BASC70037 - A Philosophy of Human Habitation: Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space

Course Description

The history of Western philosophy has heavily favored thematics of time over space, uninterested or simply forgetful of the fact that we humans live in particular places and in the particular kind of spaces we create and/or imagine. This course offers a close reading of one interruption of this dynamic, 20th-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. By way of a phenomenological exploration of the spaces we make, and their influence and impact on our poetic imagination, Bachelard intended to enrich our understanding of the images of the places we live in, which are also the images we live by. Attention will be paid both to Bachelard’s method and to the particularities of his accounts of particular spaces.