Running is Life Transcending the Crisis of Modernity

by Fleming, Bruce

• ISBN13: 9780761851752
• ISBN10: 0761851755
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780761851769, 9780761851752
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780761851752, 9780761851752
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-07
• Publisher: UPA

Summary

Running feels good. It also centers the runner in the world, solves the problems implied by the Cartesian split between body and soul, and establishes an active relationship between the self and others. Running takes the motion we are all born with (that is the essence of life) and with the individual providing the impetus, projects us into the world of others. When we run, we transcend ourselves and place ourselves in the world. Running is Life is set in many places--Cairo, the Eastern Sierras, Las Vegas, New York's Adirondack Mountains, and Barcelona, among others--but always in the moving body of the runner hurtling both through and into the world. Running is Life is both a hymn to human motion and an explanation of its sweetness.

Author Biography

Bruce Fleming is a graduate of Haverford College with subsequent degrees from the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt University. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Free University Berlin and has studied in Paris and Siena. He has taught for more than two decades at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. He is the author of numerous books ranging from aesthetics to political and military theory, dance criticism, and literary criticism. He has also published shorter pieces in many quarterlies and magazines, including the Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Southwest Review, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Village Voice, and the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as scholarly venues. He won an O. Henry short story award; his novel Twilley was compared by critics to works by Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Proust, Thoreau, and David Lynch. In 2005 he won the Antioch Review Award for Distinguished Prose, a career award.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. v
The Problem with Modernity	p. 1
Running is Life	p. 5
Running in the Adirondacks	p. 19
Running on the National Mall	p. 37
Running in Barcelona	p. 67
Running in the Eastern Sierras	p. 79
Running in Las Vegas	p. 103
Running in Death Valley	p. 113
The Abandoned Teddy Bear	p. 121
Endnotes	p. 141
Index	p. 143
About the Author	p. 149
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