The Special View of History

The book is a revised and expanded edition of Charles Olson's The Special View of History. Ann Charters produced the first edition of The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), which is now out of print, when she transcribed, edited, and organized the material from a class Olson taught at Black Mountain College in 1956. Working from material in the Charles Olson Research Collection at the University of Connecticut, Ralph Maud and John Faulise have produced a revised edition that is more accurate than the first, correcting errors in transcription and including material to which Charters did not have access, such as three class presentations from 1956, several shorter sections of text, the San Francisco lecture "The Special View of History Applied to the Two 'Mysteries' - of Samothrace and Eleusis," and the essay "Demeter." They have arranged the material chronologically for the first time, separating Olson's 1956 class preparations from material he had prepared for a book proposal on the same topic, and from the 1957 lectures he delivered in San Francisco at the invitation of Robert Duncan. In this material Olson applies Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality to his thinking about history, myth, and the "stance toward reality" he had begun to articulate in his essay "Projective Verse" and other early prose.