This article offers an innovative perspective on the literary landscapes of the 1960s in France, Ukraine, and the USA serving as exemplars of a global literary project that views literary works as heterotopias that, while being distinct, collectively constitute a cohesive whole. Using a comparative approach, complemented with distant reading techniques, the study examines how these literary realms are interconnected, revealing shared aesthetic foundations guided by an overarching law. This law, rooted in Theodor Adorno’s concept of negativity, becomes evident in (...) in countercultural movements and consequential shifts in literary form, content, and canon. While not the primary focus of analysis, other unifying elements in this global literary panorama include dissent as defined by Jaques Rancière, and a Sartrian-infused interpretation of existentialism. The article suggests that this global phenomenon may have emerged due to the confluence of two factors: the seismic global impact of events like WWII and the evolving postmodern trajectory of the era. (shrink)

A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole portrays an interplay between competing definitions of humanism. The one school of humanism—called by some the Modernist Paradigm—saw the Italian Renaissance as the origin of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist views that celebrated science, technology, and individual human freedom. The other school, led by Paul Oskar Kristeller, sought to historicize humanism by establishing that Renaissance writers and thinkers were generally conservative and preserved the philosophical ideas of the medieval era. Kristeller was the (...) President of the Renaissance Society of America and was at the height of his influence at Columbia University during the late 1950s, when Toole studied for his Master’s degree there. The main character in Confederacy, Ignatius J. Reilly, presents a parody of Kristeller’s position, which he uses to critique modern society. Ignatius also plays the part of a child of the planetary god Saturn, both by acting out the ancient astrological tradition of associating Saturn with misfortune and disorder and by being a parody of the Renaissance concept of the Genius as a Child of Saturn begun by the Renaissance philosopher whom Kristeller studied most, Marsilio Ficino. Ignatius’s worldview is an antithesis of the Modernist Paradigm. Confederacy is critical of both Modernist humanism with its attendant materialism and its antithesis—Ignatius’s dysfunctional version of Kristeller’s Renaissance philosophy. When the community expels Ignatius as a scapegoat, Toole appears to gesture toward a dialectical synthesis of the two concepts of humanism in the novel’s happy ending. (shrink)

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates (...) African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:192. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1983 The Hume literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; £9.50), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the years 1977 to 1982 were listed in Hume Studies in previous Novembers. What follows here will bring the record up to the end of (...) 1983. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions, and to send me offprints of their own articles and reviews. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recently-appearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQ American Philosohical Quarterly JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JP Journal of Philosophy PAS Proceedings of the Arisotelian Society PB Philosophical Books PQ Philosophical Quarterly PR Philosophical Review RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie RM Review of Metaphysics TLS Times Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British standard (no. 4148). 193, ARNOLD, N. S. 'Hume's Skepticism about Inductive Inference', JHP 21, 31-55. BARKER, S. 'Hume on the Logic of Design', Hume Studies 9, 1-18. [19-24] BERMAN, D. 'David Hume and the Suppression of Atheism', JHP 21, 375-87. BOX, M.? Gloss on Goldsmith's Remark on Hume', Notes & Queries 30, 59-60. BRETT, N. 'Hume's Debt to Kant', Hume Studies 9, 5973. BROUGHTON, J. 'Hume's Skepticism about Causal Inference', Pacific phil. Q. 64, 3-18. CALVERT, B. 'Another Problem about Part IX of Hume's Dialogues', Int. J. Phil. Relig. 14, 65-70. COLWELL, G.G. 'Miracles and History', Sophia 22, 9-14. DARWALL, S. L. Impartial Reason, ch. 5 ('Hume's Internalism1 ). Ithaca, N. Y. DEL VECCHIO, M. 'Un Impotesi di Lettura Esegetlica del "Dubbio Scettico" Humeano', Riv. crit. Stor. FiI. 38, 457-64. FOGELIN, R. J. 'The Tendency of Hume's Skepticism', in M. Burnyeat, The Skeptical Tradition, 397-412. Berkeley, CaI. GASKIN, J. CA. 'Hume's Attenuated Deism', Arch. Gesch. Phil. 65, 160-73. GEMES, K.? Refutation of Inductive Scepticism', Australas. J. Phil. 61, 434-8. GUTTENPLAN, S. 'Hume and Contemporary Ethical Naturalism', Midwest Stud. Phil. 8, 309-20. HARRIS, H. S. 'Hume and Barker on the Logic of Design', Hume Studies 9, 19-24. HARTSHORNE, C 'Hume's Metaphysics and its Influence', in C Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, 136-50. HIRSCH, E. 'Hume's Distinction between Genuine and Fictitious Identity', Midwest Stud. Phil. 8, 321-38. 194, IMMERWAHR, J. 'David Hume, Sexism, and Sociobiology ', Sth. J. Phil. 21, 359-70. KIVY, P. 'Hume's Neighbour's Wife: An Essay on the Evolution of Hume's Aesthetics', Br. J. Aesth. 23, 195-208. KUEHN, M. 'Kant's Conception of "Hume's Problem"', JHP 21, 175-93. KUEHN, M. 'Hume's Antinomies', Hume Studies 9, 25-45. McCRACKEN, CJ. Malebranche and British Philosophy, ch. 7. Oxford. McLYNN, F.J. 'Jacobitism and David Hume: The Ideological Backlash Foiled', Hume Studies 9, 171-99. MALHERBE, M. 'La notion de circonstance dans la philosophie de Hume', Hume Studies 9, 130-49. NATHAN, G. J.? Humean Pattern of Justification', Hume Studies 9, 150-70. NIELSEN, K. 'Hobbesist and Humean Alternatives to a Religious Morality', Int. J. Phil. Relig. 14, 33-47. PENELHUM, T. 'Natural Belief and Religious Belief in Hume's Philosophy', P£ 33, 166-81. [182-6] PONKO, T. A. 'Artificial Virtue, Self-interest, and Acquired Social Concern', Hume Studies 9, 4658. ROD, W. 'The Rationalist Theory of Double Causality as an Object of Hume's Criticism', Erkenntnis 19, 315-29. ROHATYN, D. 'Hume's Dialectical Conceits: The Case of Dialogue XII', Phil. & phenomenol. Res. 43, 519-32. RUSSELL, P. 'On the Naturalism of Hume's "Reconciling Project"', Mind 92, 593-600. SCARRE, G. 'What was Hume's worry about Personal Identity?', Analysis 43, 217-21. SCARRE, G. 'Was Mill Really Concerned with Hume's Problem of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American LiteratureElizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio)I begin with what we might call a bipolar disturbance in literary criticism. Caught between the materialism of cultural studies and the formalism of philosophy, literary criticism is construed, on the one hand, as useless—struck dumb by its lack of purpose in the face of real politics and real bodies—and, on the other hand, as (...) singularly efficacious, the only tool through which to reveal the essentially discursive character of all forms of culture, including bodies and politics. While this rhetorical model of criticism is regularly posited as politically bankrupt, as having no purchase on the facticity of the world, the model of materialist cultural criticism is just as regularly unmasked as, at base, rhetorically constructed and thus guilty of concealing its own formalist dimensions. 1 This “disturbance,” as I’ve described it, tends to be acted out as a debilitating dialectic: caught between formalism and materialism, literary criticism is left without any ground to stand on. Yet this peculiar bipolarity within literary criticism is intimately linked to the strange status of literature itself. Language becomes recognizably literary at the moment it assumes a rhetorical or formal dimension rather than serving as the invisible conduit of mimetic representation. 2 Whence, evidently, the allure of formalism for literary criticism: form would seem to be exactly what demarcates the literary from the nonliterary, what defines the exclusive territory of literature. Yet formalism, as has been widely and persuasively argued, tends to turn literature into precisely the kind of artifact that means little in relation to the world and tends to obscure the worldly relations that inform the text and its production. Indeed, in the field of Cultural Studies—a field whose defining gesture is political engagement—“formalist” is a term whose meaning often comes to approximate “apolitical.” “Formalist,” fashioned as opprobium, speaks chidingly of hermeticism or more acerbically of the insidious erasures enacted by universalism.In contemporary criticism, formalism has thus come to occupy an important antipodal position which encompasses far more than the New Critical practices of the 1940s and ‘50s. In emphasizing the formal, intrinsic qualities of the literary work, New [End Page 46] Critics closeted the text away from the world and from the possibility of social action: their agenda has thus been construed as politically quietist and inherently conservative. 3 Yet the term “formalism,” used as a charge of conservatism, has been applied more broadly to poststructuralist criticism as well. Paul Lauter, for instance, uses the term “formalist” to describe deconstruction as an avatar of New Criticism: both emphasize textual relations to the exclusion of extratextual considerations. Poststructuralism, Lauter and others have argued, continues an aestheticization of literature which turns literary criticism over to an elitist and ultimately irrelevant “priesthood.” ‘“Formalist,’” writes Lauter, “suggests that the whole enterprise of literary theorizing subsists behind dense academic walls, where de Man speaks only to Heidegger, and Heidegger speaks only to God” [138]. While Lauter bases his analogy between poststructuralism and New Criticism on the charge of hermeticism as well as a lack of historical engagement, the notion of “form” as it appears in poststructuralism is nonetheless significantly different than the “form” that animated New Critical endeavors. Where New Critical “form” concerns specifically literary structures—irony, metaphor, tension, unity—the poststructural referent for these rhetorical terms is often the “form” of language or subjectivity itself. Accordingly, the meaning of “form” (and, indeed, “formalism”) undergoes a marked shift from specific rhetorical articulations to larger theoretical claims about language and identity.This second, broader articulation of form has been critiqued less for hermeticism or quietism than for its implied universalism—that is, for fashioning subjects and discursive forces in uniform shapes without regard for political and historical specificity. Stuart Hall, for example, whilst defining the practice of Cultural Studies, warns against theories of the subject (in this case psychoanalysis) that tend toward universalism: “The manner in which this ‘subject’ of culture is conceptualized is of a trans-historical and ‘universal’ character: it addresses the subject-in-general, not an historically-determinate social subject, or socially determinate particular language” [Hall 70]. On this reading, formalist theories of poststructuralism... (shrink)

The separation of church and state disguised the coordination of two very different conceptions of liberty at work in Revolutionary America, one with a religious basis in radical Protestant thought and the other with a legal basis in the secular Enlightenment. The essay combines the disciplines of law, literature, and intellectual history to investigate these contrasting formulations and their changing relationship. Cross-cultural analysis of the language of protest in both England and America gives the investigation a crucial focus. It also (...) explains a larger movement from direct influence to refraction in Anglo-American relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1Barbara K. GoldW. R. Johnson. Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. xiv 1 172 pp. Cloth, $27.50. (Townsend Lectures)A colleague once expressed shock that I was reading Horace’s Epistles. They are, she said, the most boring works in all of Latin literature. It seems likely that this was not an (...) idiosyncratic pronouncement: the Epistles are rarely the subjects of critical work and even less frequently taught.But now we have the second book to appear in the past decade on the first book of Horace’s Epistles. Ross Kilpatrick’s 1986 volume on The Poetry of Friendship: Horace, Epistles 1 focused closely on the theme of amicitia in these poems. Now Ralph Johnson has produced a new appreciation of Horace by tracing another theme through Horace’s letters to his friends: freedom. The book is less a critical exegesis of the Epistles than a highly personal and emotionally charged meditation on what drove Horace to write these so-called letters in the twilight of his composing years. The chapter headings indicate the unorthodox approach Johnson has chosen: “Running on Empty,” “In the Rag and Bone Shop,” “Gardens.”Johnson presents us with a Horace who is engaged in a “messy” and irresoluble dialectic with himself, his friends, and his readers. Neither Horace nor Johnson offers any comforting or banal bipolarities; Johnson cautions often against the sic et non approach whereby we, like boll weevils, bore through the haze of confusions looking for the “nugget” (Virginia Woolf’s word) behind the complexities instead of accepting the power of antinomies and their meaning for human experience (144). Johnson’s Horace is thus an ambivalent and protean creature: still a satirist, but somewhat softer now than he was in the 30s; an outsider looking in but never really a part of the hive; a man suffused with anger and resentment, yet capable of a dry and impartial skepticism and a sanguine hope about our ability to live our lives well; carnal and crazy, but mature and clear-headed; an Orphic shaman figure, who mediates between lowly humans and figures of the great (Augustus) or nature herself and delivers the truth from his lofty position, but also a poet of lowly beginnings, caught in embarrassing positions and forced to kowtow to his superiors; a man absolutely insistent on his [End Page 335] freedom and individuality yet part of a court circle of sorts; a wry picaro who nonetheless sometimes plays the role of Stoic progrediens: a naughty scarecrow in the garden, an agrarian sophist, with one foot in the city and one on his Sabine farm, trying to figure out how to be a proper gardener.But, for me, there are too many Horaces here, and they cannot all exist simultaneously. It is hard to see the spontaneous, wry picaro next to the poet who desires a return to civility and decorum or the committed city dweller who develops a love for the rural life. While it may be true that Horace changed masks when the occasion suited, his representations of himself seem to me to be fairly consistent by Ep. 1.20. The Horace I see here is more comfortable with himself than Johnson’s Horace is. He has come to terms with Maecenas, with his father, and with his life in Rome. He understands why it is necessary to avoid chasing after wealth (fuge magna, 10.32) in order to achieve the internal peace and true freedom that he seeks. But he is always a city dweller and never comfortable with his Sabine farm as more than a symbol of what the rural life could offer. (In an interesting aside, Johnson admits that he might be sentimentalizing Horace’s view of the farm: “I’m an ardent urbanite without even a window box” [150 n. 5].) Horace saw and used elements of nature throughout his poetry as evocative symbols of the place of human life in the larger natural universe, but I’m certain that he never got his hands dirty.It is, however, no wonder that so... (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us (...) to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

This article examines the influence of the Persian mystic poet Hafi z on western poets. Interest in Hafiz started in England in the eighteenth century with the translations of Sir William Jones. In the nineteenth century, the German translation of Baron von HammerPurgstall inspired Goethe to create his masterpiece Westöstliche Divan (West-Eastern Divan). The poetry of Hafiz evoked such passion in Goethe that he referred to him as ‘Saint Hafiz’ and ‘Celestial Friend’. Inspired by Westöstliche Divan, a number of German (...) poets including Rückert and Platen composed volumes of poetry on the model of ghazal, the popular poetic form perfected by Hafi z in Persian literature. Prominent among the German thinkers influenced and fascinated by Hafiz was Friedrich Nietzsche who repeatedly mentioned him in his works. The influence of Hafiz stretched to America in 1838 when Ralph Waldo Emerson read Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan. In Hafiz, Emerson found a man who derived pleasure in the very elements which others found mean. Under the influence of Hafiz’s Saki-nameh or the Book of Wine, he created his finest poem Bacchus which, according to Harold Bloom, set the terms for the dialectic of American poetry. (shrink)

Originally published in 1982. Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the "possible articulation" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan examines that multifaceted relationship but not through a mere comparison of two distinct and inviolable entities. Instead, he looks at both with an eye to identifying their common elements and reweaving them into a new theory of political practice. To accomplish his task, Ryan undertakes a detailed comparison (...) of deconstruction and Marxism, relating deconstruction to the dialectical tradition in philosophy and demonstrating how deconstruction can be used in the critique of ideology. He is a forceful critic of both the politics of deconstruction and the metaphysical aspect of Marxism (as seen from a deconstructionist perspective). Besides offering the first book-length study of Derrida in this context, Ryan makes the first methodic attempt by an American scholar to apply deconstruction to domains beyond literature. He proposes a deconstructive Marxism, one lacking the metaphysical underpinnings of conservative "scientific" Marxist theory and employing deconstructive analysis both for Marxist political criticism and to further current anti-metaphysical developments within Marxism. Marxism and Deconstruction is an innovative and controversial contribution to the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and political science. (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente artículo se evidencia la vinculación que establece Rama entre lengua/literatura y espacio/poder en La ciudad letrada. Este nuevo paradigma ha permitido pensar y repensar la literatura latinoamericana y los estudios culturales, sin embargo, entraña contradicciones dentro del mismo pensamiento del uruguayo. La tajante división que el autor establece entre ciudad real y ciudad letrada hace imposible pensar el rol de la literatura fuera de la esfera del poder institucional, al mismo tiempo que relega ontológicamente la realidad (...) de esta última a una meramente instrumental. Nuestra propuesta es leer a la luz del concepto de transculturación esta oposición, para establecer una dialéctica que permita considerar la politicidad propia de la ciudad real y su rol activo en la expresión de una literatura de resistencia política. Abstract: In the present article we show the relationship that Rama establish between language/power and space/power in the Ciudad Letrada. This new paradigm has allowed us to think and rethink Latin American literature and cultural studies, non the less, it also brings out contradictions inside the own thinking of the Uruguayan author. The strong division that the author establishes between the real city and the literate city does not allow one to think of the role of literature outside the field of institutionalized power, at the same time that he relegates the ontological reality of the latter to a merely instrumental one. Our proposal is to read this opposition in the light of the notion of transculturation, establishing a dialectic that allows us to consider the very policy of the real city and its active role in the expression of a political resistance literature. (shrink)

These essays deal with the scholarly study of the genesis, transmission, and editorial reconstitution of texts by exploring the connections between textual instability and textual theory, interpretation, and pedagogy. What makes this collection unique is that each essay brings a different theoretical orientation-New Historicism, Poststructuralism, or Feminism-to bear upon a different text, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass , Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, or hypertext fiction, to explore the dialectical relationship between texts and textuality. The essays bring some (...) of the textual theories that compete with each other today into contact with a broad range of primarily literary textual histories. That texts are intrinsically unstable, frequently consisting of a series of determinate historical versions, has consequences for all students of literature, because different versions of a literary work frequently help shape different readings independently of the interpretations brought to bear upon them. Textual instability of the works is relevant to our understanding of how the meanings of texts are generated. The contributors build on the numerous challenges to the Anglo-American editorial tradition mounted during the past decade by scholars as diverse as Jerome McGann, D.F. McKenzie, Peter Shillingsburg, D.C. Greetham, Hershel Parker, and Hans Walter Gabler. The volume contributes to the paradigm shift in textual scholarship inaugurated by these scholars. Index. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE PLACE OF RENE GIRARD IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY Guy Vanheeswijck University ofAntwerp and ofLeuven Iwould like to start by quoting a text which is likely to be recognized by everyone, who is even on a superficial level familiar with the work of René Girard: Desire that bears on a natural object is only human to the extent that it is mediated by the desire of another bearing on the (...) same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus an object that is perfectly useless from a biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a human desire, and human reality as it differs from animal reality, is only created by the action that satisfies such desires. Human history is the history of desires that are desired [Désirs désirés]. Undoubtedly, these could be words written by Girard. However, they are not. These words are quoted from the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes at the Ecole pratique des hautes études between 1933 and 1939. They were followed by what would become the crème ofpost-war French philosophy: Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Koyré, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre.' Kojève's interpretation ofHegel has, as generally known, become the point ofreference to the post-war twentieth ' Although Sartre himselfcould not attend the lectures (at that time he taught philosophy in Le Havre en Laon), he must have heard from it by way of Aron or Merleau-Ponty. 96Guy Vanheeswijck century philosophy in France. Before 1930 the word "dialectic" was burdened with an odium of sin, after 1930 it became a word—thanks to Kojève —radiant with prestige. Before 1930 there had been no talk of an Hegelian school whatsoever in France, after 1930 the situation changed so drastically that Merleau-Ponty was able to write these often quoted lines in 1946: Hegel is at the origin of everything that has been great in philosophy for over a century; for example Marxism, Nietzsche, phenomenology and German existentialism, psychoanalysis. He inaugurates the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it within a wider rationality that remains the philosophical task of our century. (Sens et non-sens 109-110) Half a century later, these words have lost their self-evident character. While the generation of French thinkers between 1930 and 1960 stresses its dependence on Hegel, the generation after 1960 heavily reacts against him. In 1970 Michel Foucault gave his inaugural speech at the Collège de France. On behalf of his generation he testified to a generalized antiHegelianism at that moment: "Our entire epoch, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, seeks to evade Hegel's Imperium [échapper à Hegel] (L'Ordre du discours 74). Obviously, René Girard belongs to the second generation, which, on the one hand, embroiders on the theme ofdesire, borrowed from Kojève's interpretation ofHegel, but, on the other, in its search for answers precisely wishes to get rid of Hegel. But, is it correct to call René Girard a philosopher? His schooling was that of an historian. In 1947 he graduated in Paris as an archivistepal éographe at the Ecole de Chartres: his thesis was "La vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle." Three years later—in the meantime he had emigrated to the United States—he received his Ph.D. at the faculty of history of the University of Indiana. The topic of his dissertation was "American opinion ofFrance, 1940-1943." However, he has never worked as a professional historian. He owes his reputation first and foremost to his literary analyses, subsequently to his research in anthropology, finally to his exegesis ofthe Bible. Time and again, Girard has expressed his preference for literature to both humanities and philosophy. Human behavior is, in his view, much less elucidated by the conceptual structures of discursive philosophy than by the evocative force of a Greek tragedy, the Biblical passion story or a modern novel. One might retort that René Girard... (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes (...) extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Context in Jena around 1800 A Metaphysics of Freedom Analytic and Synthetic Philosophy Metaphysics of Humanity Socioeconomic Philosophy The Natural World Harmonious Freedom Krause's Philosophy in Spain Ideal de la humanidad (the ideal of humanity) Latin American Reception Conclusion References Further Reading.

This is the first full-length, systematic study of Ernst Cassirer's fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, which was published in the German edition in 1995 and in the American edition in 1996 from Cassirer's Nachlass. Prior to the appearance of this volume it was generally held that Cassirer had little interest in a metaphysics of symbolic forms and had not formulated such. ;This study considers the nature of the basic elements of Cassirer's (...) metaphysics as they appear in this fourth volume and as they are connected to comments in other of his works. It also considers to what extent Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms requires a metaphysical grounding in a traditional sense. ;Part I is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1920s concerning his distinction between life and spirit , their dialectical relationship and their connection to the conception of symbolic form. Highly significant is Cassirer's assertion in a fragment from this period that philosophy is not itself a symbolic form. ;Part II is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1940s concerning his conception of three "basis phenomena" --the life-process and the I, action and the Other, and the sphere of work . Of particular importance is Cassirer's final description of the philosophy of symbolic forms as a Socratic philosophy grounded in the basis phenomenon of work. ;The study contains an appendix showing an analytic scheme of the volume and a comprehensive bibliography of Cassirer's works and critical literature relevant to the interpretation of his systematic philosophy. (shrink)

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the (...) creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together sixteen essays he has written about the philosopher over the past twenty years. The opening essay, "Origin Is the Goal," pursues Adorno's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment to better (...) understand the urgent social and political situation of the United States. "Back to Adorno" examines Adorno's idea that sacrifice is the primordial form of human domination; "Second Salvage" reconstructs Adorno's unfinished study of the transformation of music in radio transmission; and "What Is Mechanical Reproduction" revisits Adorno's criticism of Walter Benjamin. Further essays cover a broad range of topics: Adorno's affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical study of popular music. Many of these essays have been revised, with new material added that emphasizes the relevance of Adorno's thought to the United States today. _Things Beyond Resemblance_ is a timely and richly analytical collection crucial to the study of critical theory, aesthetics, continental philosophy, and Adorno. (shrink)

Building on recent literature on the history of political economy and Spanish imperial history, the article reconstructs the ideas that supported the colonial development of the meat industry in the Río de la Plata. Archival and printed sources are employed to illustrate the different arguments revolving around colonial economic development and imperial rule, in the words and practices of merchants, explorers, administrators and ministers. This way, it is possible to disclose the multiple imperial visions circulating in the Spanish Atlantic. The (...) analysis suggests that economic reformism was not only a European intellectual and political movement but was shared and appropriated by Spanish Americans. They employed arguments in political economy to foster their agenda, namely the economic improvement of their territory in the broader context of the Spanish commercial empire. If a shared consensus around imperial political economy between Spanish and Spanish American vassals provided arguments supporting this colonial industry, the diverging economic interests, imperial rivalries, and the different geographical spaces of enunciation determined a variable dialectic between projects for the expansion of salted meat production and their realisation. (shrink)

This collection of essays intends to challenge conventional notions of what constitutes an American national literature. The new reading of Hegel in recent philosophy and critical theory subjects history and language to a thorough critique. Yet the connection of Hegel to American discourse has largely gone unexplored, and literary theorists have scarcely begun to interrogate the priorities of Hegelianism implicit in American literary history. The essays collected in Theorizing American Literature thus organize their arguments around the (...) necessity to rethink the process of historicizing American literature and to redefine the terms of discussion of some of its most familiar authors. (shrink)

A Grammar of the Christian Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw. By Lidia Napiorkowska. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 81. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. xiv + 600. $234, €181.

Neo-Mandaic is among the rarest and most seriously endangered languages of the world. Two extant Neo-Mandaic dialects, those of the cities of Ahvaz and Khorramshahr in southwestern Iran, are spoken by a few hundred adherents of Mandaeism, an indigenous gnostic religion of Lower Mesopotamia. Previous transcribed texts in the dialect of Ahvaz mostly deal with Mandaean culture and include Classical Mandaic vocables that are not used in the vernacular. The present annotated text is entirely colloquial, being a sample of (...) daily speech amongst speakers of the dialect and reflecting a typical conversation between two Neo-Mandaic speakers in a situation where one is receiving his relative as a guest. It is, moreover, the first Neo-Mandaic text that involves a female informant. (shrink)

While the language of Běijīng served together with Manchu as the court vernacular in the Qīng dynasty, the city’s dialect was not widely accepted in China as the standard for Guānhuà even in the late nineteenth century. The preferred form was a mixed Mandarin koiné with roots going back much earlier, such as that represented in Lǐ Rǔzhēn’s mid-Qīng rime compendium Lǐshì yīnjiàn. A similar form of mixed Mandarin served briefly as the National Pronunciation of China in the early (...) twentieth century and came to be called lán-qīng Guānhuà ‘blue-green Mandarin’. This heterogeneous norm incorporated features of a variety of Mandarin dialects and eventually came to be disparaged as an unrefined cousin of the pure Běijīng standard. Yet in origin the old National Pronunciation was designed to encompass a mix of regional forms and intended to contain the most broadly accepted elements of various Mandarin types. The evolution and development of the composite Guānhuà norm reveal much about Chinese linguistic attitudes of the early nineteenth through early twentieth centuries and shed light on various perspectives about what standard Chinese should be and what a Mandarin-based norm should represent. Broad popular acceptance of Běijīng as the governing norm for pronunciation began slowly to take hold only after the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China finally officially promoted Běijīng as the national standard in the 1930s. Yet it then had to compete with a new mixed vernacular orthography called Latinxua sinwenz. Běijīng was not firmly established as the norm until the People’s Republic of China definitively declared the city’s dialect as standard in the 1950s. (shrink)

Examining the literature of slavery and race before the Civil War, Maurice Lee demonstrates for the first time exactly how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Unable to mediate the slavery controversy as the nation moved toward war, their writings form (...) an uneasy transition between the confident rationalism of the American Enlightenment and the more skeptical thought of the pragmatists. Lee draws on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, bringing a fresh perspective to the literature of slavery - one that synthesizes cultural studies and intellectual history to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Rorty Lays Down the LawLeon SuretteRichard Rorty has found a large cross-disciplinary academic audience for his argument that philosophy ought to abandon its self-appointed role as a foundational discipline and adopt the “ironic” and “conversational” practices of literary criticism. Explicitly invoking early pragmatism—which argued that philosophy should join the natural sciences and regard itself as “the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making” 1 —Rorty (...) argues that philosophers should now abandon the natural sciences, and become “edifiers” and “ironist theorists” on the model of literary criticism. 2Rorty’s pragmatism amounts to the claim that philosophy ought to wind up and put away its long preoccupation with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology and abandon the pretense of deductive rigor to become “dialectical.” This newly reformed philosophy would, as Rorty puts it, “play off vocabularies against one another, rather than merely... infer propositions from one another” (CIS, p. 78). Rorty’s belief in philosophy as a form of conversation may owe less to American pragmatism, however, than to Continental hermeneutics (particularly Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method). Nevertheless, I intend to take him at his word, and apply the fundamental tenet of pragmatism to his own theorizing. I take the following remark by William James as definitional of American pragmatism: “What practical difference would it make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show that some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right” (PR, p. 26).In the light of this pragmatic principal, most philosophical and [End Page 261] literary theories make little if any practical difference to the practice of literary criticism, although philosophy and theory can displace, occlude, or banish it. The whole issue turns on what is meant by the term, literary criticism. Rorty assumes that criticism is an interpretive activity, and that nothing further need be said. Yet interpretation is not the sole activity of literary criticism, nor is the practice of literary interpretation sufficiently well formulated to serve as a model upon which philosophy could reform itself.Although Rorty’s proposed reformation of philosophy on the model of literary criticism is seen by many literary critics as a friendly takeover, it can just as easily be seen as hostile, as an updating and domestication of Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, which would make interpretation foundational for all of the knowledge industries. With respect to his paternalistic attitude toward literary criticism, Rorty is very much within a philosophical tradition of foundationalism that begins, as far as literary criticism is concerned, with Plato’s Ion. Whereas Plato argued that literary criticism is a misguided or unworthy form of discourse, Rorty turns it into an approved variety of philosophical discourse. But he can achieve this end only by occluding (through misrepresentation) the praxis of literary criticism as it has been constituted both within and without the academy.Rorty’s project of “edification” through the reform of philosophy as “conversation” was first proposed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (pp. 360, 371) and has subsequently been refined in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where it becomes the Nietzschean project of “making the best selves for ourselves that we can” (p. 80). This goal is said to be achieved through “literary criticism,” which he describes as “the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another” (pp. 78–79). Such an idea is enormously flattering to literary critics, and, not surprisingly, has garnered Rorty many admirers in literature departments. But it rests upon a highly selective characterization of literary criticism—a characterization which conforms roughly to New Critical and Deconstructive practice, though not to longer-standing critical practices.Rorty ignores literary criticism’s long standing self-definition as the reinterpretation or redescription of object texts. Instead, he assumes that the practice of Harold Bloom, in which both “creative” and critical discourse are regarded as varieties of usurpation or “misprision,” is standard. Rorty speaks of “literary discourse” as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Culture in Emerson’s Schellingian Solution to FateNicholas L. Guardiano (bio)Professor of English literature, President of Yale University, and Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Angelo Bartlett Giamatti (1938–1989), delighted in saying that Emerson “is as sweet as barbed wire.”1 Giamatti understood the full range of Emerson’s thought, which spans the highs and lows of the human condition. Writings such as “Experience,” “Illusions,” “The Tragic,” and “Fate” demonstrate the transcending of (...) Emerson’s transcendentalism beyond any soft Romanticism or naïve idealism. They consistently assert the reality of antagonistic forces pervading human experience and nature. “The Tragic” opens with the lines: “He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity” (CW 10:334).2 “Fate” similarly insists: “We cannot trifle with this reality [of fate], this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts” (CW 6:11; my emphasis). Emerson was made intimately aware of the House of Pain by his own personal hardships. To name only a few, there was the death of his first wife Ellen at age 19 from tuberculosis, a rheumatic eye disease that left Emerson nearly blind for months, the terrible loss of his five-year old son Waldo to scarlet fever, the untimely deaths of his two brothers Charles and Edward in their 20s, a fire that partially destroyed the Emerson family home, and the inexorable mental decline into aphasia afflicting Emerson in his final years. Emerson further bore sympathetic witness to the hardships of his friends, family, and community. In addition, he lived through the national crisis of the American Civil War, and was a committed abolitionist willing to face head on the real evils of slavery. These experiences and others were a discipline in the tragic [End Page 28] constitution of the world. Furthermore, they provided hints on how to make one’s way through it.3In this essay, I aim to do some justice to Emerson’s mature transcendentalism by examining his metaphysical-ethical co-principles of fate and freedom, or necessity and power. These co-principles are the central topic of the essay “Fate,” which appeared as the opening chapter of the book The Conduct of Life (1860). There, Emerson somewhat paradoxically admits both principles as opposing forces, and attempts to show their compatibility using a Schellingian dialectic. After presenting Emerson’s understanding of fate and an interpretation of his metaphysical solution to it, I follow up on the primary ethical concern that opens the essay and book, namely “How shall I live?” (CW 6:1). To that end, I attempt to flesh out the ethical character of a life that embraces fate in terms of an Emersonian project of self-culture. My methodological approach throughout evolves progressively from the interpretation to the expansion of Emerson’s ideas. Its first section examines his philosophy as an offshoot of the world-historical line of thought extending from Plato to the Neoplatonists, Eriugena, Spinoza, Goethe, and Schelling, among others. Later philosophers, scientists, and artists who took inspiration from Emerson’s transcendentalism, including Charles Peirce, the Hudson River School painters, Wallace Stevens, and Loren Eiseley, follow the same intellectual trajectory.4 Further taking up the torch, my second section creatively amplifies Emerson’s insights for an ethics of self-culture, and in this way argues for the truth of his Schellingian form of freedom.I. The Problem and Its SolutionFor Emerson, fate is real. It consists in the “immovable limitations” and necessary “laws of the world” (CW 6:2). These limits or laws occur in the conduct of life not so much as theoretical abstractions or remote chains of efficient [End Page 29] causality but as impositions on our will, both from within and without. On the one hand, we are confronted by the rough and tumble of nature, the outside environment in which we live. Serious in Emerson’s nineteenth century and remaining so today are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ON LEO STRAUSS'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS * DOUGLAS KRIES Gonzaga University Spokane, Washington IN COMPOSING the introduction to Natural Right and History in the early 1950's, Leo Strauss described the situation in American social science as a division between two parties : the modern liberals of one persuasion or another, who had largely abandoned natural right altogether, and the students of Thomas (...) Aquinas.1 Since the fundamental goal of that book was a recovery of the classical or pre-modern theory of natural right, one might have anticipated that Strauss's work would have been received enthusiastically by the latter group. If nothing else, Strauss and the Thomists were natural allies because they shared the same modern enemies: namely, historicism (the view that all human thought is confined to the immediate historical horizon of the thinker) and positivism (the view that human thought cannot make value judgments, but only judgments about observable matters of fact). Beyond that, Strauss explored very seriously the issues of reason and revelation.and of religion and politics-both of which are crucial for Thomistic political thought. Yet, despite such favorable auguries, a congenial affiliation of *The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticisms he received in the preparation of this manuscript from David Calhoun of the Philosophy Department at Gonzaga University. 1 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 2, 7. 215 216 DOUGLAS KRIES Straussians and Thomists was never formed.2 Many factors probably contributed to the losing of the opportunity,8 but presumably chief among them was the fact that, even though Strauss's view of Thomas was genuinely respectful, it was not unequivocally sympathetic. Strauss preferred classical natural right theory to modern natural right theory, and he came to the conclusion that Thomas's teaching on natural right-while certainly ' pre-modern ' 4-introduced novelties into the classical position which weakened it rather than improved it. The goal of this essay is to analyze Strauss's reservations about Thomas's statement of the problem of natural right. Such an analysis will, I hope, contribute to a more fruitful exchange between the students of Leo Strauss and those of Thomas Aquinas. I Perhaps the best way to initiate an explanation of Strauss's view of the differences between classical and Thomistic natural right is to contrast the starting points of the two theories. The classical approach begins with what is said about right, with the everyday opinions that are held about what is just. From such an immediate starting point the classical approach ascends toward true knowledge through the process of dialectics. Although all people have views about what is just, in fact such opinions, when examined through friendly disputation with a philosopher, are almost always found to be self-contradictory; however, the 2 This is not to suggest that Strauss was completely ignored and rejected by the Thomists. For an overview of the Thomistic literature which has considered Strauss, see James V. Schall, "Revelation, Reason and Politics: Catholic Reflexions on Strauss," Gregorianum 62 (1981), 349-365, 467-497. s See Ernest L. Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian Perspective," Interpretation 12 (1984), 349-350. 4 For Strauss, the fundamental division within the history of political philosophy was between the ancients and the moderns. He understood Thomas to be in the former camp and was critical of contemporary Thomists who, under pressure from the success of modern physics, had attempted to ' modernize ' Thomas by jettisoning his teleological view of nature. See Natural Right and History, pp. 7-8; What is Political Philosophy? (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1959), pp. 285-6. NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS 217 very fact that one comes to realize that contradiction and seeks to rectify it points to the fact that human beings realize that a more comprehensive, non-contradictory view might be possible. The contradictions thus force one to ascend beyond the opinions that are at best only partially true toward an ever more consistent view, a view based on nature; if such a process could reach culmination, the culmination would constitute a statement of what is right by nature.5 The starting... (shrink)

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

During World War II, the Institute for Social Research conducted an innovative study of American working-class antisemitism. This article goes beyond existing literature by reconstructing the project’s evolving understanding of labor antisemitism—from ideology to psychopathology. This change, it argues, arose from the project’s methods, findings, and analytical concepts—especially the long-overlooked concept of the stereotype. The article documents this concept’s role in two better-known Institute works from the period: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Authoritarian Personality. Throughout, it traces continuities in the (...) Institute’s research program and reconsiders the balance between its empirical studies and its critical theory in the 1940s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural MarxismPaul Allen Miller (bio)Jameson, Fredric. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 296 pp.Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide-ranging contributions as Jameson. From his (...) early work on Sartre’s style, passing through the twin opera on dialectical theory (Marxism and Form) and formalism and structuralism (Prisonhouse of Language), and the idiosyncratic appreciation of Wyndham Lewis (Fables of Aggression) to that summa of Marxist hermeneutics, The Political Unconscious, and from his major collection of essays, The Ideologies of Theory, through his books on Adorno (Late Marxism) and film (Signatures of the Visible), to that foundational text on postmodern literature, theory, art, and architecture, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the late work on world cinema (The Geopolitical Aesthetic), utopianism (The Seeds of Time), Brecht (Brecht and Method), modernity (A Singular Modernity), and science fiction (Archaeologies of the Future), Jameson’s career is unparalleled in the American letters. It is perhaps not coincidental, either, that this larger-than-life figure on the intellectual stage ranging easily from Russian formalism to Deleuzean antihumanism, from Balzac to Frank Gehry, and from Hegel to Derrida, is an intellectual dissident. Contemporary American life’s alternation between uncritical consumerism (Marcuse’s one-dimensional man) and nonothing anti-intellectualism (Christian fundamentalism and corporate-fueled jingoism) could only produce such a body of work as an alien presence: its own systemic negation and thus the fullest expression of its deepest internal contradictions. The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.Naturally, as with any collection of interviews, not every thing is new here. Indeed, to the seasoned reader of Jameson, much of this is familiar territory, and there is a fair amount of repetition from one interview to the next (Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” for example, is a recurring motif). Nonetheless, there are many moments of real insight and bold commentary that remind us why Marxism is far from dead and how Jameson has achieved an iconic status rivaling that of Lukacs, Althusser, or Eagleton, as one of the preeminent Marxist thinkers of the last century. Many of these come in the form of vignettes, little snippets of cultural analysis. One such comes in Jameson’s interview with Columbia University Professor of History Anders Stephanson. Here Stephanson asks Jameson to comment on the recent architectural and cultural phenomenon of creating ersatz public spaces. These come in the form of commercial areas that present themselves in guise of “squares,” “plazas,” or “villages.” They make reference to and pastiche traditional forms of life and then re-represent them in the form of a hypercapitalist consumerism. These simulacra of less alienated, precapitalist forms of [End Page 65] life are then presented as depthless surfaces, parodies of authenticity. The archetype of such ersatz public spaces is Disney’s EPCOT:Stephanson: In other words, you are referring to his compressed version of the world; little toy countries where you can orient yourself in no time at all.Jameson: I suppose you can orient yourself because walking paths are available. But where you actually are is a real problem, for you may in fact be in the Florida Everglades, and in this case you are not only in a swamp but also in a simulacrum of a different geographical complex altogether. Disneyland is, on the whole, supremely prophetic and paradigmatic of these multiple shifting and dissolving spatial levels. (49)This is both an insightful observation and a wonderful example of Jameson’s dialectic at work. One moment we’re walking hand in hand with Goofy round the little, fake Eiffel Tower of EPCOT and the next we sink into the morass that paved the Everglades, acquired control... (shrink)

An attempt to reinterpret American literature "as a kind of imaginative and experimental projection" of the "American Dream"--the ideal of perfect freedom and democracy. The author's critical and methodological principles, unfortunately, are never quite made clear.--L. H.