This image is the cover for the book Language to Live In

Language to Live In

Language to Live In offers readers an opportunity to reflect on the current crisis of the relationship between the humanities and the sciences. Drawing from work in quantum physics, biochemistry, psychoanalysis, eroticism (ancient and modern), neuroscience, environmental studies, and the traditions of European and American poetry, the book engages questions of evolution, sexuality, and technology as it considers the consequences of the 20th-century’s breathtaking achievements and unparalleled disasters. It, thus, aspires to speak to those seeking self-understanding in an increasingly polarized world, where political tribalism repeatedly angles to dictate the meaning of ‘self’ to people on vast scales, amounting in many cases to open propaganda and indoctrination. The book espouses a conviction that thoughtful and considerate men and women long for and seek a language or languages to live in, empowering, educating, and liberating them to share the meaning of their lives with their fellow human beings.

R. Allen Shoaf

R. Allen Shoaf, Alumni Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Florida, is the author of more than a dozen books and nearly 100 papers and reviews in literary studies, twice a holder of Fellowships of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Founding Editor of the prize-winning journal Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies—which he edited from 1987 until 2008—and the winner of six teaching awards during his career at UF, including ‘University-Wide Teacher of the Year’ in 1992. He is also the author of several books of poetry, most recently Pied-Piper Philology: Love Words, and a contributor to poetry magazines. Graduating from Wake Forest University in 1970, later that year, he took up a Marshall Scholarship to study in the United Kingdom (BA Hon., 1972). He has dedicated his career to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, authoring books and numerous articles on all three poets, and he has also published regularly over the past 40 years in Dante scholarship, especially regarding the relationship between late medieval sign theory and the Commedia. Language to Live In is his fourth book of poems and brings together his recent writings in eroticism, quantum physics, biology, neuroscience, and politics.

Austin Macauley Publishers