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Having Epilepsy
The Experience and Control of Illness
Joseph W. Schneider and Peter Conrad
Temple University Press, 1985
"Well written and fascinating to read. This fine book takes a large step in...contributing to the only slowly dawning awareness of the general public, and the health workers too, of the significance of chronic illness." --Anselm Strauss, University of California, San Francisco Based on in-depth interviews with eighty people who have epilepsy, this book gives a first-hand account of what it is like to cope with a chronic illness, while working, playing, and building relationships. The authors recount how people discover they have epilepsy and what it means; how families respond to someone labeled "epileptic"; how seizures affect a person's sense of self and self-control. Epilepsy patients explain what they want from their doctors and why the medication practices they develop may not coincide with "doctor's orders." The variety of experiences of epilepsy is suggested both by the interviews and by the range of terms for seizures--Petit Mal, Grand Mal, auras, fits, absences. The principal difficulty for many people with epilepsy is not the medical condition but the social stigma. A person with epilepsy has to cope with discrimination in obtaining a job, insurance, or a driver's license, and he or she may be cautious about revealing this "disabling" condition to an employer or even a spouse. People with epilepsy may manage information about themselves and their "lapses" and look for "safe places" like restrooms where they can be alone should a seizure begin. Many of those interviewed complained of overreactions to seizures by colleagues or bystanders: epilepsy patients were embarrassed at having provoked a public crisis or were annoyed at waking up in a hospital emergency room. This is a book for people who have epilepsy, for their families and friends; for health care professionals who deal with chronic illnesses; and for students of medical sociology and the sociology of deviance. "For anyone who would like to 'get inside' the experience of having epilepsy, this book is probably as close as one can come." --Epilepsia "In dispelling the notion that 'the person is the illness,' these interviews with 80 individuals reveal that those suffering from epilepsy have learned to accept it as merely another facet of their lives. A valuable contribution for those with epilepsy, for their family and friends, for medical personnel, and for the general public." --Booklist "...carefully outlined and clearly written.... Those affected by chronic conditions may find the book most helpful.... Family and helping professionals may discover new insights.... Social scientists, especially those interested in chronic illnesses, will benefit from the research conclusions and suggestions for further research." --Medical Anthropology Quarterly "It represents an important advance in the medical sociology literature as well as a contribution to qualitative sociology. I think that the book should become a contemporary classic in medical sociology." --Qualitative Sociology "...an important contribution.... In focusing on what it is like to have epilepsy in this society, Schneider and Conrad have reversed an earlier concern for the medicalization of deviance, opting in this work for an understanding of the stigmatization of illness." --Contemporary Sociology
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Heidegger and Whitehead
A Phenomenological Examination into the Intelligibility of Experience
Ron L. Cooper
Ohio University Press, 1993

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time can be broadly termed a transcendental inquiry into the structures that make human experience possible. Such an inquiry reveals the conditions that render human experience intelligible. Using Being and Time as a model, I attempt to show that Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality not only aligns with Being and Time in opposing many elements of traditional Western philosophy but also exhibits a similar transcendental inquiry.

With this reading, Process and Reality contains concepts much like Being-in-the-world, ecstatic temporality, and others found in Being and Time. More important, this interpretation considers Whitehead’s treatment of human experience paradigmatic for understanding his cosmological scheme in general. Finally, the results of this study are employed to sketch a phenomenology of holy experience.

— Prefatory Note to Heidegger and Whitehead

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Herman Schmalenbach on Society and Experience
Herman Schmalenbach
University of Chicago Press, 1977
Herman Schmalenbach (1885-1950), a friend of Husserl and a scholarly critic of Tönnies and Weber, carried on the tradition of Georg Simmel and ranks as one of the most important representatives of phenomenological society. However, because of historical and political circumstances, Schmalenbach's writings have received little attention either in his native Germany or abroad. Now Günther Lüschen and Gregory P. Stone have provided the first English translations of some of Schmalenbach's most important works. In their introductory essay to this collection, the editors appraise Schmalenbach as scholar, philosopher, and sociologist.
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The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture
Experience, Interpretation, Comparison
Lindsay Jones
Harvard University Press, 2000

The two volumes of this investigation into how we perceive sacred architecture propose an original interpretation of built environments as ritual-architectural events.

Exploring the world's cultures and religious traditions, Volume One maps out patterned responses to sacred architecture according to the human experience, mechanism, interpretation, and comparison of architecture. Volume Two, an exercise in comparative morphology, offers a comprehensive framework of ritual-architectural priorities by looking at architecture as orientation, as commemoration, and as ritual context.

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The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture
Experience, Interpretation, Comparison
Lindsay Jones
Harvard University Press, 2000

The two volumes of this investigation into how we perceive sacred architecture propose an original interpretation of built environments as ritual-architectural events.

Exploring the world's cultures and religious traditions, Volume One maps out patterned responses to sacred architecture according to the human experience, mechanism, interpretation, and comparison of architecture. Volume Two, an exercise in comparative morphology, offers a comprehensive framework of ritual-architectural priorities by looking at architecture as orientation, as commemoration, and as ritual context.

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Hewing to Experience
Essays and Reviews on Recent American Poetry and Poetics, Nature and Culture
Sherman Paul
University of Iowa Press, 1989
Hewing to Experience charts Sherman Paul's course of coming to know William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder and the critical scholarship devoted to them as it provides an assessment of recent criticism. The initial section, on criticism and poetry, sets out many of the insistences that give this valuable collection of essays and reviews its coherence. Considered are criticism, poetics, poetry and old age, ethnopoetics, the gift exchange of imagination, and the recent and controversial enterprise of canon formation.
The final section of Hewing to Experience provides an important, meditative rereading of the work of Barry Lopez that convincingly places ecological writing within the large revisionist project of avant-garde poetry. Of particular note, too, is the full commentary on the Olson-Creeley correspondence.
Throughout, Paul's humane enthusiasm is evident. Hewing to Experience merits the readership of all those who are interested in contemporary poetry and concerned with the ongoing criticism of major poets and with critical practice.
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Hijacked Brains
The Experience and Science of Chronic Addiction
Henrietta Robin Barnes
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
This book, written from the perspective of a practicing primary care physician, interweaves patients’ stories with fascinating new brain research to show how addictive drugs overtake basic brain functions and transform them to create a chronic illness that is very difficult to treat. The idea that drug and alcohol addiction are chronic illnesses and not character flaws is not news—this notion has been around for many years. What Hijacked Brains offers is context and personal stories that demonstrate this point in a very accessible package. Dr. Barnes explores how the healthy brain works, how addictive drugs flood basic reward pathways, and what it feels like to grapple with addiction. She discusses how, for individuals, the combination of genetic and environmental factors determines both vulnerability for addiction and the resilience necessary for recovery. Finally, she shows how American culture, with its emphasis on freewill and individualism, tends to blame the addict for bad choices and personal weakness, thereby impeding political and/or health-related efforts to get the addict what she needs to recover.
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The Historicity of Experience
Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event
Krysztof Ziarek
Northwestern University Press, 2001
In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization.

The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience.
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The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience
Geoffrey F. Nuttall
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Geoffrey F. Nuttall establishes the primacy of the doctrines of the Holy Spirit in seventeenth-century English Puritanism and demonstrates the continuity of the Reformation tradition from the more conservative views of Luther to the more radical interpretations of the Quakers. Nuttall illuminates prominent spokesmen, including Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter, John Owen, Walter Cradock, Morgan Llwyd, and George Fox.

In a new Introduction, Peter Lake discusses the relevance of Nuttall's book to, and its influence on, major works in seventeenth-century English history written since 1946.
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Hooked
Art and Attachment
Rita Felski
University of Chicago Press, 2020
How does a novel entice or enlist us? How does a song surprise or seduce us? Why do we bristle when a friend belittles a book we love, or fall into a funk when a favored TV series comes to an end? What characterizes the aesthetic experiences of feeling captivated by works of art? In Hooked, Rita Felski challenges the ethos of critical aloofness that is a part of modern intellectuals’ self-image. The result is sure to be as widely read as Felski’s book, The Limits of Critique.

Wresting the language of affinity away from accusations of sticky sentiment and manipulative marketing, Felski argues that “being hooked” is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Hooked zeroes in on three attachment devices that connect audiences to works of art: identification, attunement, and interpretation. Drawing on examples from literature, film, music, and painting—from Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to Thelma and Louise—Felski brings the language of attachment into the academy. Hooked returns us to the fundamentals of aesthetic experience, showing that the social meanings of artworks are generated not just by critics, but also by the responses of captivated audiences.
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