A collection of fourteen essays, three of them previously unpublished, which manages to be both indispensable and unsatisfying. Wellek surveys methods of criticism in Europe and America, then outlines the conceptual ideals that ought to be followed. Wellek's belief in literature as a structure of norms, as imaginative writing concerned with values, will be familiar from his earlier Theory of Literature. Theoretically speaking, literary study has been muddled; the hope for it lies in applying period concepts, by approaching literature as (...) a structure of norms, and by following the guidelines set down by the New Critics. But the polemics go side by side with the erudition, in such a way that one finds judgment without argument. Contains a bibliography of Wellek's writings.—C. L. B. (shrink)

An historical and critical survey of the various theories of totemism. Lévi-Strauss believes almost every theory explaining the relation held to exist between man and certain natural objects can be demolished: there seems to be no general biological or cultural framework which can account for totemism as an isolated phenomenon. But if totemism is seen as a way of thinking metaphorically, of correlating opposites, or of associating by contrariety then it becomes an example of a mode of thinking common to (...) sophisticated as well as primitive peoples. Observations by Bergson and Rousseau, made outside the framework of modern anthropology, bear out Lévi-Strauss' thesis. A fascinating work, marred only by a rather stiff translation.—C. L. B. (shrink)

The assumption underlying this collection of essays is that recent developments in philosophy and fiction have brought them closer than they have been. Novelists' insights into the ambiguity of experience, and, at the same time, philosophy's trend towards concreteness in such areas as phenomenology, point to areas of rapprochement. What the novel can do, philosophically speaking, is to formulate "the initial stages of... metaphysical thinking," and "carry out an imaginative or emotional exploration of a system of thought." In his introduction, (...) Cruickshank suggests that the French novel has developed along these lines, in the generation which begins with Bernanos and continues through Robbe-Grillet. Most of these essays explore philosophical ideas in the novels without showing how radical developments in technique actually affect them. Martin Esslin takes this further step where he notes that because of Queneau's belief in the meaninglessness of the world, the artist has creative freedom. Queneau's linguistic innovations derive in large part from this principle. Only Geoffrey Hartman, in his discussion of Blanchot, takes this vexed question of the relation between philosophy and literature down its labyrinthine paths to the point where one becomes legitimately the embodiment of the other. While many of these essays are conventional literary criticism, the best of them interpret the title in its boldest sense, and show how philosophical intent can alter the very fabric of the novel, while, alternatively, the novelist can offer genuine insight into philosophical issues.—C. L. B. (shrink)

Buckley sees the Victorians as obsessed by time, and though the obsession is certainly not unique to the nineteenth century, he attempts to delineate what is distinctively Victorian about it. The growing historical consciousness, the concern with material progress, the perspective afforded by archaeology, theories of cultural progress, decline, or cycles: all these helped form distinctive concepts of time. Buckley subtly traces the attitudes toward "the living present," ranging from an acceptance of the challenge offered by the present to seizing (...) the life of immediate sensation. But in the treatment of the epiphany as an escape from the pressures of time and the world of Mammon, there is very little that is new. Buckley's thesis is almost too ambitious for such a short book, and though the Victorians speak for themselves in many passages, Buckley could have spoken more for them.—C. L. B. (shrink)

An urbanely written dialogue which convincingly demonstrates the "compartmentalized" character of a number of modern cosmologies. The implications and inconsistencies of biological and physical views of nature, space and time take up the first part of the book; the second turns to an examination of a Steineresque mysticism, a puzzling emphasis since the objections raised to it in the text itself are never satisfactorily answered. Barfield's major polemic point, the need for more communication among intellectual disciplines as they examine their (...) basic assumptions, is presented with cogency and esprit.--C. L. B. (shrink)