The Poetics of Sleep

With an impressive historical and philosophical range, Simon Morgan Wortham shows how the idea of sleep has been a constant complication for western thought: sleep both has a 'poetics' and also presents difficult problems for philosophy and science. In clear and elegant prose, Simon Morgan Wortham explores issues of consciousness, representation, biology, physiology and writing in a fascinating way that will keep readers wakeful. -- Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Sleep is 'beloved', as that great insomniac the Ancient Mariner says, 'from pole to pole'. But what is this love about? What do science and philosophy have to tell us, and how can we know whether they are right? The Poetics of Sleep confronts the reader with something akin to the paradox of Bach's Goldberg Variations: a project of this nature inevitably dallies with the pleasures of the soporific. Maintaining an admirable critical vigilance and intellectual restlessness, Wortham provides a rich and thought-provoking survey of sleep theory, from Plato to Jean-Luc Nancy. -- Nicholas Royle, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, UK It is precisely Morgan Wortham's attentiveness to the question of the border between sleep and wakefulness, however, that signals an exemplary methodology that works with ease both within and without the tradition of philosophy, neither exhausting sleep as a philosophical theme nor as simply a position to espouse an attack on philosophical discourse. -- Marc Farrant Los Angeles Review of Books