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Will, Frederic

Dr. Frederic Will is a Professor, School of Advanced Studies, at the University of Phoenix. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University.

BEING HERE:
Sociology as Poetry, Self-Construction, and Our Time as Language
2012 0-7734-2911-5
These are poems describing the process of writing as integral to creating the self and to our experience of time. There are numerous poems in this text. Ranging from discussing distinctions between Modernism and Postmodernism, to being nervous, to the joy of reading, the goal is to deconstructively describe the process of writing.

Field Research in North American Agricultural Communities
2003 0-7734-6808-0
This book is based on field research in agricultural communities in Chiapas, Quebec, and Iowa. It is both an academic and a warmhearted study of the social and human factors embedded within the three agricultural communities making up the North American Free Trade Agreement. It will inform scholars and general readers interested in ecology, environment, international relations, agriculture and technology, rural sociology, and technology and social transition. It will also inform those who are interested in the food they eat, who ask questions about how that food was processed, taking the reader into the banana grove, cornfield, and dairy barn as well as into the banana packing plant, grain processing factory and cheese factory.

Literature as Sheltering the Human
1993 0-7734-3038-5
The first section of the book deals with the births of language and literature from consciousness, and the formation of literary history. Explores Husserl's mapping of the origins of language, and subsequent language theories in Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger. Section Two traces privileged Homeric shelters such as the bowers off the battle-line in the Iliad and hidden islands like Ogygia in the Odyssey. It tracks that same language-sheltering into several Biblical wombs -- Sarai's, Mary's or Jonah's whale's, and turns from these to language shelters constructed by Sappho for her passion, Saint Paul for inner salvation, and by the creator of the Bhagavad Gita. The final section looks at the intimate intermeshing of literature and music with the Zeitsgeist, and finally, locates the impulse to literature and all art in the pulse of biology.

Long Poem in the Age of Twitter and the Being Here Site of the Poetic
2011 0-7734-1603-X
A monograph concerning the state of epic poetry in an age of shorter attention spans.

Male's Midlife Rite of Passage
2006 0-7734-5773-9
Dramatizes the well-known rite of passage in anthropology, while addressing this famous male transition as it occurs in three midlife western intellectuals.

Recoveries
1993 0-7734-0041-9
"The theme of my poetry book is the restoration of purpose and direction in private life, with concrete reference to my rediscovery of inner energy after a difficult and meaningful divorce. The mood of this poetry is argumentative and daily, presenting attitudes and opinions through the filter of diary- and journal-like segments of everyday experience." - FW

SINGING WITH WHITMAN'S THRUSH
Itineraries of the Aesthetic
1993 0-7734-3046-6
This is a collection of personal essays (on multinational sensibility; the godmaking impulse), letters (a mini-Bildungsroman in personal correspondence), scholarship (a study of several Marxist social critics; extended queries into Whitman's thrush-theme), and a tale (of revolutionary intensity in the contemporary city). The lead essay `Rearranging my shelves', is a prolonged meditation on book-classification , and all it involves in implicit assumptions about the organization of the intelligible world. The book probes the interrelations of loss and redemption, in art and the religious, and argues complexly for the notion of the artist as a priest. Finally, it brings to the surface fresh understandings of the tension between beauty and goodness, a perennial polarity for critical understanding.

Social Reflections on Work
2002 0-7734-6898-6
This work includes seventeen interviews with workers of varying backgrounds, gender, race, and financial levels. They work in cornfields, brass works, hog barns, jukebox truckstops, and university conference rooms. It blends anthropology with current social critique and occasional lyric-meditative outbursts.

TEXTURES, SPACES, WONDERS
1993 0-7734-3036-9
This is a collection of brief verbal travel snapshots, from which fundamental registers of human experience are drawn: senses of violence (evoked by the pounding sea off Cabo San Lucas); coziness (Greek buses, Quebec cafés); desolation and despair (Auschwitz); despondence (Belize); the power of history (Mayan Corozal in Northern Belize); purity in nature (Zion National Park). The events and perceptions recorded here date from 1957 to 1990, and yet the temporal factor constantly collapses, to let forth from within it a single sense: of the always meaningful fabric of place, and the wonder all places exude, the scent by which they trap us.

Translation Theory and Practice Reassembling the Tower
1993 0-7734-9234-8
Essays on translation, not as a brainless, sterile theory, but as a conversation of the mind itself. The topic of this inner talk is power and beauty in different languages, the return of that power onto the translator's self, and the philosophical import of that circuit of energies. Interleafed with actual translations are essays on the nature and yield of translating: Translation and Criticism; reworked parts of three issues of Micromegas -- American Indian, Mexican Indian, and Manx; Untranslatability; Translating the Conceptual; and more.

TRIPS OF THE PSYCHE
1993 0-7734-3040-7
This is a sequence of seventy-five vignettes: one to four-page mind-pictures of places, persons, ideas, and moral issues; a harvest of decades of looking and feeling. The themes advance thus: observations of objects in space; concern with aesthetics and the arts (sculpture, architecture) that organize space; travelling -- which moves through, and fills with, space; evolution and nature; the imagination -- as maker of art, and our sense of space; the religious instinct as an outgrowth of the imagination; the religious and the mythical -- how they are inter-related; our potential for compassion and solidarity; and the chances we have to export life with us beyond the grave. A world-view expresses itself here in pictures of the world; a blend of poetry, logic, historical observation, and mini-fictions.