The secret lives of things: a phenomenological approach to Oliver Sacks’narrative of the life course

  1. Marta Cerezo Moreno 1
  1. 1 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
    info

    Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02msb5n36

Revista:
Cultura, lenguaje y representación = Culture, language and representation: revista de estudios culturales de la Universitat Jaume I = cultural studies journal of Universitat Jaume I

ISSN: 1697-7750

Año de publicación: 2024

Número: 33

Páginas: 79-95

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.6035/CLR.7177 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Cultura, lenguaje y representación = Culture, language and representation: revista de estudios culturales de la Universitat Jaume I = cultural studies journal of Universitat Jaume I

Resumen

Framed within the phenomenological turn that literary studies have experienced through the last few decades, this article analyses Oliver Sacks’ narrative of the life course in Uncle Tungsten(2001) and Gratitude(2015) as about the very act of embodied perception from an object-oriented perspective. Sacks presents himself as what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicted as a «phenomenal body», a sentient body playing an active and intentional role ‒ in the phenomenological sense of being directed toward something ‒ in his/her relation to and perception of the self, nature, and the other. This study reads Sacks’ narrative as an outstanding literary illustration of Gilbert G. Germain’s presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception as a return journey to a world permeated by an affective, lyrical, and enigmatic understanding of science where the embodied perception of natural objects is central to the recognition of the self and what surrounds it.

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