Roger Poole

Anyone researching a family tree can discover names, dates and places fairly easily. It is usually more difficult to uncover any details of their ancestor's lives. What were they really like? James Hall and Penny Turner set out on such a quest with just a few photographs, a couple of letters and some pictures of a sailing barge. The mystery unfolds in the landscape around the river Severn and in the Wye Valley where the story of "Riversprite" is to be found.

This book is a study of the much debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's ""indirect communication."" It approaches the problem, however, in quite a new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy. A deconstructive approach to the written work is followed by a phenomenological description of the development of the lived sign. The book is an attempt to investigate a theme concerning individual rights and embodiment that descends from Kant through Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

This book is a study of the much debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's ""indirect communication."" It approaches the problem, however, in quite a new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy. A deconstructive approach to the written work is followed by a phenomenological description of the development of the lived sign. The book is an attempt to investigate a theme concerning individual rights and embodiment that descends from Kant through Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Here is an engaging alternative to the more solemn introductions to Sren Kierkegaard that are currently available: The Laughter Is on My Side entices us into Kierkegaard's way of looking at the world. Skillfully clearing a path to the heart of Kierkegaard's writings for those who may be unfamiliar with the great Danish thinker, Roger Poole and Henrik Stangerup rearrange some of his most pleasurable and most readable passages to form an entertaining "text-narrative"--not a selection in the ordinary sense but an innovative presentation that tells a new story. The book replaces the inaccessible Kierkegaard of philosophical legend with an ironic, witty, shrewdly observant writer, writing for the amusement of writing, and not for the grimmer satisfactions of instructing or upbraiding. Above all, the Kierkegaard revealed by Poole and Stangerup becomes, in the deepest sense, our contemporary. Taking its title from the young Kierkegaard's nickname, "The Fork," the first section of the work is full of urbane and erotic materials and has much to say about his famous broken engagement to Regine Olsen. A section called "Women" will be of special interest to feminists, particularly the three discourses from the Symposium section of Stages on Life's Way. "The Midnight Hour" presents Kierkegaard's most anguished and existential passages: "Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?" Lastly, "1848 : 1984" presents Kierkegaard as an incisive and relevant political thinker in a way that has never been attempted before.