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Shots In The Dark: The Presence Of Absence In Imaginative Literature (Iw), Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

Western metaphysics and IW can be described as a search for "first" presences, not absences. With the exception of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aristotle, writers like Lord Rochester (John Wilmot), Jonathan Swift and Philip Larkin, no one, to my knowledge, has taken absence as a "first" and consequently as also a "last." This essay is a modest attempt to open the door, if only a crack, for investigations into the metaphysics and meaning of absence as a means of creating, and understanding an interesting IW—from the perspective of the presence of absence as "first" and as "last."