, looking at geography, re-examining the literary tradition” - seen through the nodal points of Scotland, the North and Atlanticity. In each essay White double backs to his central theme: the practice-theory of geopoetics. ‘On the Atlantic Edge’ doesn’t put forward a single, monolithic definition of geopoetics but the contours of the project take shape through the literary ‘textonics’ practiced by the author. Through his intellectual and ambulatory peregrinations White lays bare hidden cultural channels and opens up new horizons: “Geopoetics breaks familiarity, and recognizes a strangeness. Beginning with the lie of the land, remaining close to the elements, it opens up a space, and it works out a new mindset. Its basis is a new sense of the land in an enlarged mind.” The ambition of geopoetics is to retrace a path back to an originary point that regrounds the relationship between humans and our planetary habitat, and from that ontological ‘ground zero’ revitalize culture and interhuman relationships.
These lectures have been an unalloyed pleasure to read. The author's erudition, the incisiveness of his prose, and the scope and ambition of the geopoetic project are thrilling. I look forward to continuing the exploration of this rewarding territory.
September 6, 2011
Pretentious series of talks which amount to it's all vapid aside from my geopoetics which is the only true path to meaning. Seemingly mostly nonsense but delivered with such chutzpah that you have to grudgingly admire the author.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews