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by Nathaniel Tarn (Author), Joseph Donahue (Foreword by)
Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century's major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person." Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.
Author Biography
Nathaniel Tarn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at Rutgers University and the author of over three dozen works of poetry, criticism, and scholarship, including The Hölderliniae, Gondwana and Other Poems, and The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology. He has lived north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the past forty years.
