Theodore Roszak
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Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
Theodore Roszak (born 1933) is an American professor, social thinker, writer, and critic best known for his work on American culture: The Making of a Counter Culture.
His books include Longevity Revolution: As Boomers Become Elders, a comprehensive study of the cultural and political implications of our society's lengthening life expectancy, and the widely acclaimed The Making of a Counter Culture, a much discussed, best selling interpretation of the turbulent sixties. He has also written The Voice of the Earth (Touchstone Books), The Cult of Information, (University of California Press) a study of the use and abuse of computers in all walks of life, and The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science, a study of gender-bias in the theory and practice of science, with a preface by Jane Goodall. His books The Voice of the Earth and Ecopsychology: Healing the Mind, Restoring the Earth are the founding texts of the ecopsychology movement. With his wife Betty, he is co-editor of the anthology Masculine/Feminine: Essays on Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women.
His fiction includes Flicker (Simon and Schuster and Bantam Books) and the award-winning Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Random House and Bantam Books), both of which are under option for major feature films. His most recent novel, published in 2003, is The Devil and Daniel Silverman. Theodore Roszak has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was twice nominated for the National Books Award.
He chronicled and gave explanation to the European and North American counterculture phenomenon of the late 1960s in his book The Making of a Counter Culture (1969). Later, his writings (e.g., Person/Planet) were often associated with the "alternative," "new age," or "resacralization" movements.
Initially, Roszak was much influenced by thinkers like Alan Watts and Jacques Ellul, and, somewhat later, by modern theosophists such as H. P. Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner. In Where the Wasteland Ends Roszak draws on such historical theorists and poets as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake (in particular, Blake's critique of 'the industrial spirit'), and what has recently been referred to as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "holistic science". While staying in touch with many contemporary and emerging thinkers (and historical giants of thought), Roszak seems in his writings to rest more on his own personal experiences. His perspective is largely grounded in ecology and the environmental movement.
In the more recent The Voice of the Earth, Roszak made a big contribution to "ecopsychology" by exploring what he views as a correlation between the degraded condition of the Earth and an uneasy state of the human psyche, which he first took up in Person/Planet.
The kernel of Roszak's outlook is something well articulated by Plato (in Timaeus) many centuries ago—that the cosmos is "a living creature, one and visible, containing within itself all living creatures, which are by nature akin to itself". It is a viewpoint that has had many other spokespeople through the centuries, in the West and the East. For instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Bucke assembled a compendium of excerpts from many authors, both famous and unknown, on the subject. This was because Bucke himself had had a very vivid experience of the cosmos as a "living presence."
Career
Roszak first taught at Stanford University in the late 1950s, then was a teacher in an experimental post-secondary school in London, England in the late 1960s. During this period he gained experience as a writer and editor with the pacifist weekly Peace News. After this he taught again at Stanford and the University of British Columbia. He was also a professor of history and the chair of General Studies at California State University, Hayward and is now professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay.
Roszak, like Aldous Huxley, has frequently written about how, as individuals and as societies, we must look closely and holistically at the technologies we use. He is a lecturer and the author of many books and essays and an internationally renowned social critic.
Books
- Non-fiction
- The Dissenting Academy (1968)
- The Making of a Counter Culture (1969)
- Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women (1969)
- Where the Wasteland Ends (1972)
- Sources (1972)
- The Unfinished Animal (1976)
- Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (1979)
- Fool's Cycle/Full Cycle (1988). ISBN 0-931191-07-6.
- The Voice of the Earth' (1992?)
- The Gendered Atom
- The Cult of Information (1994)
- From Satori to Silicon Valley
- World Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror (2006, ISBN 1-897071-02-7)
- Kanner, Roszak, & Gomes - Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. (1995, ISBN 0-87156-406-8)
- Fiction
- Pontifex (1974)
- Dreamwatcher
- Bugs (1981)
- Flicker (1991)
- The Devil and Daniel Silverman (2003)
- The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
