In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been (...) doing the chores for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 171-173 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding, by David Ellis; ix & 195 pp. New York: Routledge, 2000, $35. In his discussion of biography as a form, Ellis points to his study as a response to the scarcity of "monographs on (...) class='Hi'>biography... and [that] none of them are particularly satisfactory" (p. 2). He further points out that "the comparative dearth of analytic enquiry into biography is surprising" (p. 3). In short, his first pages get off to a rocky start in their tatty justification of a critical study. Though a critic of D. H. Lawrence, Ellis uses the English writer sparingly, pointing out in his "Preface" what he feels is a need "to keep illustration involving Lawrence to a decent minimum" (p. viii) while concentrating on those problems which face the biographer. That said, he sets about to characterize biography as an integration of "a disinterested enthusiasm for information... [fashioning a]... compelling story in which many details with no direct relevance to the life of his subject can be considered as contributing successfully to a period atmosphere" (p. 35). Ellis is thinking specifically of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene through which he has brought to the discussion his intent of pointing to an approach which concerns itself with chapters on "Ancestors," "Primal Scenes," "Body Matters," "the Sociological [End Page 171] Imagination," "History, Chance and Self-determination," "Compatibility, Sartre and Long Biographies." All are aspects of biography.As well as the approach he suggests by these areas of concentration, Ellis draws broadly from many subjects of biography, always keeping a critical eye on its form. Anne Stevenson's approach "is towards psychological determinism" (p. 135); Ackroyd in his biography of Dickens raises "through a degree of intellectual play" the questions of when "lineage" is appropriate, that is, the extent to which it has any productive consequence. He also uses Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf as examples. Writing of the role of the historian raises difficulties for writers creating biographies from such an early period as that of Chaucer; Ellis points to Derek Pearsall's "excellent Life of Geoffrey Chaucer" (p. 121).Ellis neither can nor should ignore Lawrence and what better chapter to include him in than "Body Matters" in its concentration on illness. Here Ellis draws on Lawrence's concern with the harm of his health on his work (p. 78). He also considers Flaubert, Sartre, and Woolf. Briefly he mentions Stendhal's imagination of his "future audience" after his death (p. 109), sensibly rejects the long ago depleted and so, parenthetically, apparently permanent speculation on what Keats's might have become had he lived a full life "in a time of drugs for treatment of tuberculosis" (p. 123) and the equally mined issue of what prompted Hemingway's suicide (pp. 132-33). Certainly he is aware of the danger that such a use of material may pander to the pleasure of mere name-hunters (what if there were no index!). At the same time, if the effect of his range of examples invites additions of our own, while keeping before us that his study is about biography as form, it is successful.In "Primal Scenes," the fourth chapter of his book, Ellis gives what he feels is necessary space to Freud, the creator of the term. He points to Wordsworth's "spots of time" as only one indication of the difficulty--if not impossibility--of capturing biographically those moments in childhood by which the individual written about might be defined (p. 57). (Such an impossibility should not be surprising to those of us readers who recognize the nearly impossible task for ourselves in our own lives.) Surely both the biographer and autobiographer share this ignorance and frustration. In a very interesting move, Ellis points to Compton Mackenzie's discussion of a critical event in his six-year old life surrounding the interruption of an Easter evening with his parents and siblings, interrupted by the arrival of friends. Ellis writes... (shrink)

V Individuum est ineffabile: bearing of this experience on Erasmus' view of history; Christ as the prototype of individuality 79 VI Erasmus' biographical ...

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how (...) the ancient collective biographical tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates the psychological and intellectual demands writing biography makes on the biographer and explores the complex and frequently conflicted relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and what areas - theory of character, for instance - must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory. Psychoanalytic theory used for biography, she argues, can yield insights for psychoanalysis itself, particularly in the understanding (...) of creativity. (shrink)

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to (...) refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger's biting monitor, Hachikō and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy's gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination. (shrink)

The conventional description of biography as a form of nonfiction narrative begs questions about the stories biographies tell, the facts that constitute their raw material, and the language in which they are cast. These questions are seen as central for students of the arts and humanities and are addressed as three interrelated issues as exemplified in literary biography. First, it is argued that biographies have a cellular structure that derives from the imposition of a master narrative (...) over the subject’s life, one that creates continuity and coherence from the heterogeneous accumulation of mininarratives found in the biographer’s sources. The factual status of these sources is shown to be complex due to the ambiguous nature of the subject’s literary works considered as data; to be unstable due to unavoidable features such as archival gaps, and the selectivity, speculation, and error that are inherent in the biographical process; and to be malleable because of the particular agenda that motivates every biography. Finally, the “literariness” of biographical language is shown to be fundamental in the rhetorical evocation of the subject. Art and artifice combine in a genre that provokes questions about the relationship between the life stories biographers construct and the narratives by which we make sense of life. (shrink)

“Biography” is a sober, precise and modern word. Like other words formed from a Greek root, it has a competent and knowing air. It makes a good appearance in the summary of reviews, on the platform at conferences, between “biology” and “bibliography,” between “necrology” and “radiography,” in that scientific elite of the lexicon that travels in “business” class from one language to another, always at home in the time belts, hotel lobbies, conference rooms or amphitheaters. Compared with this prosperity, (...) the word “Life” is old-fashioned, a poor relative doomed to retirement homes. In the period between the two wars it disappeared from bookstore windows and book jackets. The hesitations of André Maurois, the author of Aspects de la biographie (1928), are characteristic of a transition: he wavered between La Vie de Disraeli (1927), Ariel ou la vie de Shelley (1923), Prométhée ou la vie de Balzac (1965) and Byron (1930). We sense that the title Vie was on the way out or had to yield to a proper name or an allegorical figure. However, it was a word in good standing, nobly Latin in origin, as great a signore in its class as those Massimi or Colonna who claimed their ancestors were mentioned by Titus Livy. Its genealogy is still more ancient, if we recall that its metonymic and literary meaning in Latin is a translation of the Greek word Bios, which the Hellenes, inventors of the genre and who had a more pedantic use of their language than we do, were content to use up until the end. “Biography,” according to Liddell-Scott, is not found in Antiquity except in a very late neo-Platonian, Damaskios, who put this humorless escogriffe into circulation when twilight was descending on the Roman Empire, between the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., at the dawn of the Middle Ages. It made its entrance into modern languages in the last quarter of the 17th century, when the humanism of the Renaissance was coming to an end, and the Enlightenment was beginning its rise. This late and ill-boding word began a slow ascension, long delayed: it did not come into usage outside the circles of antiquarians until the 19th century. The old word “Life” proudly kept its importance until the ‘20s of our era in the particularly conservative language of titles of works. Its definitive effacement to the profit of “biography” brought that of the word “memoirs” or the word “confessions,” which yielded to “autobiography,” while “hagiography” without being able to impose itself so well in usage, took much gravity and credibility away from the “Lives of the Saints.”. (shrink)

Stanley Fish opens the collection with a persuasive argument for the role of intention and biography. Michael McKeon, Gordon Turnbull, and Jerome Christensen are concerned with the late eighteenth--and early nineteenth-century English cultural discourse that gave rise to the nearly simultaneous emergence of literary biography, Romantic sensibility, and reflexive human consciousness. The essays by Alison Booth, Cheryl Walker, and Sharon O'Brien reveal that the recognition or lack thereof the biographical subject has received and remains both a problem (...) and an opportunity for women writers and readers. The essays by Valerie Ross, Rob Wilson, Steven Weiland, and William Epstein pursue the question of difference and cultural reification in the theory and practice of a specifically American biography and biographical criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Biography in Antiquity by Tomas HäggDan CurleyTomas Hägg. The Art of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xv + 496 pp. Cloth, $110.We know less about the genre of ancient biography than handbooks and brief surveys would have us believe. Genres by their nature invite definition, and historiographical perspectives on this genre in particular promote tidy classifications and clear lines (...) of influence. Tomas Hägg’s Art of Biography in Antiquity, which undertakes close readings of some eight-hundred years’ worth of biographical authors and texts, not only recognizes but also embraces ancient life-writing as a vast, polymorphous, versatile, and lacunary enterprise. For those of us who, like this reviewer, prefer to read the works of ancient biographers in literary terms, this is the book we have been wanting.Hägg’s “Prolegomena” are brief but cover the critical issues surrounding ancient biography (and, by way of comparison or contrast, modern biography). Chief among these are the question of the biographical genre itself, which Hägg acknowledges “is more subject matter than form” (3), and the welcome recuperation of biography as the product of “creative imagination” from its traditional status as a “sub-branch of historiography” (3). Hägg distinguishes historiography from historicity—namely, the biographer’s evaluation of, and approaches to, his sources—and he enumerates what might be considered biographical biases, from [End Page 713] the emphasis on public rather than private life, to transference between author and subject, to the inventive bridging of gaps, to the tension between cradle-to-grave chronology and characterization in the moment. Brevity courts controversy, and Hägg cautions that “no systematic treatment of biographic theory and practice is intended” (1). Yet his prolegomena lay out clear guideposts for the case studies of later chapters, which make a more or less chronological exploration of the genre.Chapter 1, even as it postulates Xenophon as the most important (or, at least, the most prolific) proto-biographer, discusses a range of fifth-and fourth-century b.c.e. texts and the ways in which they are—and, just as often, are not— biographies: Ion of Chios, Epidemiai; Plato, Apology and Phaedo; Xenophon, Memorabilia; Isocrates, Evagoras; Xenophon, again, Agesilaus and Cyropaedia. It is no small task to trace the development of a genre given a vexed chronology, the differing purposes of these texts, and uncertainty as to how much influence their authors exerted upon one another. The Epidemiai offers a sympotic anecdote about Sophocles (preserved in Ath. 13.603e–4d) that illuminates the tragedian’s character. The Apology and the Phaedo together display and interpret the life of Socrates as “an ethical unity” (19), the former a retrospective defense of the philosopher’s career, the latter ending with a scenic description of his death. The Memorabilia, in turn, paints a “consistent, pregnant picture” (27) of Socrates’ persona with its serial anecdotes. The Evagoras confirms its own status as written encomium (graphein) and introduces what would become standard topoi, such as its subject’s genealogy, childhood, and methods of ruling. Likewise, the Agesilaus, which emphasizes writing to an even greater degree and dichotomizes the Spartan king’s deeds and their underlying virtues. The Cyropaedia, therefore, is a pinnacle of proto-biography, extending from Cyrus’ childhood to his fictional, idealized death. Although Hägg reads each work on its own terms, and avoids an overly simplistic taxonomy, his emphasis on the unbiographical qualities of his case studies is at times counterproductive. Furthermore, he tends to conclude his discussions with considerations of “the biographical,” as if the preceding analyses—frequently engaged with the aforementioned topoi—have had little bearing. This said, chapter 1 describes a genre developing along lines that later biographers, and their readers, would have recognized.Chapter 2, a survey of Hellenistic biographers, is on firmer (albeit more fragmentary) ground, perhaps because the texts of this era regularly have bios in their titles and therefore help to establish “an unmistakably biographical form” (67). Hägg considers examples from the three traditional sub-categories of Hellenistic “professional biography” (97), namely, the philosophic, the literary, and the political: Aristoxenus’ Pythagoras and Socrates; Satyrus’ Life of Euripides... (shrink)

A common contention of literary criticism is that literary forms can express, reflect, shape, represent or otherwise give form to human life. Literature can seem to offer the same idea as a promise of life’s meaningfulness; where expressive form is powerful, life need not be empty. Can literary forms give form to human life? I will argue for one sense in which this is true. As will become clear, at stake in this inquiry is (...) not simply an idea about the meaningfulness of literature’s poetry, but a way of answering the question of what it means to be human. (shrink)

If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in principle impossible that we might choose to set going an initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of the (...) predispositions for or against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety, evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form, threatens to remain merely gestural and generic. “History” promises thus to function as legitimating any reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived, whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist reconstructions. David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 and Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement. (shrink)

The paper offers a qualified endorsement of Terry Eagleton’s striking claim that “a work’s moral outlook … may be secreted as much in its form as its content”. A number of points are raised in defence of the claim: an argument for the inseparability, under certain conditions, of form and content in a literary work; an idea of moral content, not as derived moral principle, but as inward-facing interpretation grounded in an ethical vocabulary; the possibility of internal (...) and external perspectives on fictional characters; and an emphasis on emotions expressed in, rather than caused by, narrative. Three literary examples are explored, to show how vocabulary, syntax, implicature, and tone, contribute to the emergence of moral salience. A consequence drawn is that the ethical stance readers take to a scene or incident is partially shaped by the narrative modes of its presentation. The overall perspective of the paper is that of aesthetic autonomism: the view that the aesthetic value of a work of literature is distinct from, and not reducible to, any instrumental moral values (positive or negative) attributed to the work. (shrink)

A formalist approach to literature, one that bears witness to the movements of distinct levels of form as they compel one another to a kind of infra-literary psychoanalysis, helps move us beyond the critical dichotomies — text vs. context, history vs. form, realism vs. the avant-garde — that have sometimes hampered recognition of the topologically complex and uneven fashion in which literature intervenes in the world. This article argues that it is the particular modes of constriction, isolation (...) and textual withdrawal that literature induces which paradoxically reveal literature’s psychoanalytic approach to its outsides. The article begins by close-reading a few short passages from Lacan, passages which when reframed offer the initial ingredients of a psychoanalytically informed materialist literary-critical formalism. It then turns to Paul de Man’s late reflections on literary form and materiality, before concluding with a reading of the poetry of Geoffrey G. O’Brien. (shrink)

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The volume (...) includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular LanguagesFrançoise Lionnet* (bio)In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf quips: “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men;” literary history, she might have added, is too much about sons murdering their fathers. Canonical readings of the canon have often insisted on the vaguely Freudian (if not biblical) model of literary (...) creation susceptible both to “anxieties of influence” and to creative revisions imposed by strong misreadings. Criticism has followed the same reactive pattern in order to clear new ground for further research: the debate between “traditionalists” and proponents of “cultural studies” all but repeats this familiar and combative dialectic. Between formalist and sociopolitical readings, French texts have been mined by many different critical trends; but the perspectives that do not fit neatly into one or the other of these agonistic moves tend to be left out. Dominick LaCapra has suggested that “one issue for readers today is whether a different, ‘noncanonical’ reading of the canon, which resists symbolic resolutions as well as narrowly formalistic interpretations, may be one force in reopening texts to the[ir] broader sociopolitical effects” [731].In the case of Baudelaire, the way to do this “noncanonical” reading might well be to go back to a discursive field which includes biography and oral histories, and to resist the temptation either to eulogize the innovations of the poet of modernity or to denounce the patent racism of his images. The challenge today is to return to the scene of writing and the conditions of production of the early poetry—in other words, to look at the text from outside of conventional literary, critical or cultural history, to reclaim it for our side, that of a more global francophonie. To do so might mean to map out once again the contested terrain of culturally and politically sensitive readings such as the ones Christopher Miller and Gayatri Spivak claim to do. Their readings, however, do not take into account the residual cultural element of the poetry, that is, the vernacular language it appropriates. This language is all but buried beneath the emergent theoretical practices of postcolonial criticism and its vaguely nationalist agendas. 1 Critics have tended to look for [End Page 63] symbolic resolutions and to settle cultural scores at the expense of historical and geographical specificity, despite claims to the contrary.The facts of Baudelaire’s youthful travels in the Indian Ocean have remained relatively obscure. While doing research in the islands of Mauritius and Réunion on two separate occasions during the past few years, I came across written documents and watercolors that helped me reconstruct the historical and visual contexts that appear to have been Baudelaire’s in 1841. By re-examining the criticisms that have been lodged against the exoticizing rhetoric of his poetry, I want to foreground the links between the Creole culture with which Baudelaire became familiar and the now canonical texts he produced. These links can allow us to bypass the sterile opposition between “literary studies” and “cultural studies” or between aesthetics and politics; they demonstrate the urgency of re-visioning the canon not just from the perspectives of its margins, but as an important source of muted cultural knowledge. The questions with which I begin, then, are the following: where did Baudelaire actually go on his travels in 1841? and why does this matter to the field of French studies?Il faut en finir avec la légende de l’Inde parcourue par Baudelaire. Elle était séduisante, Gautier l’a adoptée, Banville ne l’a pas négligée.... Mais la vérité vraie est que Baudelaire, embarqué malgré lui, brûla la politesse à l’Inde.... Peut-être Baudelaire abandonnait-il complaisamment au commun public ces bruits de longues pérégrinations en pays fabuleux, parce qu’il en tirait, avec des couleurs de mystère, l’air de revenir de loin. Dans tous les cas, il ne nous parlait jamais de ces voyages. A peine, à son retour, nous dit-il quelques mots d’une station dans l’île Maurice ou l’île Bourbon. 2[It is time to put a stop to... (shrink)

Widely chosen by students of society as an approach under which to labour, emancipatory, liberatory or, otherwise put, critical social thought occupies a position between knowledge and practical action whose coherence is taken for granted on account of the pressing nature of the issues it attempts to deal with. As such it is rarely subjected to scrutiny and the methodological, conceptual and moral challenges it faces are not properly identified. The contribution of this article is to raise these problems into (...) view clearly and unambiguously. This is undertaken via a careful examination of Alice Crary’s recent work, in which she attempts, firstly, to defend a left-Hegelian version of Critical Theory by relating it to the work of Peter Winch and, second, to issue a set of methodologically radical recommendations on employing the sensibility-shaping powers of the literary form. The article aims to deepen our understanding of the fundamental tensions between the Critical Theory and Wittgensteinian traditions, which Crary attempts to bring together and, ultimately, of those crucial features of our moral practices that frustrate the enterprise of critical social thought. (shrink)

Starting from the identification and characterization of three literary forms that coexist throughout Parmenides’ Poem, all of them plainly different from each other, it is proposed and demonstrated that such a variety of forms mirrors the delimitation of the different ways of thought and language elaborated by Parmenidic philosophy, in which at least two types of nature of knowledge must be recognized: the logical and the cosmological. The first, marked by a formally logical-argumentative speech which is given the name (...) of truth (aletheia) and whose way of thinking is exclusively noetic; the second, of a theoretical-descriptive nature, dedicated to the consideration of the movement proper to cosmic phenomena, whose devenir demands an equally mobile way of thinking (phronein). (shrink)

It was [Maria] Edgeworth’s deeply personal motive in writing Harrington that made possible the special self-reflexive quality that informs her novel. In the act of reviewing her role as a reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits, she was able to recognize a tradition of discourse she had at once inherited and perpetuated. And only by recognizing such a tradition was she able both to subvert it in Harrington and to articulate for future writers the way to move beyond it. (...) In short, she boldly turned her personal self-examination into a cultural critique: she diagnosed a disorder in “the imaginations of the good people of England,”4 and in so doing she issued a challenge and founded a new tradition. In Harrington Edgeworth inquires into the trials that the English imagination must undergo if it is to exorcise the powerful figure of Shylock, and thereby issues a challenge taken up in subsequent novels : the tradition I am designating “the novel of Jewish Identity” attempts to articulate, investigate, and subvert The Merchant of Venice’s function as the English master text for representing “the Jew.” Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, vol. 9 of Tales and Novels , p. 148; hereafter cited by page number. Michael Ragussis, professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition and Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction . He is currently working on a book-length study entitled “Figures of Conversion: Jewish Identity and British Fiction.”. (shrink)

Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious (...) efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced. (shrink)

Although many people find fault with Freud, the horse that they flog is not yet dead. I should in fact maintain that we are all still under Freud's long shadow. Last autumn the American press reported a dreadful crime: a young man, egged on by his mother, murdered his father. The newspapers helpfully explained that the young man had a very prominent Oedipus complex. If we dismiss this as just a journalistic excess, we would do well to remember how hard (...) it is to open our own mouths without registering the effect of Freud upon the language. We converse casually about the sexual proclivities of infants, about sibling rivalries, about dependency upon the mother, about sadomasochistic impulses. When we forget things, we suspect ourselves of having wanted to forget them. We may shun the technical vocabulary of Freud, words such as ego, superego, id, the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the anal, oral, and genital stages, yet we are hardly likely to do without such words as aggression, anxiety, compulsion, the unconscious, defense mechanism, narcissism, death wish, erogenous zones, fixation, guilt feeling, sublimation, wish fulfillment. Freud may not have invented most of these words, yet he connected them together and he gave them a special color and shape. And quite apart from terminology, Freud has given us the conviction that a secret life is going on within us that is only partly under our control. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu's work on literature has frequently been criticized for its perceived failure to attend to the specificities of literary form. This article argues that, in fact, literary form plays an important role in Bourdieu's theorizations of literature, or rather, that form is called upon to play a range of different, potentially conflicting roles. Through close readings of both The Rules of Art and the 1975 essay ‘L'Invention de la vie d'artiste’, the article seeks to (...) clarify the different roles Bourdieu attributes to literary form, as that which both conceals and reveals ‘repressed’, ‘incorporated’ or ‘unconscious’ social realities. It will examine Bourdieu's contention that the literary work functions analogously to the Freudian dreamwork in this respect, and will question how appropriate or convincing that analogy proves to be. (shrink)

We attempt to offer a new interpretation of Schlegel’s original solution for the problem of the new mythology. We claim that, while grasping the problem of the missing center as the structure of modern thought, Schlegel develops a theory of literature which implies an ontology of time. We advance that, by identifying myth with romantic literature, Schlegel’s argumentative economy leads him to apply the metaphysical predicates of myth to romantic literature as such. We propose then to read the status of (...) literary forms as constituting the substance which precedes them but, paradoxically, only exists through them. (shrink)

"The problem of art in the modern era," according to the opening of Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, "is the problem of the new". Citing the familiar maxim of Ezra Pound, "make it new," Wasser locates in the problem of novelty the problem of modern art as such. Modernity inherits its fixation on the new from a longer tradition, which for Wasser begins with the German romantics in the wake (...) of Kantian aesthetics. Crucial for Wasser is the way in which the romantic philosophers, particularly Friedrich Schlegel and other contributors to the Athenaeum, attempted to resolve the problems with the Kantian system by "invest[ing] the literary with the... (shrink)

This article considers the two major biographies of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, MD (1868—1935), an early campaigner for ‘gay rights’ avant la lettre. Like him, his first biographer Charlotte Wolff (1897—1986) was a Jewish doctor who lived and worked in Weimar Republic Berlin and fled Germany when the Nazi regime came to power. When researching Hirschfeld’s biography (published in English in 1986) Wolff met a librarian and gay activist, Manfred Herzer, who would eventually be a cofounder of the Gay Museum (...) in Berlin and publish (in German, in 1992) the other major Hirschfeld biography currently available. Using, inter alia, the correspondence between Wolff and Herzer, the article aims to explore and interrogate the boundaries and possibilities of ‘biography’ as a form of ‘doing history’. (shrink)

For some time it has been fashionable in literary circles to reject what is called scornfully the biographical method. It was inevitable. No mode lasts forever. Sooner or later, there is a change. This method was the law for too long. It had no rival. Under its tutelage the motto for teaching literature was “the man, his work”. It was by its authority that students were taught that La Fontaine was in charge of waterways and forests and master of (...) the hunt before writing his Fables, that they had to learn by heart; or that Beaumarchais had been a clockmaker, musician, secret agent and business man before inventing the character of Figaro, proposed for their admiration. There has been a reaction. Our irreverent and contentious age has put an end to that absolute sovereignty. For a good quarter of a century this practice and the assumptions on which it rests has been on trial, in the name of the various and at times even contradictory conceptions and theories about the nature of literature. These have in common, however, the belief in the independence of literature with regard to the human being who was the instrument of its creation, as well as the anathema cast by this fact on what is commonly accepted as “referential illusion”. (shrink)

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways (...) through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have ‘experience’. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ‘insider-outside’, that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as ‘women’) could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading BiographyMichael Benton (bio)Biographer, Biography, and the ReaderBiography is a hybrid. It is history crossed with narrative. The biographer has to present the available facts of the life yet shape their arbitrariness, untidiness, and incompleteness into an engaging whole. The readerly appeal lies in the prospect both of gaining documentary information, scrupulously researched and plausibly interpreted, and of experiencing the aesthetic pleasure of reading a well-made work of (...) art with a continuous life story and a satisfying closure. "In the family of literature," one of its most respected practitioners asserts, "biography seems to be the product of a strange coupling between old-fashioned history and the traditional novel."1 The invitation of biography is thus a dualistic one; the aesthetic experience it offers stems from the twofoldness of its nature and from the stance that this imposes upon the reader. Literary biographies of poets and novelists offer a particularly fruitful area of study since their subjects have a special concern for aesthetic experience and the biographers' main interest lies in the relationship between the life and the works. Though much of what follows has a wider application, the focus of this article is on biographies of writers. By triangulating the roles of the biographer, the biographee within the biographical text, and the reader we can conceptualize the elements that make up the invitation of the genre.First, the biographer. Richard Holmes characterizes the process he experiences with two keywords: it is a "pursuit" and it is a "haunting." They are two sides of the same phenomenon. The pursuit is a "tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps," an effort "to write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present."2 The haunting occurs when this revivification succeeds and the biographee is brought imaginatively alive. Then the biographer turns from pursuer to pursued. While the subject does not take [End Page 77] him over, as it might in some Gothic fantasy, it does exercise the power of the past upon the present and haunt the biographer's imagination. Holmes goes on to explain the two main elements as "closely entwined strands":The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man's "journey" through the world—the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the "life and letters." The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a "point of view" or an "interpretation," but a continuous living dialogue between the two... It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.3Not every biographer would necessarily subscribe to this particular description, but there is ample evidence in the recent spate of books about the genre4 that the biographer's capacity for imaginative empathy is continuously interacting with the verifiable historical data. The present operates upon the past in other ways, too. Earlier biographers who are more or less contemporary with their subjects (for example, Boswell, Forster, Mrs. Gaskell)5 stand in different relationships with them and the available data about them compared with present-day biographers who may inherit a whole bibliography of "lives" laid down in stratified layers on top of the life they are trying to recover. The modern reader, like the modern biographer, has to be a literary archaeologist. Dickens's "lives," for example, are constructed on a bedrock of his friend Forster's biography and on the novelist's own writings, neither of which subsequent biographers can afford to ignore. Later "lives" also have to be sifted through: our inherited Dickens is compounded from a series of accounts from, among a host of others, the Victorian memoirs of his daughter6 and his reading manager,7 via Edwardian enthusiasts8 and 1930s revelations about Dickens's private life,9 to those of modern academics and writers in our own time.10 In such cases, bringing the subject... (shrink)

Literary Analysis: The Basics is an insightful introduction to analysing a wide range of literary forms. Providing a clear outline of the methodologies employed in twenty-first century literary analysis, it introduces readers to the genres, canons, terms, issues, critical approaches, and contexts that affect the analysis of any text. It addresses such questions as: What counts as literature? Is analysis a dissection? How do gender, race, class and culture affect the meaning of a text? Why is the (...) social and historical context of a text important? Can digital media be analysed in the same way as a poem? With examples from ancient myths to young adult fiction, a glossary of key terms, and suggestions for further reading, "Literary Analysis: The Basics "is essential reading for anyone wishing to improve their analytical reading skills. (shrink)

This chapter examines historical reconstruction and literary structures of rabbinic texts using the Leviticus Rabbah as an example. It explains that Leviticus Rabbah is a commentary on the Book of Leviticus which now forms part of Midrash Rabbah. It proposes ten theses about the special problems which the literary structures of rabbinic texts pose for the historian and analyses a section of the amoraic work of Leviticus Rabbah to describe some of those literary structures. The findings suggest (...) that it is impossible to explain how the textuality of rabbinic sources worked and that many rabbinic works fill the same functional position in a text more than once. (shrink)

‘Books are the work of solitude, and the children of silence.’ Thus Marcel Proust. The writer is not the same person as the man. The writer, if any good, is a different person, a higher person or at least one who distils something more worthy than is evidenced in the blunderings and fumblings and inadequacies of the everyday character who shares the same skin. This was the basis of Proust's own blistering attack on Sainte-Beuve, to the effect that the critic (...) substituted gossip for criticism and, incidentally, failed to recognize the genius of Baudelaire.In philosophy we have our own Proustian tendency, in the unlikely form of Karl Popper, For Popper, the provenance of ideas is supremely unimportant—and so, by extension is the biography of their authors. A healthy corrective, one might think, to the present day culture of celebrity, even at the intellectual level, and to the flood of philosophical biographies and title-tattle. At a more serious level, it warns us that we should not treat a philosopher's ideas with suspicion because (just because he was a Nazi in his lifetime or she was a communist when she was young or the apostle of equality is a snob living high on the hoof or the advocate of open discussion anything but its practitioner. (shrink)

Global Literary Theory: An Anthology comprises a selection of classic, must-read essays alongside contemporary and global extracts, providing an engaging and timely overview of literary theory. The volume is thoroughly introduced in the General Introduction and Section Introductions and each piece is contextualised within the wider sphere of global theory. Each section also includes annotated suggestions for further reading to help the reader navigate the extensive literature on each topic. The volume engages with the 'internationalising' of the curriculum (...) as well as the globalization of literature and theory. Alongside these key themes, the volume also extends its coverage to include: The core topics and theorists from formalism and structuralism to post-modernism and deconstruction Digital humanities and humanities computing and their relevance to globalization and literary theory The religious turn in literary theory and philosophy New textualities such as auto/biography, travel writing and ecocritcism Oppositional texts which 'write back' against the canon In addition, the book's Companion Website features an interactive world map incorporating biographies of every theorist in the book, as well as biographies of additional influential theorists. Crucially, this anthology shows that ethnic, postcolonial studies and globalization are not simply niche areas of literary study but are of concern across the contemporary humanities and that new voices are always emerging, and being discovered, from around the globe. As such, this volume offers a refocusing of essential literary theory, extending the canon in line with ongoing debates concerning contemporary cultural and geographic borders. (shrink)

Pre-modern Arabic biography has served as a major source for the history of Islamic civilization. In this 2000 study exploring the origins and development of classical Arabic biography, Michael Cooperson demonstrates how Muslim scholars used the notions of heirship and transmission to document the activities of political, scholarly and religious communities. The author also explains how medieval Arab scholars used biography to tell the life-stories of important historical figures by examining the careers of the Abbasid Caliph al- (...) Ma'mun, the Shiite Imam Ali al-Rida, the Sunni scholar Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and the ascetic Bishr al-Hafi, each of whom represented a tradition of political and spiritual heirship to the Prophet. Drawing on anthropology and comparative religion, as well as history and literary criticism, the book considers how each figure responded to the presence of the others and how these responses were preserved by posterity. (shrink)

This study focuses on the question of individualism in the works of Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly with regard to the issue of ethical and political selfhood. If there is to be a fruitful interaction between descriptive narrative ethics and proscriptive ethical theory, the role of the literary imagination needs to be reassessed. The resurging interest in redefining the humanist project begs the question of why exponents of individual liberty and group authority remain firmly opposed to one another. (...) Therefore the analysis begins with a consideration of Sartre's failure to produce a formal system of ethics consistent with his early ontology. Sartre's account of subjectivity is framed within recent reevaluations of ethical individualism in the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas in order to demonstrate that Sartrean existentialism is ethically flawed. It is therefore argued that it is his theory of subjectivity which precludes an existentialist-Marxist alliance--the alliance itself deriving promise from a refinement of the existential position. In posing the question of whether Proust defines a theory of the self or elucidates one of an infinite number of individual paths to an authentic self-relation, I reveal that his emphasis on 'la vie interieure' is not excessive or idealistic individualism but rather ethico-political sobriety. According to Sartre, the novelist's sole purpose should be to present, without any form of edification which could translate to proselytism, the passions and actions of the characters. However, his emphasis on action neglects certain aspects of authorial intervention. When Proust's narrator, through the intricate exploration of his own self-relation, invites the reader to embark on the same journey of self-transformation, the novel becomes a site for experimental selfhood. By addressing these issues, I illuminate the difficulties Sartre faced in attempting to unite a Marxist ethos with the primacy of the individual as well as challenge Richard Rorty's characterization of Proust's literary project as a "purely private act of self-creation.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Walter Glannon WHAT LITERARY THEORY MISSES IN WITTGENSTEIN Wittgenstein's stock is rising in literary criticism. The market value of expressions such as "language games" and "form oflife" is increasing in that they seem to lend themselves to the notion of interpretive communities endorsed by diose of reader-response persuasion.1 Wittgenstein's style is also apparently at a premium, in light of a recent attempt by a proponent of (...) deconstruction to relate the philosopher's writing to that movement's use of rhetorical strategies in dealing with texts.2 There are affinities between Wittgenstein's repudiation (in the Investigations and the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics) of the metaphysical realism in the Tractatus and die arguments from reader-response critics against the notion of unmediated facts, as well as the rejection of the metaphysics of presence by deconstructionists. All diree oppose the idea that truth and falsity are conferred on our statements about the world by properties independent of diese statements. Insofar as these two critical schools are concerned primarily with language, they share Wittgenstein's aspiration to "bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (PI, I, § 116), for we can arrest the tendency to postulate objective, unmediated facts by "looking into the workings of our language" (PI, I, § 109). Moreover, Wittgenstein avoids psychology which involves the mental faculties. Presumably, this puts him at one with die concerted effort of many critics to rid texts of die author and with it the problem of intentionality. At first blush, then, the relation between Wittgenstein and literary criticism appears to be an attractive one. Yet Wittgenstein's antirealism does not militate against his passion for truth, that is, his intense desire to achieve complete understanding in the areas ofphilosophy that vexed him most.3 Nor does it debar him from thinking about the inexpressible realm 263 264Philosophy and Literature of the mystical, since, despite his concern for language, Wittgenstein never ceased being attracted to "things that cannot be put into words" (TLP, 6.522). This is not at all congenial to die purpose ofliterary theory, which admits ofno such shadowy domain beyond words and our linguistic practices. Indeed, I shall illustrate that Wittgenstein's resdess search for truth, spiritual concerns, and the dialectical structure of his works for the most part put him radically at odds with a critical enterprise whose aversion to truth and penchant for rhetorical analysis and conventions blinds it to both his view of literature and his aim in doing philosophy. I Since die advent of the New Criticism, literary theory has in great measure addressed itself to die discourse ramer than the story in texts. With the focus on literature as a rhetorical construct, more traditional humanistic interpretations have been excised. A more recent development of this shift to the discursive side of diings has been the effort to blur the distinction between literature and philosophy.4 With neidier discipline having a privileged status, both have been reduced to a textual discourse with no lines ofdemarcation, a reduction diat is at variance with Wittgenstein on two counts. First, he compartmentalized literature and philosophy as having distinct purposes: the literary works that interested him were stories ofmoral import; philosophy was to be practiced for the sake of clarity in thought. To the extent diat such clarity, if attainable, pointed toward an ethical dimension that lay beyond the bounds of language, literature and philosophy for him did have a common goal; but the paths leading to it were distinct. Second, and more importantly, Wittgenstein had no concern for the discourse of the literature diat he read. Rather, it was the moral import of the stories that attracted him. Most noteworthy on this score were the writings of Tolstoy, who had a profound influence on Wittgenstein's view oflife, and Dostoevsky.5 Wittgenstein often recommended Tolstoy's Twenty-three Tales to his friends, and while a schoolmaster in Lower Austria from 1920 to 1926, he constantly read The Brothers Karamazov, doing so aloud on one occasion in die presence of the village priest. He was especially impressed with Dostoevsky's character the Elder Zossima, "who could see into people's hearts and direct diem" (Rhees... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Herodotus' Literary and Historical Method:Arion's Story (1.23-24)Vivienne GrayHerodotus' story of how the talented and original musical performer and conductor Arion of Methymna was rescued from the sea and carried to dry land by a dolphin is of great interest because of the literary and historical methods he uses.1 The story arises out of the siege of Miletus and is connected with it through Periander (1.20, 1.24.1, 7), (...) but different readings have been presented in order to make a better connection with the immediate or wider context.2 Questions have also been raised about the authenticity of Herodotus' inquiry and his own belief in the miracle.3 His normal inquiry (historia) involves akoe (what he heard), opsis (what he saw), and gnome (his judgment).4 He tells Arion's story mainly on the authority of the traditions of the Corinthians and Lesbians, whose agreement on it frames the story.5 He supplements this akoe with [End Page 11] apparent opsis, in the form of a "material proof": the dedication "of Arion" on a statue of a man on a dolphin, at Taenarum, to which his sources said the dolphin carried him. The genitive case of the dedication suggests that Arion dedicated it and inscribed it with his name.6 And Herodotus' description of the statue as "bronze, not big" suggests that he saw it. But he does not add his own gnome of belief, or disbelief, in the miracle.I would like to offer a new reading of Arion's story that combines insights into Herodotus' presentation of it and its context with some comments on Herodotus' own beliefs and his use of the oral traditions available to him.The StoryThe story goes that Arion had been spending most of his time at the court of Periander. Periander plays an important role in the story: his experience of Arion's miracle is the focus from beginning to end. The traditions that Herodotus cites present the story as a "very great wonder" () that "occurred to Periander in his lifetime" (1.23.1). They give an account of how it happened, and say that Arion gave an account to Periander, presumably in the same form (1.24.6). Periander experiences "disbelief" as a result of the "wonder" but conducts an "inquiry" that shows it to be true.7Arion decides to go west to acquire his fortune. He hires a Corinthian ship to take him back to Corinth, but the crew plots to rob him and make him kill himself, giving him a choice that seems to be no choice (): to kill himself on board and be buried, or to jump overboard (and not be buried). Arion promises to kill himself, but first secures the crew's permission to give a last performance, which he does in full dress, of "the shrill/rising tune" ().8 He then makes what appears to be the worse choice and jumps overboard, whereupon a dolphin rescues him and carries him safely to Taenarum. [End Page 12]Herodotus does not explain Arion's choice or directly connect his performance with his rescue, but Arion's religious dedication () at Taenarum implies that Arion, at least, believed that the dolphin came as a divine agent (1.24.8). Poseidon had a very famous shrine at Taenarum and was thought to save men from disaster at sea by sending his dolphin to assist them.9 Similar patterns of action in other stories strengthen the hypothesis that Arion has appealed to some divine force to rescue him.10 Croesus, for example, secures his divine salvation by shouting out to the god Apollo, appealing to him to stand by and deliver him from death if ever he has given him any gift that pleased him (1.87.1). Arion sings () instead of shouting, but a song from the world's best kitharode (1.23) is bound very much to please the god to whom it is addressed.11 The Magi sacrifice and sing () to the god of the wind and sacrifice to Thetis and the Nereids of the sea in order to quell a storm that is threatening them and prevent further... (shrink)

Literature, for Sartre, it could be said, is not so much an object of theory as the focus of a question. The notion of 'committed literature' is less prescriptive than it is interrogative: the title of the text most commonly associated with 'littérature engagée' is, after all, a question about literature itself, and the nature of 'commitment' lends itself much more to a practice of contestation than to implementation of any particular programme. In what follows, I shall be examining some (...) of the ways in which Sartre makes literature synonymous with a question. And I shall be arguing that the very terms in which literature is presented as a form of self-contestation make biography, rather than theory, the arena in which the notion of literature is most extensively opened up. (shrink)

In this essay, the authors describe human consciousness as an embodied experience that emerges from a complex relationship of the biological and the phenomenological. Following arguments made by ) and ), they argue that one primary way that human beings develop self‐awareness of their own minds is by becoming aware of other minds. These mind‐reading abilities become fundamental to the continual adaptations that human beings must make in their daily lives. The authors offer descriptions of two literary texts to (...) illustrate how these texts participate with other forms of culture and with human biology to produce experiences of self‐conscious awareness. They argue that if consciousness is understood as an emergent property of biology and culture, and if human beings develop self‐awareness of their own minds by becoming cognisant of other minds, then it follows that literary experiences create productive mind‐reading practices that contribute to the ongoing development and emergence of consciousness and, as such, are important for education. They conclude that extended opportunities to critically inquire into readers’ imagined identifications with characters and their situations can support the development of empathic understanding of others. (shrink)

Western metaphysics has long privileged solidity, presence, fixity, and substance, over the fluid, moving, intangible, and diffuse, that is, over water.1 Emmanuel Levinas noted that Western philosophy seems so incapable of thinking the liquid, moving, and dispersed, that even when we try, we only reduce the elemental to a multiplicity of solids.2 The problem, he concludes, is that water and other elements are "content without form," denying our metaphysical preferences for solidity and fixed shape, even as they are not (...) mere absence or nothingness.3 And still the elemental is our home, our condition of being.Luce Irigaray further notes a "historical lag in... (shrink)

The life of George Price (1922-1975), the eccentric polymath genius and father of the Price equation, is used as a prism and counterpoint through which to consider an age-old evolutionary conundrum: the origins of altruism. This biographical project, and biography and history more generally, are considered in terms of the possibility of using form to convey content in particular ways. Closer to an art form than a science, this approach to scholarship presents both a unique challenge and (...) promise. (shrink)

This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to (...) defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism or Jewish mysticism. Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason. (shrink)

After introducing the main Platonic issues in the field of literary theory and aesthetics, the author discusses Proclus’ relationship to the study of literature in late antiquity; his own literary theory and his use of allegorical interpretation; and the wider context of Proclus’ Neoplatonist aesthetics. She shows how his aesthetics pans out in his view of visual art, as referring to higher realities via Homer’s poetry, and of music, including a form of inspired music. The author then (...) moves on to Proclus’ metaphysics of beauty itself, and the relation between transcendent Beauty and the beauty of the universe. She concludes by pointing out the relevance of Proclus’ literary theory and aesthetics for his metaphysics. (shrink)

The writings of Ernst Bloch represent one of the lasting linguistic and intellectual achievements of expressionism. What distinguishes Bloch from other expressionists is that he lived long enough to form the impulses of the expressionist break-through into an oeuvre that grew in depth and mastery across half a century. This collection, which dates from 1913 to 1964, represents a field of experiment in which a thinker of astonishing originality exposes his own thought to the provocation of literary, musical, (...) and artistic works, but also to such quasi-artistic phenomena as advertisements, landscapes, cliche;s and obsessive images, films, and forms of interaction in country and city: why does water emerging from a spring so fascinate the human imagination? What is the function of musical accompaniment in a silent film? How does a writer's birthplace imprint itself on his intellect? (shrink)

Behind all of Sheldon Sacks' writing and teaching lay an intense belief in the objectivity of literary experience and our capacity to achieve a shared conceptual understanding of the forms which underlie it. Literary criticism for him was not the critic's unique and unrepeatable performance but a serious inquiry—a critical inquiry—seeking explicit and precise explanatory concepts which others could grasp, test, and build upon. His effort was to show that we could in significant measure understand and explain literature (...) and its value as standing independent of our understanding and explanation, and it was this double emphasis on the real being of literature and the possibility of valid conceptualization of it which gave his thought its appeal for those whom it influences. His creative constitution—and the length and circumstances of his life—were such as to allow only the one sustained effort of Fiction and the Shape of Belief and a series of articles in which he modified and expanded the application of the ideas developed therein. Yet in this relatively small body of work he revised and extended the ideas of the Chicago School within which he worked so as to achieve what seem to me genuine advances in the explicit conception of novelistic forms—what might be called portable ideas, sharp and definite enough to be adopted and used and in their turn revised and redefined by others; this sets them apart from much critical work and marks their value and his intention. Ralph W. Rader, chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , and "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms". (shrink)

If we inspect closely the works that ascend to world literature from the peripheral, David Damrosch’s well-recognized argument that “world literature is writing that gains in translation” may need some revision, because apparently translation is not the sole factor that decides the formation of world literature. Translated works do not necessarily represent the best part in one national literature. Damrosch’s overemphasis on translation differences and untranslatability in world literature tends to overlook the syncretism of heterogeneous literatures: The influence of Roman (...) Empire on Indian Buddhism, the influx of elements from Indian, Arabic, and Persian stories into European writers’ creation, the genres of China’s ancient literature influenced by Buddhism, etc. Furthermore, a great deal of Chinese idioms and allusions appearing in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese literatures provide us a general view of how world literature forms through exchange and syncretism. On this account, Damrosh’s argument may be reformulated as “world literature is writing that gains in variation.” Variation reflects the ability to absorb otherness and then to create something new. Meanwhile, the perspective of literary syncretism will help us reasonably distinguish world literature and national canons. (shrink)

What is life and what does it mean to be in the living political universe of entitiness without rhyme or reason? Flappy exudate, a bag in a bag, corpuscles of corporeality, worms (or flesh tubes) with appendages, even the cult of first involution – these are our body pods and the hunger and thirst of being-in. How can the situation of anatomical form be analysed without the illusion of instrumentalized reflection? Perhaps by amalgamating the categories and their issues. The (...) issuance of taxonomy is the actual fine muck of excrement, which every brick of ordered life leaks as exudence and decay. Deep thoughts leave a mucal snail trail of what was tabular-seeming about our bodily situation, our environs, our friends, our experiments and our nourishment. Especially in this current age of 露 露 and 娜娜 (Lulu and Nana), our first officially public transgenic kindred, the question becomes, ‘who are these free-living divergences and what does it mean to be the uber-ding beyond geoengineering’s capabilities?’. (shrink)

Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or more hostile to the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the essays are attempts to reflect on how the kinds of literary research the contributors themselves are doing, the kinds of work (...) to which they are personally committed, might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The authors' specific fields of work are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Taken together, the essays contribute more points of ambiguity and hesitation to the study of human flourishing than decisive advancements. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable. But by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, this volume provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. (shrink)