This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (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)

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to Literature explores Adorno’s essays on literature as an independent contribution to his aesthetics with an emphasis on his theory and practice of literary interpretation. Essential to Adorno’s essays is his unorthodox treatment of language and history and his elaboration of the links between the two. One of Adorno’s major but often-neglected claims is that truth is relative to its historical medium, language. Adorno persistently and creatively tries to (...) narrow the gulf between truth and expression, philosophy and rhetoric, and his essays on literature are practical examples of his effort to critically rescue the rhetorical dimension of philosophy. Rather than relying exclusively on aesthetic concepts inherited from his predecessors in the Western tradition (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard), Adorno’s essays seek to transgress and transcend the conceptual limitations of aesthetic discourse by appropriating a non-conceptual, metaphorical vocabulary borrowed from the literary texts he investigates. Thus, Adorno’s interpretations of literature mobilize an alternative subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discourse on language and history that eludes the categories that tend to predominate his thinking in his major work, Aesthetic Theory. This book puts forth the claim that Adorno’s essays on literature are of central relevance for an understanding of his aesthetics because they challenge the conceptual limitations of philosophical discourse. (shrink)

The analysis of historical literature allows to consider profoundly the development of national culture and science of the 18th-first half of the 20th centuries and the formation and change of different historical concepts. With the analysis of historical periods that are highlighted in the research, general trends in the changing of paradigms about Russian historical development were concluded, which were translated to mass historical consciousness from the beginning of the 18th century up to 1917. The periods were closely connected (...) with the specific political, historical and economic changes in Russian Empire and with the dominance of certain textbooks during this time. The books were selected because of a number of factors: their inclusion to the school curriculum, the number of publications, the equal number of textbooks devoted to different historical periods. For the analysis were used 19 textbooks, schoolbooks for different courses of secondary schools and primary schools. All the sources of educational literature were grouped into two concepts - officially-state and the liberal. Each publication was highlighted the dominant concept as a base for the whole textbook. There is also a characteristic of the concepts that are presented chronologically. The analysis represents school history books as an important source for the formation of state policy in the representing of Russian history, and, that is more important, for creation of the concept of the state of Russian history. (shrink)

The great critic Peter Viereck, in a volume that both reproduces an earlier effort and presents an entirely new work on the intersection of history and literature, offers a biting critique of the American desire for normalcy that leads to a culture of the surrender of personality. In contrast to this voluntary thought control process is the unadjusted person. Cast in the mold of great individualists from Thomas More to Friedrich Nietzsche, such a person responds to fundamental values (...) of conscience rather than conformity built exclusively on ego gratification and icon worship. Viereck's book is a stinging critique of the liberal presumption of a monopoly in critical thought. He argues to the contrary, that most varieties of liberal expression offer little else than the common platitude dressed up as critique. In such a cultural environment, conservatism is the skeleton in the liberal closet. The virtue of conservatism is that in its very stress on liberty as dependent on tradition and law, it permits the human being an opportunity to test all transient things by the touchstone of all lasting ideas. Unadjusted Man cuts deep and in many directions: against left totalitarian regimes of Europe and right wannabes like McCarthyism in America. For Viereck, the art of conserving is not an embrace of utopias to come or empires that were, but retaining the sense of individuality over against the senselessness of the "massman." Civil liberties in this approach are a right to non-conspiratorial dissent informed by fundamental values. The new material is presented unabashedly--without an attempt to rewrite personal history, and with an admission that not every prediction made in the original edition has come to fruition. That said, the underlying themes of the original are not so much repeated as expanded upon. For those seeking a work in the classic mold of conservatism, rather than the strident reactionary views that have come to dominate much of the conservative dialogue, this will be a special book, a special entrance to the mind of a great figure in American culture wars of present as well as past. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable (...) - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

Numinous spaces in British literature from William Wordsworth to Samuel Beckett -- Jesus figures in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Edward Albee -- Using Bakhtin's definitions to discover ethical voices in Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy -- René Girard's categories of scapegoats in literature of the American South -- Hopkins's metaphysics of nature as sacred disclosure -- The book of job as mirrored in Hopkins's metaphysics -- Beckett's mythos of the absence of God.

In this article, I discuss a relatively recent development of Russian interest in Kyiv as a place with symbolic and historical significance for Russian history, which makes it a desirable target in an ongoing war. I trace the changing attitude of Russian travelers towards Kyiv’s history from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Earlier generations of visitors came to Kyiv primarily to visit holy places, with no knowledge of the city’s historical significance, and because it was a (...) more affordable alternative to travel abroad. However, at the end of the eighteenth century, after Catherine II’s royal visit, the publication of guidebooks, and the ascend of history as a discipline, and interest among Russian educated elites, Kyiv’s past became an obsession for many Russian travelers. Their travel accounts were motivated by a search for the past glory of Kyiv. For Russian travelers and authorities, history became one of the key means of appropriation of Kyiv, with a new generation of travelers searching for material evidence connecting Kyivan Rus to the Russian past. However, they were unable to find much material evidence and often used their imagination to present Kyiv as a site of Kyivan Rus history, ignoring the city’s non[1]Russian heritage. (shrink)

The Jamesian mode of writing, it has been claimed, actively works against an understanding of the way truth, history and power circulate in his texts. In this collection of essays, leading scholars of James analyse the strategies James used to address these crucial issues. Enacting History in Henry James claims that, because the type of knowledge available in James's fiction is never of a cognitive kind, the reader can never know 'truth' in any verifiable sense. James's writing instead (...) promises an experiential type of knowledge, one that is attained by participating in the power games and moral dramas that unfold within the text. This collection argues that reading James ultimately requires not just an emotional responsiveness, but also an ethical assumption of responsibility for the act of reading. By placing James's work in a fresh theoretical context, this book throws new light on this most enigmatic of writers. (shrink)

The beginnings of modern Romanian culture coincide with the discovery of folk literature. The first to benefit from this true “revelation,” around the middle of the last century, were two of the most authentic representatives of Romanian romanticism: Vasile Alecsandri and Alecu Russo. However, the earliest manifesto of Romanian romanticism was not very explicit in its treatment of the subject, because others who participated in the current—especially Mihail Kogălniceanu and Nicolae Bălcescu— were primarily historians. In 1840 the contensts of (...) Dacia literară, a magazine edited by them, gave literary status to heroic events that had entered into Romanian history; second place was reserved for the beauty of the Romanian countryside; the picturesque and the poetic content of the traditions held by the people who had lived this history and animated this countryside were only third in importance. Now, the term “traditions” could be applied in the same way to different artistic expressions: dance, music or literature. (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument (...) has been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

An artistic interpretation of historical facts is quite relevant in the literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society. Prose works on historical themes are valuable and interesting in that they create an illusion for readers to be present in a certain period of historical time, and it is the artistic modeling of events that makes priceless facts of history completely disappear. The historical past is an inexhaustible material that word artists have been referring to for centuries, creating the (...) best examples of fiction. Prose texts of historical subjects are perceived by each next generation in a new way, historical events and phenomena are interpreted from different angles, the activities of famous figures of the past are widely covered. Non-fiction literature is a kind of literature that is on the verge of artistry and documentary. The main non-fiction genres are a diary, autobiography, biography, memoirs, confession, letters, etc. On the one hand, non-fiction literature claims to recognize the author’s subjective truth about him in her texts; on the other hand, only the reader can either, demonstrating full confidence in the author, call this text documentary, or admit the presence of poetry and aesthetics in the work and tilt the scales in the direction of artistry. The material for observation and research of the phenomenon of artistic modeling are works that allow us to trace the most common, in our opinion, models of correlation of historical and artistic consciousness in postmodern literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society. (shrink)

In spite of being a well articulated proposal, the theory of quantum histories, in its different versions, suffers from certain difficulties that have been pointed out in the literature. Nevertheless, two facets of the proposal have not been sufficiently stressed. On the one hand, it is a non-collapse formalism that should be technically appropriate to supply descriptions based on quantum properties at different times. On the other hand, it intends to provide an interpretation of quantum mechanics that solves the (...) traditional puzzles of the theory. In this article we spell out the main criticisms to TQH and classify them into two groups: theoretical and interpretive. Whereas the latter might be ignored if the TQH were considered as a quantum formalism with its minimum interpretation, the former seems to point toward technical difficulties that must be faced in a theoretically adequate proposal. Precisely with the purpose of solving these difficulties, we introduce a different perspective, called Formalism of Generalized Contexts or Formalism of Contextual Histories, which supplies a precise condition for consistently talking of quantum properties at different times without the theoretical shortcomings of the TQH. (shrink)

This book is an inter-disciplinary volume based on collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences that explores the benefits of historical understanding in leading disciplines, including History, Politics, Literature, Economics, Anthropology, Law, Sociology, and Philosophy.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the humanities and social sciences have turned toward history, something that culminated in the 1990s, and this phenomenon was evident in law as well. However, until recently, law and economics, the most influential post-World War II jurisprudential movement, was a-historical in its methodology and research agenda. The first objective of this article is to call attention to this neglected characteristic of law and economics and to explain its causes by analyzing its (...) intellectual origins, its methodological causes, and the nature of its interaction with other sub-fields of law and of economics. The second objective of the article is to identify a change-in-the-making and its characteristics. Law and economics scholars have turned to history more often and for new purposes in recent years. The article identifies the set of factors that brought about this turn to history. These factors include: a growing willingness to conduct empirical research; the integration of public choice analysis into mainstream law and economics; preliminary comparative law and economics studies; a growing interaction between law and economics and new institutional economics; and the importation of the concept of path dependency and of greater awareness of past burdens from other quarters of economic theory. Finally, the article examines the concrete ways in which these developments are being realized, by pointing out the various uses of history evident in specific law and economics studies conducted in recent years. It suggests a classification of this growing literature into six distinct uses of history, four of them emerging only in recent years. The general aim of this article is to enhance awareness among law and economics scholars of the actual and potential uses of history. The article further seeks to connect law-and-economics historical studies to other relevant historical works so that the law and economics inquiry will not be conducted in a disciplinary vacuum. It thus calls to the attention of legal historians and economic historians the new literature published in the field of law and economics. Finally it is also directed at scholars interested in the intellectual history of jurisprudence and in the methodological turn to history in the social sciences. (shrink)

Les prémices du mouvement pour l’émancipation des femmes coïncident dans l’espace grec avec leur entrée sur la scène littéraire. Les écrivaines participent d’abord largement de la veine patriotique qui caractérise la littérature grecque au xixe siècle. Mais elles s’en éloignent progressivement à partir des années 1880, quand certaines se tournent vers la prose et la fiction, évolution propice à l’expression d’une critique du système de genre qui correspond en outre à un glissement du récit de l’histoire nationale vers celui d’histoires (...) de la sphère privée. Outre l’intérêt intrinsèque qu’elle présente, notamment à travers l’intrication de la question nationale et de la question des femmes, l’étude du rapport des écrivaines grecques à l’histoire au xixe siècle invite à une réflexion historiographique et épistémologique sur l’articulation entre genre, histoire et littérature. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain (...) thinking activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed (...) on a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

The Circumcision Controversy in Classical Reform in Historical Context Judith Bleich Toward the close of the nineteenth century, a gathering of rabbinic ...

Talmudic history, understood as how events are organized and narrated to teach, cannot be said to deal with great affairs; it simply tells what those responsible for compiling it thought about the world around them. But if manifest history is scarcely present, a rich and complex world of latent history does lie ready at hand. The Talmud and related literature contain two sorts of historical information: stories about events within an estate of clerks, and data on (...) the debates of those who produced the Talmud. The authors of the Mishnah found no reason to narrate history because what was important in Israel's existence was sanctification, an ongoing process. Its framers recognized the pastness of the past and hence, by definition, laid out a conception of the past that constitutes an historical doctrine. The Talmud of the Land of Israel, spurred by the story of the suffering of Israel and efforts to explain the tragedy, moves toward an interest in the periodization of history and a willingness to include events of far greater diversity than the Mishnah. A teleology lacking all eschatological dimension - the Mishnah - here gives way to an explicitly messianic statement that the purpose of the law is to attain Israel's salvation -the Talmud of the Land of Israel. (shrink)

With their common focus on narrative, literary scholars and historians of science share a close relationship with language and can offer each other valuable interpretive insights. Particularly revealing in each field are scientists' and literary writers' changing uses of metaphor, which is critical to each kind of scholarship since both disciplines place such a high value on cultural context. Any cross‐disciplinary help, however, needs to take into account the essential differences between the fields: contrasting views of what constitutes evidence and (...) varying relationships with the past. Since both kinds of scholarship involve creating as well as analyzing narratives, each field has developed its own sense of pacing and significance, and their differing approaches to truth deserve respect. -/- . (shrink)

Through essays, Mount Mary College professors from various disciplines analyze several pieces of literature from a variety of genres and authors to show how ...

Centered on practices of the body - human bodies, the "body politic", this book considers a fascinating and largely uncanonical group of texts, as well as public dramas, rituals, and spectacles, from multidisciplinary perspectives. These essays consider the way the human body is subjected to educational discipline, to corporate celebration, and to the production of gendered identity through the experiences of marriage and childbirth. Among the topics explored are the "theatrics of punishment", including legal mutilation; the representation of the body (...) of Christ as social ritual; adolescent misbehaviour and its treatment; and conflicting ecclesiastical and lay models of sexual behaviour. The contributors also trace the definition of "poor", "foreign", and "dissident" bodies, examining private and public issues surrounding social identities. The result is a volume that incorporates insights from history, literature, medieval studies, and critical theory, drawing from the strengths of each discipline to illuminate a relatively little-studied period. Insightful and momentous, "Bodies and disciplines" marks an important intervention in the development of cultural studies of late medieval England. (shrink)

In Music in the Mirror, thirteen distinguished scholars explore the concept of music, music theory, and music literature as mirror images of one another?whether real or distorted. Encompassing the history of music and music theory and literature from the Middle Ages to the present, these essays, in their reconsideration of the relationships among music, theory, and literature, offer new approaches and articulate compelling visions for future research.

In the paper I try to define some basic ideas and sketch a style of Marek Siemek’s epistemological reflection and its influence on the notion of do called “meaning of history”. I referee some elements of his interpretation of Kant and Hegel as a background to paradox of “meaning of the history”—the paradox of its necessary transcendence and immanence, the contradiction between a history as an eschatology, and history as a “project”, a dialectic of sense and (...) non-sense. The conclusion is following: the “history” for Siemek is the becoming of self-sufficiency of the “modern spirit” and therefore a tragicomedy in the Hegelian sense. It excludes any transcendent point of view or any utopia. (shrink)

This paper considers the disciplines of literature and history and the contributions each makes to the discourse of bioethics. In each case I note the pedagogic ends that can be enacted though the appropriate use of the each of these disciplines in the sphere of medical education, particularly in the medical ethics classroom.1 I then explore the contribution that both these disciplines and their respective methodologies can and do bring to the academic field of bioethics. I conclude with (...) a brief consideration of the relations between literature and history with particular attention to the possibilities for a future bioethics informed by history and literature after the empirical turn. (shrink)