In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ancient Quarrel Revisited:Literary Theory and the Return to EthicsJoseph G. KronickThe modern quarrel between theory and practice, like the ancient one between philosophy and poetry, is at once a practical one—at its heart is the question how we should live—and a pedagogical one—who or what is the proper teacher of virtue? Today, the quarrel is between theory and literature rather than between philosophy and poetry, a change (...) that has not been beneficial. The modern complaint against the abstractions of theory reflects a diminution in the quality of the argument. For the ancient Greeks, to ask about the virtuous life was to inquire into what it is to be human, for aretê, which is typically translated as "virtue," but is understood to mean "excellence" or "goodness," meant acting in accordance with what it is to be fully human. 1 The notion that "real issues," as one prominent theorist argues, belong to the realm of action and epistemological and ontological questions to the abstract realm of theory is a simplification of the more serious question of the relation of particulars to universals. It reverses the Platonic and Aristotelian hierarchy that makes thinking the highest form of activity. But something else is going on in this call to action: in denigrating thinking as abstract, it elevates doxa, opinion, in its place. Under the regime of doxa, two things occur: philosophy and poetry are looked upon as useless because utility becomes the criteria for measuring value, and singularity is looked upon with disdain, if it is, indeed, acknowledged at all, because to the extent the world as it appears is common to us all, doxa is not distinct or individual but uniform or the same. Philosophy and poetry share not only the stigma of being deemed useless, but they are dismissed as odd, singular, not common.This essay is concerned with the status of the singular in philosophy [End Page 436] and poetry. The ancient quarrel has not been settled, which may indeed be a good thing because the quarrel keeps alive the question, who is to speak for that which cannot be spoken of, the singular? Silence may be the appropriate response, yet to preserve the experience of that which resists language is the task of philosophy and poetry, hence the quarrel. A long tradition has it that the philosopher seeks universals, while the poet offers particular images of virtue, but at the heart of this argument over ethics is the question of how to account for the singular or unique. To do so, I turn to Socrates, whose singularity remains unaccounted for to this day.Socrates may be said to embody the very problem of the relation between philosophy and literature, for he left us no writings and exists for us primarily through the writings of Plato. Yet there is widespread acceptance of Plato's portrait of him, particularly as to Socrates' method, the elenchus, and his principle of the priority of definitions. However, Socrates' insistence upon the priority of definition is not an example of the philosopher elevating theory over experience but a practical issue involving the care of the self. Furthermore, in ancient Greece, moral and philosophical questions concerning the soul were as much the provenance of poetry as they were of philosophy. The search for truth is a practical matter concerning the conduct of life, but the Platonic philosopher wishes to give a rational account, or logos, that would link conduct to knowledge, whereas the poet's examples are bound to their representations. Nevertheless, to presume that Socrates was seeking a definition of virtue on the grounds that possession of the definition would translate into a good life is an absurdity, for he could never have sought after the knowledge of virtue if his mode of life depended upon the definition rather than on his character. 2The error is to accuse Socrates of placing abstract knowledge before virtuous conduct. When Socrates asks for a definition of the beautiful, for instance, he does not reject the answer, "the beautiful is a beautiful woman," because it confuses a particular with a universal (when compared to the beauty of the gods, the woman is... (shrink)

In this study, Levin explores Plato's engagement with the Greek literary tradition in his treatment of key linguistic issues. This investigation, conjoined with a new interpretation of the Republic's familiar critique of poets, supports the view that Plato's work represents a valuable precedent for contemporary reflections on ways in which philosophy might benefit from appeals to literature.

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel brings together contributions from leading scholars to explore the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism in the work of J.M. Coetzee.

In An Ancient Quarrel Continued, Louis Mackey argues that the relationship of philosophy with the literary arts is more intimate, more problematic, and more interesting than its relationship with the sciences.

Peter Kivy presents a fascinating critical examination of the two rival ways of understanding instrumental music. He argues against 'literary' interpretation in terms of representational or narrative content, and defends musical formalism. Along the way he discusses interpretations of a range of works in the canon of absolute music.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Language, Truth, and Literary Interpretation: A Cross-cultural ExaminationYanfang TangReflections on the philosophy of language in China and the West suggest that philosophers’ critiques of language center on two issues: its inadequacy and its metaphoricity. The former indicates the inability of the signifier to capture the multiplicity of the signified, whereas the latter reflects the semantic surplus of the signifier over its referent. While modern Western philosophers focus on (...) the metaphoricity, frequently referred to as the “play,” of the sign, philosophers in traditional China targeted what they believed to be the inherent inadequacies of words in their discussions. 1 Both aspects of language are considered the cause of equivocal or ineffective speech, and thus of impediment to correct understanding, and yet philosophers of the two cultural traditions have come to different conclusions about reading or literary study.To Western philosophers and literary critics, the metaphoricity of language incurs a serious problem for reading. Because the sign, in its incessant play, always points to more than is needed to the point that its real reference is blurred or covered up, correct reading of a literary text becomes impossible. Such phrases, frequently appearing in contemporary critical writings as “the tyranny of words,” “the indeterminacy of meaning,” and “the unreadable text,” testify to the widespread concern about the problems of language in the West. On the other hand, despite their acute awareness of the intrinsic deficiency of words, Chinese philosophers and poets never gave up their hope in the efficacy [End Page 1] of writing and literary understanding. Indeed, the enterprise of creative writing and literary criticism boomed in China at the time when the philosophical aphorism that “words do not exhaust meaning” (yan bu jin yi) was brought home to almost every poet and critic flourishing between the third and fourth centuries. For the following one and a half millennia the question of the objectivity of meaning, the crux of Western post-structuralist discourse and quarrels, has never been raised in Chinese philosophical or literary discussions. This wide contrast of outlooks on reading informed by the same disillusionment with language is rather intriguing. To account for this phenomenon this article attempts to look at the differences in the way language is perceived and practiced in China and the West. It shall also probe into the concepts of truth underlying the two cultural traditions because such an inquiry sheds some important light on the different perceptions people in the two parts of the world hold concerning language and literary practice.Metaphoricity: The Way In or Out of the Dilemma?It is interesting to say that while twentieth-century discoveries about the metaphoricity of language have made some Western critics conclude that “all reading is misreading” and that “there is no such a thing as an objective meaning,” this same awareness—that language is essentially metaphorical in nature, that it always says more than what it appears to—posed a solution for Chinese philosophers and poets to get out of the linguistic dilemma in which they found themselves. But before we enter the topic, let us first look at the dominant views of language in each cultural tradition. First, as Yip Wai-lim and others have demonstrated, the Chinese philosophical tradition began with a rejection of language as a reliable means for cognition and expression. 2 Philosophers in ancient China viewed language, or in their own terminology, words, as an instrument for expressing ideas in the mind or describing objects in the world, but they considered them inherently limited and thus unable to carry out their tasks effectively. The earliest statement of this conception is recorded in the ancient classic the Book of Changes, where it says: “Writing does not exhaust words, and words do not exhaust meaning.” 3 Attributed to Confucius and thus also representing Confucian ideas, 4 this statement was elaborated, amplified, and developed into a systematic argument by Daoist (Taoist) philosophers Lao [End Page 2] Zi and Zhuang Zi (369?-286? bc). Approaching the issue from the perspective of Dao (Tao), these founders of Daoist school viewed language as intrinsically limited in its function of representing Dao. This is because Dao, the cosmic principle or pattern, is dynamic in... (shrink)

... The Philosophers’ Quarrel is an enjoyable tour through the salons, great cities and country retreats of the Enlightenment, in the company of some of its brightest stars. Although much of the tale turns on some tedious details of the various intrigues of Hume and Rousseau, together with their friends and collaborators, Zaretsky and Scott manage to provide their account with a number of interesting and valuable insights into the character of the thinkers involved and the social and cultural life (...) of Enlightenment Europe at this time. I particularly recommend this book to contemporary academics, who may be comforted and reassured to see that prickly, neurotic and insecure dispositions are not the invention of contemporary academic life. (shrink)

The treatise On those who wrongly accuse wise men, of the past and present, preserved anonymously in MSS. Vindobonensis theol. gr. 174, containing works ol Georgios Galesiotes, and Vaticanus gr. 112, is a product of the literary quarrels of the first quarter of the XIV c., coming from somebody belonging to the circle of Theodore Metochites. The anonymous author shares Metochites' view concerning the lasting value of the whole canon of Greel literature, refusing to admit that only Demosthenes (...) and Aelius Aristeides are of any real help to those contemporary authors who try to imitate the Attic style.It is possible that the Letter 11 of Manuel Gabalas was sent to the author of the treatise in question, since a passage of that Letter is very similar to a passage of the anonymous treatise. Kourouses, identifying the addressee of Letter 11 of Gabalas with Nikephoros Choumnos, thought that the author of the anonymous treatise was Georgios Oinaiotes. However, the verbal similarities between the anonymous treatise and the letters of Oinaiotes, detected by Kourouses, are rather trivial. On the other hand, there are several striking resemblances between the anonymous treatise and the rhetorical works of Metochites, which may be easily explained if we assume that the anonymous author was Metochites himself. Though the evidence presented in this paper has at best a cumulative value, our hypothesis explains the circumstances of that treatise's writing better than any other hypothesis previously put forward. It is possible that the opponents of Metochites were those narrow-minded compilers of dictionaries , who did not refrain from accusing prominent authors of the past of not conforming to the rules of Attic language. (shrink)

The story of the greatest of all philosophical friendships—and how it influenced modern thought David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as “the Great Infidel” for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism. Remarkably, the two were best friends for (...) most of their adult lives, sharing what Dennis Rasmussen calls the greatest of all philosophical friendships. The Infidel and the Professor is the first book to tell the fascinating story of the friendship of these towering Enlightenment thinkers—and how it influenced their world-changing ideas. The book follows Hume and Smith’s relationship from their first meeting in 1749 until Hume’s death in 1776. It describes how they commented on each other’s writings, supported each other’s careers and literary ambitions, and advised each other on personal matters, most notably after Hume’s quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Members of a vibrant intellectual scene in Enlightenment Scotland, Hume and Smith made many of the same friends, joined the same clubs, and were interested in many of the same subjects well beyond philosophy and economics—from psychology and history to politics and Britain’s conflict with the American colonies. The book reveals that Smith’s private religious views were considerably closer to Hume’s public ones than is usually believed. It also shows that Hume contributed more to economics—and Smith contributed more to philosophy—than is generally recognized. Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship that had great consequences for modern thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 397-413 [Access article in PDF] Betwixt Two Ages Cast: Milton, Johnson, and the English Renaissance Jack Lynch To judge by the most visible institutional mechanisms of literary periodization --the anthology, the history of literature, and the survey course--John Milton has come unstuck in time. The Norton Anthology of English Literature prints its excerpts from Paradise Lost under the rubric "The (...) Early Seventeenth Century (1603-1660)" along with Jonson and Bacon, not under "The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1785)" alongside Dryden and Bunyan. 1 Milton gets a chapter to himself in volume five of the Oxford History of English Literature, English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century 1600-1660, not in volume six, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century. 2 And Stanford Uni-versity's two-part survey of English masterpieces puts Milton in English 10 ("Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and their Contemporaries") rather than English 11 ("From the Enlightenment to the Modern Period"). But his most important work appeared in 1667, the same year as Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Sprat's History of the Royal Society, works now invariably consigned to the latter of the two periods. Milton is almost univerally accorded the title of the last great writer of the English Renaissance, while his contemporaries stand at the beginning of what we clumsily call the "long eighteenth century." 3The situation is not new; it began neither with the Norton Anthology nor the Oxford History. As long ago as 1853 Hippolyte Taine placed Milton in book II [End Page 397] of his History of English Literature, "The Renaissance," rather than in book III, "The Classic Age." 4 But Taine was not the originator of this habit; he was only an inheritor of older paradigms. In fact a search for the causes of this treatment of the seventeenth century would take us back to the seventeenth century itself, only a few years after the publication of Paradise Lost, and into the eighteenth, when Milton's epic took its central place in the English canon.To remark upon this peculiar violation of strict chronology in English literary history is not necessarily to quarrel with it; it may well be that specialists in the English Renaissance have more interesting things to say about it than do those in the eighteenth century. But Milton's treatment at the hands of literary historians deserves attention, for it takes us straight to the heart of questions of literary periodization. Because eras make sense only in relation to one another, periodization is never entirely disinterested. Periods are imposed in retrospect in an attempt to extract the most useful or satisfying narrative out of the events of the past, and it is therefore inevitable that they should serve the cultural needs of the present.Some of the most enduring acts of periodization come out of cultural movements which divide themselves from their immediate predecessors, dividing us from them, now from then. Thomas Vogler observes that "the perennial goal of historical thought can be seen to be a mode of self-definition in the form of a narrative in which a 'modernity' defines itself over against a past perceived as essentially different." 5 As Peter Bürger points out, periodization inevitably, if sometimes indirectly, results in "the construction of the present." 6 This invocation or creation of an ever-new sense of now (along with its resulting creation of a series of thens) amounts to a declaration of modernity.Perhaps the most important such declaration of modernity came when the Florentine humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries traded the classical and Christian models of six ages or four monarchies for a new three-term model, one with three great ages: ancient, middle, and modern. 7 Francesco Petrarca is a central figure in this transformation: for him, defining modernity meant first discovering or inventing a post-classical Dark Age against which to measure the brightness of modern enlightenment.Petrarch never gave a definitive account of a modern world, though by allying himself... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alexander and Persian WomenElizabeth Donnelly CarneyPerhaps the most dominant symbol of conquest in Greek literature is that of the captive woman, the wife, the mother, the daughter of some once great warrior now slave and perhaps concubine to the man who killed him. It is the image of Andromache led away to do demeaning work for some Greek that most haunts Hector when he foresees defeat; he hopes he (...) is dead before it happens (Il. 6.450–65). As the quarrel over Chryseis and Briseis demonstrates (Il. 1.26–31, 110–85), possession of the women of your enemy both symbolizes victory and is victory. 1 The family of Alexander’s mother, the Aeacids, asserted their essential Hellenism via connection to the great saga of Troy, not only by claiming descent from Achilles, through his son Neoptolemus, but also from Andromache, the captive of Neoptolemus. 2The strong influence of the story of Troy in Greek literature has created the image of a male Greek conquering and taking captive an Asian woman. 3 By the fifth century Greeks had defined themselves as superior because they had defeated Asians, Trojans and Persians had been conflated, and by then both were characterized as mere barbarians. 4 Thus the capture of Asian women by Greeks could be understood as part of the victory of civilization over barbarism.It is not incidental that the image is primarily one of a captive woman rather than a captive child; from the point of view of the ancient [End Page 563] world, the woman is the more compelling figure. 5 More important, women, perhaps because they themselves could not generate status easily, were perceived to have axi ma (‘reputation’), 6 to carry the status of their fathers and/or husbands or sons with them, status which could then be transmitted to the male who possessed them—thus the importance of Andromache, widow of the greatest Trojan warrior.Sexual possession of these bearers of status, whether legitimated by marriage or not, was a particularly powerful symbol of victory—a kind of second victory, both sexual and military, over the males to whom the women had belonged. Victory as rape and conquest as sexual union were commonplaces of Greek literature, metaphors but more than metaphors. 7Thus, that Alexander came into control of the women of the Persian royal family and other women of the Persian elite after the battle of Issus in 333 meant both that he had achieved a real victory and that he had acquired a potent set of symbols of that victory which he could manipulate to his own ends in the varying contexts of Macedonian, Greek, and Persian audiences. However, these Persian women were or could be, thanks to another old Greek literary tradition, dangerously ambiguous symbols to the Greeks and Macedonians. This tradition insisted that Persian monarchy had lost its original toughness by the fourth century and had become overly steeped in luxury. Much of this decadence was understood as effeminacy, often blamed on the role of royal women, especially in the education of princes (e.g., Plato Laws 3.694a–696a). If anything, [End Page 564] Greek tradition exaggerated the power and influence of royal Persian women, particularly the mothers of kings. Stories of scheming and seductive queens playing succession politics abounded. 8As is now generally recognized, most of this tradition is false, 9 a product of the Hellenic inclination to conceptualize in terms of polarities and to associate two different sorts of “others,” the foreigner and the female, 10 coupled with Hellenic suspicion of the role of women in monarchy, 11 and envy of the comparatively rich Persian culture. Greeks claimed to pride themselves on their austerity and to disdain the material wealth of the Persians, but in practice proved vulnerable to it. 12 In fact, a considerable part of the appeal and motivation for warfare in general and the Graeco-Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire in particular was the acquisition of that wealth and luxury supposedly so disdained and so often associated with women. 13Whatever one believes about the ethnicity of ancient Macedonians, one cannot assume that Macedonian views were identical to those [End Page... (shrink)

The work of Northrop Frye, evenly divided as it is between those earlier and later literatures and equally influential in both fields, will serve to illustrate the literary-historical myth I have begun to describe. "Romanticism," he writes, "is a 'sentimental' form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most part, a 'sentimental' form of folk tale."1 Frye's terms are directly adopted from Schiller's famous essay, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung," though "naive" for Frye means simply "primitive" or "popular" (...) and is not historically identified, as it is in Schiller, with "classical," while "sentimental," as in Schiller, means "later" or "sophisticated." In adopting Schiller's terms, however, Frye has also adopted, though less obviously, Schiller's historical scheme. In the theory of modes that opens the Anatomy, Frye's division of Western literature into a descending scale from "myth" through "romance," "high mimetic," and "low mimetic" to "irony" is correlated to the historical periods in which each mode successively dominates: classical, medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and modern. Like Schiller's starker contrast of the "naive" or classical poet in touch with the natural world and the "sentimental" or Romantic poet alienated from it by modern civilization, Frye's logical and chronological scheme conceives literary history as a process of disintegration or displacement away from the natural integrity and univocality of myth and toward the self-conscious distancing and discontinuities of irony. The history of literature moves, following hard upon an Enlightenment conception of cultural history that derives as much from Rousseau as from Schiller and Friedrich von Schlegel, from the anonymous universality of myth to the individuality or eccentricity of modern fiction. Frye systematically avoids valorizing this "progress of poetry" in any of the ways it has been successively valorized by various schools of ancients and moderns, classics and Romantics, over the past three centuries. Yet he nonetheless repeats the historical scheme that underlies and generates these schools and their quarrels in the first place. It may turn out that the weakness of Frye's rehabilitation of romance is not his avoidance of history, as is commonly charged, but his inability to do without a version of it. · 1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , p. 35. Howard Felperin is the author of Shakespearean Romance and Shakespearean Representation. He has taught at Harvard, the University of California, and Yale and is currently Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, Australia. (shrink)

The Ethics of Geometry is a study of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Essential differences in the ethos of mathematics, for example, the customary ways of undertaking and understanding mathematical procedures and their objects, provide insight into the fundamental issues in the quarrel of moderns with ancients. Two signal features of the modern ethos are the priority of problem-solving over theorem-proving, and the claim that constructability by human minds or instruments establishes the existence of relevant entities. These figures are (...) combined in the emblematic statement of Salomon Maimon, "In mathematical construction we are, as it were, gods." Construction is the mark of modernity. The disciplines of classical philology, literary interpretation and the history of philosophy and of mathematics are woven together in this volume. (shrink)

In What's Wrong with Postmodernism Norris critiques the "postmodern-pragmatist malaise" of Baudrillard, Fish, Rorty, and Lyotard. In contrast he finds a continuing critical impulse--an "enlightened or emancipatory interest"--in thinkers like Derrida, de Man, Bhaskar, and Habermas. Offering a provocative reassessment of Derrida's influence on modern thinking, Norris attempts to sever the tie between deconstruction and American literary critics who, he argues, favor endless, playful, polysemic interpretation at the expense of systematic argument. As he explores leftist attempts to arrive at (...) an accommodation with postmodernism, Norris addresses the politics of deconstruction, the issue of men in feminism, Habermas' quarrel with Derrida, narrative theory as a hermeneutic paradigm, musical aesthetics in relation to literary theory, and various aspects of postmodern debate. A chapter on Stanley Fish brings several of these topics together and offers a generalized statement on the function of current criticism. (shrink)

According to classical and postclassical sources, the early Greek turannoi were, by definition, illegitimate rulers who overturned existing political arrangements and installed rogue monarchic regimes in their place. And on this one fundamental point at least, modern observers of archaic turannides seem to have little quarrel with their ancient informants. To this day, it remains axiomatic that Cypselus, Peisistratus, and the rest were autocrats who gained power by usurpation. Whatever their individual accomplishments, they were still, in a word, "tyrants." Relying (...) mostly on evidence from the contemporary literary and material records, my paper aims to challenge this time-honored conventional wisdom and restore the first turannoi to the political mainstream. (shrink)

A small, insignificant-looking intellectual with absurdly long legs, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a veritable Hans Christian Andersen caricature of a man. A strange combination of witty cosmopolite and melancholy introvert, he spent years writing under a series of fantastical pseudonyms, lavishing all the splendor of his magnificent mind on a seldom-appreciative world. He had a tragic love affair with a young girl, was dominated by an unforgettable Old Testament father, fought a sensational literary duel with a popular satiric magazine, (...) and died in the midst of a violent quarrel with the state church for which he had once studied theology. Yet this iconoclast produced a number of brilliant books that have profoundly influenced modern thought. In this classic biography, the celebrated Kierkegaard translator Walter Lowrie presents a charming and warmly appreciative introduction to the life and work of the great Danish writer. Lowrie tells the story of Kierkegaard's emotionally turbulent life with a keen sense of drama and an acute understanding of how his life shaped his thought. The result is a wonderfully informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the past two centuries. This edition also includes Lowrie's wry essay "How Kierkegaard Got into English," which tells the improbable story of how Lowrie became one of Kierkegaard's principal English translators despite not learning Danish until he was in his 60s, as well as a new introduction by Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay. (shrink)

It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able (...) finally to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is historicism—the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe in Friedrich Meinecke’s great book on this subject, the perspective which, in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, is identified with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is the historical perspective, contemporary historical theory and practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good reason: the referent of the term “history” is as indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as the term “literature” itself. So that, if one wished to “correct” certain critical positions by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper “sense of history,” it would be just as legitimate to correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the “sense of history” that the history of criticism displays over the “sense of literature.” When Mitchell characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally agreed upon “sense of history” to which one can appeal in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of fact from which they draw different implications regarding the attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself. Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Historical Interpretation” , “The Narrativization of Real Events” , and “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”. (shrink)

This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic (...) art into some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies. (shrink)

However this may be, it is clear that the rhetoric of the self in American criticism will no longer do, any more than its accompanying interpretative codes of identity crises and mythic reintegration, and that a post-individualistic age needs new and post-individualistic categories for grasping both the production and the evolution of literary form as well as the semantic content of the literary text and the latter's relationship to collective experience and to ideological contradiction. What is paradoxical about (...) Burke's own critical practice in this respect is that he has anticipated many of the fundamental objections to such a rhetoric of self and identity at the same time that he may be counted among its founding fathers: this last and most important of what we have called his "strategies of containment" provides insights which testify against his own official practice. Witness, for example, the following exchange, in which Burke attributes this imaginary objection to his Marxist critics: "Identity is itself a 'mystification.' Hence, resenting its many labyrinthine aspects, we tend to call even the study of it a 'mystification.'" To this proposition, which is something of a caricature of the point of view of the present essay, Burke gives himself a reply which we may also endorse: "The response would be analogous to the response of those who, suffering from an illness, get 'relief' by quarreling with their doctors. Unless Marxists are ready to deny Marx by attacking his term 'alienation' itself, they must permit of research into the nature of attempts, adequate and inadequate, to combat alienation."1 · 1. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 308. In fact, certain contemporary Marxisms—most notably those of Althusser and of Lucio Coletti—explicitly repudiate the concept of alienation as a Hegelian survival in Marx's early writings. Fredric R. Jameson is the author of The Political Unconscious: Studies in the Ideology of Form. He is also the editor, with Stanley Aronowitz and John Brenkman, of the Social Text. See also: "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" by Kenneth Burke in Vol. 5, No. 2. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies puts forth the question of the extent to which philosophers must go to school with the poets. It begins with a new interpretation of the famous Platonic quarrel with the poetic wisdom of Homer. It brings this question forward through the humanism of thinkers of the Italian Renaissance and the German Idealism of Hegel. It then treats the relation of philosophy and literature in four ways by considering philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophy (...) in literature, and philosophy and literature. In regard to the first of these, it discusses Jorge Luis Borges’s The Immortal, to the second James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to the third Carl Sandburg’s epic prose poem The People, Yes, and to the fourth, Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools. This work demonstrates that in an area of thought often dominated by fashionable doctrines of literary interpretation, the great works of literature and philosophy remain as permanent residents of our thought and imagination. (shrink)

In my essay on Austin I did not specify what I took the politics of my own discourse to be, but the institutional pressures on it, in particular the pressures of the professionalization of American philosophy, were in outline clear enough. I was more and more galled by the mutual shunning of the continental and the Anglo-American traditions of philosophizing, and I was finding more and more oppressive the mutual indifference of philosophy and literature to one another, especially, I suppose, (...) of American philosophy and American literature, and especially philosophy's indifference to the literary conditions of its own existence. I was still near the beginning of what is turning out to be a lifelong quarrel with the profession of philosophy. One of its recent manifestations has been the question put to me by certain professional colleagues whether I do not take satisfaction from the newer literary theory and criticism, especially as that has been inspired by developments over the past fifteen or so years in French intellectual life. This would seem to answer my plea at one stroke for both continental philosophy and for an understanding with literary matters. The fact is that my ambivalence toward these developments has been so strong, or anyway periodic, that I have found it difficult to study in any very orderly way.The reason for my difficulty is contained in what I mean by my quarrel with the profession of philosophy. That this is a quarrel means that I recognize the profession to be the genuine present of the impulse and the history of philosophy, so far as that present takes its place in our public intellectual life. This is what makes my quarrel with it a part of what I take my intellectual adventure to be. My point in the quarrel is that I can recognize no expression of mine to be philosophical which simply thinks to escape my profession's paradigms of comprehensibility; so that the invocations of the name of philosophy in current literary debate are frequently not comprehensible to me as calls upon philosophy. It may be that I should care less about this than I do, even less than my ambivalence asks. I mean to bear this in mind as I go on to spend the bulk of my time here considering in a practical way some passages from the writing of two literary theorists who have recourse to the work of Austin. In the case of the passages from Stanley Fish, it may be that my efforts will just amount to clearing up some unnecessarily confusing terminology; some passages from Paul de Man I find more troubling.Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of Walden, The Claim of Reason, and most recently Pursuits of Happiness. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "On Makavejev On Bergman" , "A Reply to John Hollander" , and "North by Northwest". (shrink)

This paper begins with the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and literature, which, with the subsequent splitting of logos into word and reason, comes to mark philosophy's self-conception and much other thinking besides—compartmentalising, in the process, what is understood by ‘literature’. Philosophy, thus separated becomes atemporal and abstract, preoccupied with propositions rather than statements or sentences, and, in some of its incarnations, aligning itself with science. Language, thus separated, becomes ‘literary’—that is, it comes to be epitomised by self-consciousness about (...) class='Hi'>literary form and style; and a casualty of this is the ‘poetic’, a term whose origins in poiesis (production of meaning) are forgotten. But the relationship has never been as settled as it may have seemed, and a series of examples from classical and contemporary philosophy and literature helps to demonstrate this. At stake in these examples are the ways in which reason requires that one means what one says. A classic expression of commitment to this view is provided in Hamlet, by the much-quoted words of Polonius to his son, who is about to travel to Germany to study philosophy: ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’. The implications of this in relation to the claims of reason are developed with reference to moral education and the development of judgement for learners and teachers. (shrink)

In 1946, after an eight-year debate with the New Critics, Charles Morris doggedly maintained that "an education which gave due place to semiotic would destroy at its foundations the cleavage and opposition of science and the humanities."1 This insistence on the unity of disciplines—the hallmark of the logical empiricist movement and its brainchild, The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science —effectively silenced semiotics as a force in American literary studies. For the New Critics' point of departure—and one of the few (...) tenets that they held in common—was the belief that art creates a mode of knowledge different in kind from that of practical or scientific discourse and that a criticism modeled on the latter would miss the essence of its subject matter. The quarrel, which continued unresolved during the polemics of the war years, now fuels the controversy between structuralism and post-structuralism. It lies at the very heart of the question of the relevance of semiotics to the humanities. · 1. Charles Morris, Signs, Language, and Behavior, in Writings on the General Theory of Signs , p. 327. Wendy Steiner, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein. She has written a book on the relations between modern painting and literature and edited the proceedings of the 1978 Ann Arbor Conference on the Semiotics of Art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plot Taxonomies and IntentionalityJon AdamsEver popular among the various topics occupying non-academic conversations about literature—such as the identity of the real author of the plays attributed to "Shakespeare"—is the notion that there exists only a finite number of storylines, and that all the stories we know are only ever complications or rehearsals of these few, elementary plots. What is the status of that claim? The issue gains a renewed (...) relevance in light of literary criticism's recent interest in the possibilities of employing evolutionary psychology as a means of naturalising literary study, but interest in plot taxonomies stretches a long way back. Why might we seek to categorise plots into a finite taxonomy? And what are the implications of the claim if true?Organising literature into any classificatory scheme is an attempt to achieve something like the coherence that the natural sciences have achieved—in chemistry and physics with the composition of the periodic table, and in biology with Linnaean classification. Much of science's epistemic prestige is rooted in the enormous success with which they have organised and categorised their subject of study. In searching for mechanism and pattern, the natural sciences proceed confidently from the belief that those mechanisms and patterns exist to be discovered, and that (relatively) simple rules underlie the manifest complexity of natural phenomena.Unfortunately, the study of literary fiction has no such security. There are two senses here in which we can talk of literature being patterned. At the micro-level, we have the question of whether individual works can be thought of as internally patterned. Usually, this type of patterning is easy enough to establish and recognise, and something the author is (or ought to be) in a good position to control. But, of course, internal [End Page 102] structures are not always conspicuous, and readers faced with an overtly complex text, like Pound's Cantos, or Finnegans Wake, have no guarantee that there is sense to be made of it. Surface complexity may shield a profound and subtle architecture, or the work may be as unstructured, fragmentary, and chaotic as it initially appears. A frustrated Wayne C. Booth draws attention to the problem: "One can't be sure that Finnegans Wake is not a great novel; perhaps someday readers will discover that the complex structure they now dream of and quarrel about is a realizable structure, an experienced structure. I doubt it, but it may happen. Until then, each new intricacy discovered... reveals precisely nothing more than that: a new intricacy."1 What's missing is a conceptual centre around which overall coherence might be achieved from what had seemed to be unconnected parts. Even so, if this sort of centre cannot be found in the individual work, it may yet obtain between works. In other words, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake may yet occupy nodal roles in a larger system, within which they acquire a previously unrecognized unity and order. This type of organization is something the individual author is obviously in a much less suitable position to control. Nonetheless, mapping out this larger, macro-level order is a task that literary criticism might want to take on. There is the example Borges uses of how Kafka's work retrospectively confers a familial similarity upon previously unconnected works. The quality of being "Kafkaesque" is the only thing common to the pieces, but was not apparent (or rather—the paradox that excites Borges—did not exist) prior to Kafka's writing.2 This is the second sense in which literature might be thought of as patterned; that is, not within works, but across them. On the larger scale, is it possible that literature as a whole could be understood as patterned?The notion that literature can be understood "as a whole," and its corollary, that a literature so understood would submit to taxonomical classification, is an enduring one. Anthropologists and art historians have long acknowledged that there appear to be recurring themes, motifs, and commonalities across world cultures, and consequently, commonalities among the narratives those cultures construct and consume. Cataloguing these similarities has produced a variety of classificatory systems.In the mid-nineteenth century, German scholar Adolf... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Confessions of an American PsychoJames Hogg’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to ViolenceDaniel Cojocaru (bio)My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility.... I could perceive no bottom, and then—not till then, did I repeat the tremendous prayer!—I was instantly at liberty; and what I now am, the Almighty knows! Amen.—James Hogg, The Private Memoirs (...) and Confessions of a Justified Sinner1My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.... My pain is constant and sharp.... But even after admitting this... and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself.... This confession has meant nothing.—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho2A hundred and sixty-seven years lie between the publication of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) (henceforth referred to as Confessions) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Yet one cannot but be amazed at the striking similarities of the main [End Page 185] protagonists’s insights at the end of these two novels. Although connections between works of Gothic Romanticism and postmodern narratives have been duly noted, the possible reasons for the analogies remain largely unexplored.3It will be argued here that both novels are representations of worlds immersed in what René Girard, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (henceforth referred to as Deceit), has termed “deviated transcendency,” resulting in similar stages of narrative progression, which in turn can be analyzed in terms of Girard’s mimetic cycle of violence.At a first glance, the two pieces seem to be concerned with themes that to a secularized age must appear most disparate. But as Girard has noted: “The very idea of mediation encourages literary comparisons at a level which is no longer that of genre criticism or thematic criticism.... It may illuminate the works through each other.”4 Hogg’s narrative deals with the problem of antinomianism and the resulting spiritual pride. The anti-hero of the narrative, Robert Wringhim, relies on his belief that he is one of the elect and cannot fall from grace and consequently is convinced by his elusive friend Gil-Martin to become a murderer without having to fear punishment. American Psycho on the other hand is concerned with the consequences of the crass materialism of the U.S. yuppie generation, culminating at the end of the 1980s, as experienced by the serial-killing first-person narrator Patrick Bateman. However, one could argue that in its very first pages, American Psycho presents the reader with a secularized version of antinomianism. Michael Steig has fleetingly noted that the egocentric doctrines of antinomianism psychologically resemble the “I’m alright tenets” of yuppie pseudo-psychology.5 Timothy Price, one of Bateman’s colleagues on Wall Street, expresses this in the following words: “In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.”6 Translated into antinomian terms, one could say that he is one of the elect, one of the privileged enjoying a capitalist heaven on earth; and by saying that society cannot afford to lose him, he, like Robert Wringhim, is showing that he believes he cannot fall from grace—or at least he tries to believe it.“I was well aware that the devilish powers of his mother would finally prevail; and either the dread of this, or the inward consciousness of having wronged him, certainly unnerved my arm.”7 If, in this reference to a quarrel with a fellow pupil at school, Robert gives away the fact that he doubts his own words, through the rhetorical device of correctio, so does Timothy Price by his choice of words. In fact, it is exactly because he is an asset that society can afford to lose him. As he is literally transformed into a commodity, society can discard him and in the novel indeed does so. It is one of the many ironies of the narrative that Price disappears soon after the above... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Michael Fischer ACCEPTING THE ROMANTICS AS PHILOSOPHERS The romanticsarenot widely regarded as philosophers, at least not in philosophy departments, where they are seldom taught.1 Some of the reasons behind this exclusion of the Romantics involve a general disdain for literature; other reasons suggest a more specific uneasiness with Romanticism itself—with its apparent interest in animism, its selfindulgence, its coolness toward reason, and, perhaps above all, its refusal to abide (...) by Kant's containment of skepticism. These complaints are not the invention of paranoid or obtuse academic philosophers (as some literary critics might like to think). In fact, some ofthese objections have dogged the Romantics from the beginning. There is something risky, or outlandish, about Romanticism that these criticisms bring out. I want here to pursue what is at stake in accepting the Romantics as philosophers. In discussing what may be threatening about Romanticism, I will be drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell. Unlike most professional philosophers, Cavell declares his indebtedness to the Romantics, but unlike some literary critics, he appreciates the dangers of the Romantic quest that he nevertheless joins. The Romantics often leave Cavell feeling nervous and wretched, as Thoreau left Emerson— and as Cavell leaves many of his own readers. Cavell affirms Romanticism while acknowledging the risks that have repelled some ofits critics: hence his usefulness to me here. The Romantics' quarrel with Kant perhaps best accounts for the contempt, or indifference, that Romanticism can inspire in academic philosophers. Cavell pictures Kant as arriving at a settlement with skepticism, a compromise that concedes the inaccessibility of things-inthemselves, while reassuring us of our right to say that "we do know the existence of the world, or rather, that what we understand as knowl179 180Philosophy and Literature edge is ofthe world."2 For Kant, again as Cavell portrays him, limiting knowledge—by relinquishing any claim to know things-in-themselves— is necessary to shoring up knowledge, to our still claiming that there is such a thing. By "knowledge" Kant, in effect, means science: he saves science by positioning it between skepticism (the denial of knowledge) and fanaticism or dogmatism (the expansion of knowledge beyond acceptable limits). By affirming the possibility of (scientific) knowledge, Kant thus contains skepticism, or at least curtails its damage. But by putting thingsin -themselves beyond knowledge, he also gives in to skepticism. According to Cavell, the Romantics balk at this trade-off, saying, in effect, "Thanks for nothing." 3 Knowledge of things-in-themselves is precisely the knowledge that the Romantics are most interested in. From this point ofview, Kant concedes too much to skepticism—and gets too little in return. Resisting Kant accordingly entails putting us back in touch with things, or bringing us face-to-face with them, which in turn means showing that we can face things or shy away from them, presumably as we can confront or avoid people. Cavell finds examples of Romantic writers facing things and even listening to them in Waiden, the "Intimations" ode, and other texts.4 But I want to focus here on a poem that Cavell does not mention, "Tintern Abbey," where Wordsworth speaks of that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In Body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power ofjoy, We see into the life of things. (11. 37-49) By "things" Wordsworth means nothing less than "all objects of all thought" (1. 101), "all that we behold / From this green earth"(11. 1045 ), "all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear" (U. 105-6). He specifically mentions "setting suns" (1. 97), "the round ocean and the living air, / Michael Fischer181 And the blue sky" (11. 97-98) and he declares himself "a lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains" (11. 103-4). In these lines—and others I need not cite—the world... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 116-127 [Access article in PDF] Authority, Solidarity, and the Political Economy of Identity: The Case of the United States David A. Hollinger Theorists of nationalism tend to circle around the United States like boy scouts who have spotted a clump of poison oak. The nationalism of the United States has figured small in the robust and wide-ranging discourse about nationalism that has involved sociologists, historians, political (...) scientists, philosophers, and literary scholars during the past two decades. Although there are significant exceptions to this pattern of avoidance--David Miller and Liah Greenfeld are convenient examples--several prominent cases illustrate the pattern. The United States is mentioned in only a single footnote in Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism. The United States is given short shrift in three of the most important collections of the 1990s: Homi Bhabha's Nation and Narration, John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith's Nationalism, and Geoff Eley and Ronald G. Suny's Becoming National. Montserrat Guibernau mentions the United States only twice, and in passing, in her Nationalisms: The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. The United States gets less attention than Canada and the Ukraine in John A. Hall's rich, state-of-the-art collection of 1998, The State of the Nation. Ronald Beiner's Theorizing Nationalism has much more to tell us about Quebec than about the United States, which is alluded to even in passing by only half the contributors to this valuable anthology of 1999. That "nationalism is unknown" in the United States is claimed by Elie Kedouri, even in the fourth edition of his classic text Nationalism [143]. But the most interesting case of all is that of nationalism's most creative and influential theorist, Benedict Anderson.Anderson provides only episodic treatment of the United States while discussing "creole nationalism" in his influential book Imagined Communities. To be sure, Anderson's demonstration of the similarities between a large number of similarly situated, comparably developing national projects among creole populations in the New World is no cause for complaint. It is a signal contribution, and still insufficiently absorbed by a persistently Europe-centered discourse about nationalism. Anderson's recent book, The Spectre of Comparisons, also deals episodically with the United States, which Anderson now tells us explicitly has proved "too sui generis for ready-to-hand" [336] comparisons with other national projects in the Western Hemisphere. Most of Spectre of Comparisons is about Southeast Asia, just as the preponderance of Imagined Communities is about Latin America. Fair enough. [End Page 116]My point is not to find fault with Anderson for being an Area Studies specialist in so many areas of the world outside the United States. Nor do I have any significant quarrel with what little Anderson does say about the United States. What is worth remarking upon is simply that even the least Eurocentric of our era's leading theorists of nationalism in general has emerged not from the study of the United States, but from the study of Southeast Asia and Latin America. This is less a comment about Anderson than about the class of theorists of which he is a member. The scholars whose careers focus on the United States are "area studies specialists" of a kind, but few of them have intervened tellingly in the cross-disciplinary discussion of nationalism. One who did was the historian David Potter, whose still-powerful article "Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa" was published nearly forty years ago but is rarely cited today.The poison oak effect among theorists of nationalism would not be worthy of notice were it not for one fact that might be expected to attract rather than repel these theorists: the United States is the most successful nationalist project in all of modern history. What makes it "successful" is its longevity, its absorption of a variety of peoples, and its sheer power. Two-and-one-quarter centuries after its founding and 135 years after its Civil War, it is by far the most powerful nation-state... (shrink)

I agree with much of what is said in this article; and I also will quote Roland Barthes, but for a different purpose. But I believe that it is a mistake to judge contextualism by its theory rather than its practice. If we look carefully at what is actually done in contextualist criticism, we will find that the "contradictions in its basic premises" which trouble Wasiolek have also allowed it to overcome the limitations that a strict construction of "autonomy" would (...) impose. We will also find that what really distinguished contextualism, what the concept of autonomy leads to in practice, is not an impoverishment but a deepening and enrichment of the literary experience and, third, that the theoretical developments in other critical schools have vindicated at least one cardinal principle of contextualism, namely, that the meaning of a literary work is inherently ambivalent or indeterminate. By following the lead, we can, I believe, provide a better theoretical base for contextualism, although I am not sure that it would be or should be one that "includes the world rather than excludes it," as Wasiolek demands it. Lawrence W. Hyman professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is the author of a book on Milton's poetry,The Quarrel Within, and articles on critical theory. He responds in this essay to Edward Wasiolek's "Wanted: A New Contextualism". Hyman has also contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Harpsichord Exercises and My Lai Massacre" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The modern concept of ‘style’ – from which ‘stylistics’ is derived, a discipline that witnessed the quarrel between Linguistics and Literary studies in the 20th century – has inherited from Ancient Rhetoric its substance and was largely used as a direct translation from the Latin concept ‘_elocutio_’ and also as a translation for Greek concepts, such as ἑρμηνεία, λέξις and φράσις. There are still some other concepts that seem intimately connected to ‘style’, for instance ‘_ornatum_’ and ‘_decorum_’. Considering that (...) classical references of ‘style’ present themselves essential to write the history of this modern concept, this paper seeks to present a catalog of ancient concepts that have found in ‘style’ their traditional translation, as well as attempting to build a short history of each of these translation paths. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Illegibility: Blanchot and Hegel by William S. AllenBryan CounterAllen, William S. Illegibility: Blanchot and Hegel. Bloomsbury, 2021. 264pp.With its absence of commentaries, imitative reproductions, unreflective quarrels, baseless miscomprehensions, creative research, faithful admiration, and the works of thought that accompanied it, the reception of Blanchot’s work was perhaps more diverse than that of any other major body of work of its time, of any time. However, it always (...) lacked free discussion unhindered by creative ambitions or by complacent reiterations of the ‘themes’ at its heart.(Bident 420)The notorious difficulty of Maurice Blanchot’s writing has been extensively documented, as is evidenced by how hesitant his contemporaries have been to engage with his work. Serious considerations of Blanchot’s thought did begin to accumulate in the 1970s, a period that saw an increase in his critical relevance, which has remained strong in more recent years. In the past, the “difficulty” of Blanchot’s thought and writing often resulted in texts that either blindly imitated or derided his work. 1 Due to his subtle logic, intense focus, and sub-referential style (that is, the rarity of direct quotation in his nearly constant engagements with prominent philosophers and literary figures), any critical study of Blanchot calls for a thorough and unwavering commitment to the texts at hand in order to do justice to his work.As a study of the Hegelian underpinnings of Blanchot’s thought, William S. Allen’s Illegibility: Blanchot and Hegel stands out on the contemporary critical landscape by focusing attention on a specific dimension of Blanchot’s writing and thinking. Already, the title offers two suggestions as to what is at work here. First, and most importantly, Allen foregrounds Blanchot’s engagement with Hegel and does so in way that eschews dogma and proceeds by undertaking a careful, detailed reading of the latter’s thought. Second, Allen highlights Blanchot’s persistent concern with literature, particularly that of Raymond Roussel and Lautréamont. Taken together, this approach supports Allen’s main assertion that Blanchot was [End Page 86] keenly aware that philosophy requires literature in order to address its own concerns. 2 Accordingly, Allen’s assessment bears not on Blanchot’s approach to discrete works of literature, or to a particular philosophical doctrine, but rather to the fundamental question of the illegibility of all literary writing.Allen makes clear that illegibility does not appear in only one form. The book’s opening lines posit:A text can be illegible because its language is too complex, too foreign, or too obscure to be read, but these obstacles can to some degree be overcome with time and patience. But a text can also be illegible because it cannot be read in any summative way, and in a text like this what is in play is structurally unreachable, that is, it cannot be read because doing so would require more (in whatever way this ‘more’ might be measured: time, effort, thought, etc.) than is possible.(1)In line with Blanchot’s own general method, Allen isolates and contrasts two different kinds of illegibility: mere difficulty on the one hand, and true obscurity on the other. Taking up the latter, Allen asks: “How is it possible to write a text like this, and what would be the effects of reading it?” (1). We are thus asked from the outset to consider the illegible text in the context of another of Blanchot’s classic ways of distinguishing aspects of writing — namely, from the respective positions of writer and reader. These positions participate in the dialectic because they are two opposing, yet interrelated, moments in the experience of the work of literature. 3 Allen goes on to classify such a text as infinite, meaning ultimately that it possesses a “lack of boundary that needs to be considered, and that informs the problematic of its reading” (1). The illegibility of the text, in this absolute sense, implies the very impossibility that any writer would ever set out, consciously, to write a text that would deserve to be called illegible.On the side of the reader, such a text evades recognition or classification by means of any particular content, but form and... (shrink)

Kierkegaard's relationship to the literary Socrates of antiquity, an ironic and ambiguous figure who reflects the uncertain nature of reality itself, uniquely recapitulates Plato's relationship to the historical Socrates. For Kierkegaard as for Plato, contact with Socrates results in an explosion of poetic and philosophical creativity—a demonstration of Socrates’ pedagogical potency that implicitly resolves what Plato calls the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” This chapter reflects on that ancient quarrel and its connection with the figure of Socrates, traces (...) the birth of Kierkegaard's Socrates in his dissertation, and sketches the developing significance of Socrates in Kierkegaard's major pseudonymous writings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Negative Capability Reclaimed: Literature and Philosophy Contra PoliticsIhab HassanI began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as the murderous.Seamus HeaneyTwo concerns cross in this essay: the first, explicit, regards the current condition of the academic humanities, their idioms and axioms, especially in America; the second, implicit, regards my own need to confront criticism, its abstractions that (...) now enable, now disable, the profession and even more the experience of literature. Such concerns must mix speculation and autobiography, mix the pride with the pathos of mind.But I should admit it from the start: my title cries paradox. Negative capability reclaimed? Can reclamation dwell in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats thought, and can a critic aspire to the condition of a poet, in whom the “sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates consideration”? 1Mine, I repeat, is a hybrid critical discourse, touched by exasperation more than mystery. Yet negative capability can still serve us as emblem of certain qualities, attitudes, dispositions that we bring to literature, without turning that happy phrase into yet another slogan. Beyond the arrogance of transient ideologies, beyond the mawkishness of self-regard, negative capability may offer us a kind of patience, perhaps ascesis, the intellectual and, yes, spiritual equivalent of discipline in our moment. [End Page 305]IStated baldly, my proposition, which I will need continually to texture and qualify, is this: the prevalence of politics, the obsession with power, the unrelieved pressure of both in the university, skew our language, thought, values. Thus the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, between Homer and Plato, now cedes the field to a nastier agon between both and politics as GRIM (my acronym for the Great Rumbling Ideological Machine) grinds on. These are no abstractions; the clamorous evidence is all about, indicative even in its triviality, banality.Take a book blurb. Kathy Acker endorses a new, and quite intelligent work, entitled Male Matters, thus: “Calvin Thomas is able to hint at a way out of the prisonhouse of straight male identity.” Granted, this is but an ad in a university press catalogue. But what does the language reveal about the assumptions of academic discourse? “Prisonhouse,” really, for all unfortunate, straight males? Is a generalization of this kind permissible when blander generalizations about other groups raise such a hue and cry? Will straight African-American or Native American males feel “offended” by the statement? Or is it all a matter of restitution, categorical loyalty, political commitment? And when will that supreme fiction, the white, straight, bourgeois, rational male “subject” cease to prop up every ideological complaint?Thought blends into hype; words writhe; stereotypes become as transparent as the stereotypes they once repugned. But let us consider an example worthier of criticism. In his Inaugural Lecture as Robert Wallace Professor at the University of Melbourne, entitled “The Departure of English?” (the question mark risks disingenuousness), Professor Simon During inelegantly states: “The academic appropriation of the avant-garde transfiguration of values is happening as what I am calling the departure of English—in the relative decline of literary studies and cultural studies’ emergence.” 2 Professor During thus assumes, on behalf of cultural studies, the mantles of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Hugo Ball—where is Antonin Artaud?—and Walter Benjamin, though none really had a mantle to bequeath. For a moment, the mind reels: Nietzscheans and poètes maudits, Pataphysicians and Dadaists, as apostles of cultural studies, of political correctness, group think, and GRIM? Involuntarily, the lines of William Butler Yeats, in “The Scholars,” sing out: “Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way?” [End Page 306]We are all free, of course, to reinvent our ancestors and to derive later authority from what an earlier generation derided—free, this side of ludicrousness. But Professor During’s argument, a sort of academic conceit, discourages mere ridicule; it has pedagogical consequences. Thus he continues: “I am certainly not claiming a causal relation between modernism circa 1900 and academic cultural studies today. Rather I want to argue that cultural studies... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Adventures of Telemachus [1699] by François de Salignac de la Mothe-FénelonJean–Michel RacaultFrançois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. The Adventures of Telemachus [1699]. Translated with an introduction and notes by A. J. B. Cremer. London, Anastasis Books, 2022, 419 pp. Hardbound £24.50. Paperback £15. ISBN: 9781739798314.Fénelon’s 1699 novel The Adventures of Telemachus—or more precisely, the epic poem in prose—was one of the major bestsellers in many European countries (...) for nearly two centuries. The book inspired paintings, operas, fashions, and even wallpaper motifs. It gave birth to a literary subgenre, the “archeological novel,” such as Terrasson’s Sethos (1731) or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s L’Arcadie (1788), in which the action is located in an antique setting. Still part of French schools’ syllabi a century ago, this book mainly owes its survival today to highly specialized academic research, stimulated from time to time when an “Agrégation” program generates new publications, papers, and conferences, as happened in 2009–10. The situation is similar in English-speaking countries, if perhaps just a bit worse: new editions are scarce and generally based more or less on revised versions of eighteenth-century translations, such as those editions by John Hawkesworth’s (1768) or Tobias Smollett’s (1776).The publication by A. J. B. Cremer of an entirely new translation, featuring a close rendering of the French text into modern English and preserving the original’s formal dignity without resorting to a pastiche of the classical language, is therefore a landmark in the history of Fénelon’s reception, and in the valuation of Telemachus particularly. This edition, while intended for the general reader, includes most of what is expected of a scholarly edition. In a comparatively short introduction, the editor recalls the essential facts about the author’s background (as a descendent of high nobility) and about his ecclesiastic career, which was compromised by both his involvement in mystical spirituality (the quarrel over Quietism) and his critical attitude toward the absolutism of Louis XIV’s régime. [End Page 140]In fact, Fénelon’s appointment as Archbishop of Cambrai (1695) was a kind of exile. In 1689, however, he was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s seven-year-old grandson, the young Duke of Burgundy, second in the line of succession to the throne after his father (though both died prematurely). Fénelon wrote for this boy The Adventures of Telemachus as an educative fiction in the tradition of the “mirrors of Princes.” Of course, such a book was not intended for publication, and when it appeared in 1699—strangely enough, in a fully legal manner and with a printing privilege—it was against Fénelon’s will and in a very faulty form, which was corrected in later editions. An editor today therefore faces solving some highly complex textual problems, and choosing between the manuscript traditions. Cremer’s translation is based upon Jacques Le Brun’s authoritative text, published in Fénelon’s Œuvres, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1997).1After surveying the critical reception of Telemachus, particularly in England, starting at the text’s first publication and reaching the present time, the introduction discreetly hints at an apparent trend, among some interpretations, toward Christian allegory. If the figure of Mentor obviously “represents Fénelon” in his tutorial role, Cremer notes, this character, also an incarnation of Minerva, embodies humanity and divinity simultaneously, and thus may be seen as a “Christ-figure,” with Telemachus as his disciple and Ulysses, with his pursuit of a never-ending quest, as the symbolic form of the Divine. These observations are not entirely new; they have been formulated before by various critics. The editor himself concurs with a well-known article by André Blanc that describes Fénelon’s neo-platonician turn of mind: for Fénelon there is no contradiction between Christian revelation and the pagan fables of classical mythology, which he considers prefigurations or allegories of Christianity.This interpretation is abundantly and convincingly confirmed in the editor’s annotations. While as expected the commentaries point frequently to Greco-Latin mythology or classical literary sources... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Warner PHILOSOPHICAL POETRY: THE CASE OF FOUR QUARTETS I FOR plato the quarrel between philosophy and poetry was already an ancient one. Since his day strenuous efforts have been made to eliminate it by circumscribing each widiin carefully specified boundaries, on die principle that strong fences make good neighbors, and allowing die one to venture onto the territory of the other only as licensed. Thus until recently assessments (...) of the literary quality of a philosopher's writing have commonly been treated as extraneous to its value as philosophy, and philosophical probing of die thought of a poem as irrelevant to a literary critic's final assessment ofit. For some works, however, such compromises seem forced; Four Quartets is a case in point. Here we have a sustained effort to explore issues of a philosophical and theological nature in poetic terms — in a manner that challenges our understanding and lays claim to our assent. The poetry does not merely encapsulate a theoretical position, but enacts a process ofthought perceived as bearing on diese topics at least as significandy as do those processes commonly termed "philosophical," and diereby raises by implication more general issues concerning die status of those "philosophical" modes themselves. F. R. Leavis is well known both for his engagement with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and for his insistence on a clear separation between literary criticism and philosophy; dius his raising of philosophical questions as an integral and decisive element in his final and most extensive analysis ofthe Quartets is particularly striking: That Four Quartets offers us thought, searching, basic and rigorous, we have our assurance in the first ten lines of"Burnt Norton".... As thought, it aspires to a general validity.... 222 Martin Warner223 The questions, how must reality be conceived, and what is the nature of the human situation, have been raised in a way diat compels one to determine and verify one's own ultimate beliefs.1 Of course, Leavis is clear that the manner in which die poem raises these questions is not that traditionally associated with philosophy: "The 'music' of Four Quartets challenges a criterion that is not logic, but something equivalent in the field of total meaning. We can only tell what it is by intelligent self-exposure to the poetry" (p. 159). Similarly his mode of"determining " and "verifying" his own beliefs in response is that proper to literary criticism. But the questions are plainly philosophical ones, and one does not need the authority of Leavis to see that the poem raises them. From a philosophical point ofview, the interesting questions are the status of the manner in which it does so and the nature of the "criterion that is not logic" which is said to have an internal relation to that "intelligent selfexposure to the poetry" which Leavis in his critical practice seeks to exemplify. Unfortunately, this late commentary on Eliot's poetry is among the weakest in the Leavis corpus, precisely lacking "intelligent self-exposure to the poetry";2 but this should not lead us to dismiss its more general claims. In earlier and far stronger criticism Leavis had already argued that "Burnt Norton" does "by strictly poetical means the business ofan epistemological and metaphysical inquiry" ("Eliot's Later Poetry," p. 65). Further, die most distinguished recent criticism of Eliot's poetry is probably that of A. D. Moody,3 and he too finds himself driven to place his own "ultimate beliefs" in relation to it. On the one hand, "There is likely to be at least some degree of essential conformity between the way we live now and die way in which the poem would order life; and to that extent the poem can be said to express, and to give a form to, the sensibUity ofits age" (p. 264). But on the other, "It is a neurotic vision, one arising from some disorder or disease of the personality — or of his culture.... It is not easy to attain a detached view of die neurosis which is like a dominant gene in our culture. It is a matter... of the alienation ofman from mat to which he properly, of his nature, belongs — his being cut off from... (shrink)

This paper offers a critical insight into the present moment of Croatian literary and cultural theory by combining an overview of the main actors and interests with a problem-specific approach to the underlying tension or quarrel that is defining and shaping the field of Theory in the Croatian context. The paper depicts a cross-generational debate on the fictionality and reification of/by Theory. Deconstructive operations and the broad historicizing of Theory itself are used along with the specificities of the Eastern (...) gaze: “othering,” interstitiality and the traces of previous conjunctures that strongly influence the Croatian theoretical scene. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ibsen's Drama of Self-Sacrifice William A. Johnsen Michigan State University Henrik Ibsen, like Flaubert, is a fundamental precursor of all subsequent modern literature. His development, which takes place over a lifetime of playwriting, is nevertheless only obscurely recognized in theories ofthe modern. Critics quarrel about his antecedents: Scribe, Feydeau, as well as Norwegian and Scandinavian dramatists and poets. Yet nothing in any of his predecessors could prepare one for (...) the great prose plays of the last twenty-five years of his career. How did he modernize himself? Ibsen said ofhis transition to prose, that he could no longer allow his characters to speak in verse, the language of the gods.1 It is tempting to begin reading Girard in here, because Ibsen offers us a fascinating variation on the historical moment ofcrisis represented by Flaubert, the moment of modernization itself, where the disintegration ofan accepted political and cultural aristocracy forced everyone to compete for prestige and for unique being in a common marketplace. In the case ofNorway during Ibsen's time, it is the crisis caused by the delegitimation ofDano-Norwegian as the uncontested literary language, in favor of competing versions of an emerging national language for a 1 Ibsen's famous comment is in a letter to Edmund Gosse, 15 January, 1874: "Speaking generally, the dialogue must conform to the degree of idealization which pervades the work as a whole. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient sense. What I sought to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk the 'language of the Gods'" (Sprinchorn 145). 142William A. Johnsen uniquely national literature that provokes a rivalry for atavistic or nativist preeminence: Who is the most Norwegian ofall? Ibsen and Henry James (as well as Borges) do not choose chauvinist atavism, yet they also avoid becoming mere disciples of the dominant philosophical traditions which have marginalized them. They are more outspoken discussants of the significant historical and cultural developments analyzed in Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel because they are from "new" countries, outsiders to European culture. It is here we must avoid the occupational hazard ofcritical theory: we must not permit a resemblance between a literary and a theoretical text to degenerate into a transcoding of the former into the latter, without ever considering that their resemblance means that each proposes some contribution to a converging theory ofhuman behavior. Critics who merely convert literature into the theories they already know contribute little to literary knowledge, and nothing to theory. Girard has insisted on the quasitheoretical potential of literary texts from the beginning. Only by staying as close to Ibsen as possible, can we ever hope to add to the considerable work that Girard's hypothesis has already achieved. If there is a general principal at stake in not prematurely transcoding the language of Ibsen's plays into theoretical language (not being prematurely theoretical for the sake of a more inclusive theory), there is also the specific risk of burying the peculiar diversity of his dramatic accomplishment. Ibsen is above all the playwright of complex characterization —no one before him was as subtle in motivating the ordinary characters ofeveryday life. Yet during his time, his plays were awaited for the intense discussions of ideas that they were certain to provoke. How is it that Ibsen is not considered the most theoretical and didactic of writers? Partly, the sheer number of controversial ideas and positions dramatized in play after play kept him from being seen (for very long) as the propagator ofany one ofthem. Michael Meyer reproduces in his biography ofIbsen a contemporary Norwegian political cartoon, which depicts Ibsen flailing first right, then left, then all (Meyer 447). More importantly, Ibsen, beginning with Samfundets Stotter (1877) [Pillars ofSociety], created a drama of ensemble theorizing conducted by characters themselves. Ibsen's work, beyond the creation ofcharacter, was to imagine the conditions and events that might make it possible for ordinary individuals to contribute discoveries about human behavior which, collectively, allow amplification and consolidation as a hypothesis. Ibsen 's Drama ofSelf-Sacrifice143 The mimetic hypothesis first found itself explaining the spectacular results of negative reciprocity in modern resentment, the unperceived commonality ofan isolation... (shrink)

The noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius contain almost all the ancient paradoxes. Nevertheless, in comparison with his philosophical sources, the author shows a shift in the perspective of his approach. He analyses the `master argument' of Diodorus Chronus only from an ethical point of view and, among the seven paradoxes attributed to Eubulides of Milet, he quotes the `heap' as an absurdity (absurdum), the `horned one' and the `not-someone' as a trap (captio), the `liar' as a sophism (sophisma). Following the (...) advice of Cynics, Gellius mistrusts deceptive manoeuvres, which highlight gaps in binary logic. At the same time, however, he is interested in argumentative structures, which lead one of two opponents on to victory. The extensive report of the quarrel between Protagoras and Evathlus, and many observations of Gellius on convertible forms of reasoning in literary texts fall within this rhetorical field. (shrink)

Examining both why and how Emerson evades the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, this book entirely rethinks the nature of Emerson's radical individualism and its relation to the possibility of an ethics and a politics. The author argues that the quarrel between literature and philosophy never took place in America, and that instead traditional philosophical work staged itself here as a form of literary praxis and cultural therapeutics, epitomized in the work of Emerson. A revisionary study of some (...) of Emerson's central essays, Less Legible Meanings also invites the reader to reconsider the nature of Emerson's influence on contemporary American culture and to discover new ways in which we might continue to understand his work. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book makes equal use of the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history. (shrink)

Like Aristophanes’ Frogs, Plato’s Symposium stages a contest between literary genres. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes constitutes the primary axis of this contest, and the speech of Alcibiades echoes and extends that of Aristophanes. Alcibiades’ comparison of Socrates with a satyr, however, contains the key to understanding Socrates’ implication, at the very end of the dialogue, that philosophy alone understands the inner connectedness, and hence the proper nature, of both tragedy and comedy. I argue that Plato reflects in (...) the character of Socrates the primordial wisdom embodied in satyric drama. I conclude with a brief consideration of Nietzsche’s challenge to Plato’s Dionysian wisdom. (shrink)

That there is something not altogether honest about a didactic novel can be seen once we imagine a novel which violates our political sympathies or our moral principles, such as a novel that shows the Nazis or the American soldiers at My Lai as heroes. We certainly would not like this novel. But could we refute it because of our certain knowledge that these men, in real life, were murderers? I don't think so, since a skillful writer could easily make (...) his characters act heroically in the situation—and even make us dislike their victims. Could we say that the situation is false? Perhaps, but since the actions and the characters are fictional, what does it mean to refute them? We can say that a novel is bad or unconvincing if the characters do not resemble people in real life or if the actions do not satisfy our sense of logic or probability. But these are literary objections, not political ones. And because the writer cannot be refuted by evidence from the real world, he cannot make pronouncements about this world. For example, even if there were evidence that no slave resembled Tom and no overseer resembled Legree, such evidence could not refute the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. And as Moody Prior points out in his essay , our disagreement with the philosophy of spiritual, rather than physical resistance to slavery cannot take away the heroism of Tom's action. His final act of forgiveness is indeed Christ-like, and no philosophy of political activism which is validated by, let us say, our admiration for Tom within the novel cannot validate Tom's kind of inward action in the real world. If it did, then our admiration for Tom, a fictional character, would prelude our support for a more active resistance to oppression. But, of course, it does not, or at least it should not, if we are to see fiction as performing a different role than politics and philosophy. Lawrence W. Hyman, professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is the author of The Quarrel Within: Art and Morality in Milton's Poetry. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The 'New Contextualism' Has Arrived: A Reply to Edward Wasiolek," appeared in the Winter 1975 issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Faulkner's Novels Past and PresentAndrew J. McKenna (bio)This article contains instances of the N-word. The Editor, Michigan State University Press, and Michigan State University do not condone the use of this word and only after careful consideration have we reprinted it. In this case, the word appears in the context of works by Faulkner.When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of some (...) of them as coloured people not niggers, … I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, and leave them alone. That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.—Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ([1929] 2019, 45)A black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.—W. E. B. Du Bois ([1940] 1992, 153)When William Faulkner memorably stated, "the past is not dead, it's not even past," he was not reaching out for a place in the world-historical pantheon of aphoristic wisdom; he wasn't thinking about culture and history in general. A person of his own time and place, he was thinking about his experience in his own homeland, the deep South of his native [End Page 39] Mississippi, with its cherished myth of a Lost Cause that ennobled the effort to tear our country apart over slavery, and that subsequently enabled Jim Crow legislation, spawned the KKK, and sanctioned a century of lynching and burning. There has been an uptick of attention to Faulkner owing to Carl Rollyson's recent two-volume biography (2020) and, especially for my purposes, Michael Gorra's The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (2020), which focuses on the centrality of that cataclysm in his creative imagination and his historical vision.On more than one occasion Faulkner himself was emphatic in his own ambivalence toward "his native land," as in this self-description: "He was born of it and his bones will sleep in it; loving it even while hating some of it … the intolerance and injustice; the lynching of negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black" (in Blotner 2005, 354). Gorra (2020) argues that this very ambivalence is a generative resource for the author's greatest achievements, quoting Yeats's notorious dictum, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (346). This can remind us of the notorious "crucible of doubt" out of which Dostoevsky allegedly forged his fiction. The Russian novelist is named (Blotner 2005, 718) as among seven of Faulkner's "masters" in the literary education of this omnivorous autodidact, with the others being Melville, Conrad, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, and Cervantes. With Dostoevsky especially he shares an admixture of horror and benign good humor. On occasion Faulkner was classed as an author of Southern Gothic, a label also applied to Flannery O'Connor, who, with Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, counts among his greatest literary progeny. A more capacious designation might rank him with masters of the grotesque, as Mikhail Bakhtin has explored this anomalous category in his writings on Rabelais and Dostoevsky.Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) begins and ends on a humorous note, as we follow the quest of the guileless Lena Grove for the father of her unborn child. She has concluded from her "endless care of other children" in her brother's household, "'I reckon that's why I got one so quick myself'" (3); the novel closes with her newborn infant in her arms in her now aimless trek, marveling, "My, my. A body does get around: here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee" (480).Lena's peregrinations bookend the story of Joe Christmas, so named because he was born on that day and who, we find later in the narrative, was snatched away by his religiously fanatical grandfather to be placed in an orphanage, then snatched away again to be placed... (shrink)

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide in Literature education paying particular attention to how this was reinforced by New Criticism and Poststructuralist Criticism as these were key movements that have had a significant (...) influence on the teaching of Literature in schools. More importantly, I argue that such a divide exemplified the different goals of the West, in which Literature education originated as a platform for the cultivation of taste, and Postcolonial countries, in which the subject was utilized as a political tool for colonization resulting in acts of mimicry and subversion among colonized subjects. In the second part of the paper, I apply third space theory to disrupt the aesthetic-political divide. I discuss the need to create third spaces in Literature classrooms that are critical, inclusive, negotiated and ethical allowing students to engage with aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Institution of TheoryPaul M. HedeenThe Institution of Theory, by Murray Krieger; xi & 103 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $35.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.Murray Krieger is an insider who promoted literary theory as an “instrument” (p. 80) and watched it go on to become an “institution” (p. 80). In this volume he recounts its rise, assesses it, and suggests its revision.For Krieger, theory is a (...) continuation of traditional institutional battles. The debate between the old historical scholarship and the new criticism, which he describes in his first chapter, parallels the current debate between new historicism and deconstruction (p. 25). But Krieger shows that there is a much older parallel in the debate between the Tories with their myth of the Golden Age and the Whigs with their myth of progress (p. 27). American criticism divides itself between formalists who emulate “the great literatures of the West” (p. 35) and historicists who value literature “shaped by and... reflect[ing] American experience” (p. 35). For Krieger, the ancient quarrel between formalism and historicism is the real context for this century’s debate between new criticism and the older and newer historicisms (p. 38–40).The first of his four chapters describes the old historicism’s resistance to theory, especially its resistance to the formal principles of the new criticism, the preinstitutionalized theory of the 1950s. The new criticism could be defended as being “for the text” (p. 8), but the theories that came after it—structuralism, poststructuralism, and their “interdisciplinary mixtures” (p. 10)—established successive hybrids built upon “the domain of contingency” (p. 12). Krieger argues that this process, coupled with the rise of human sciences and the demystification of literary values, has resulted in a full-scale assault upon institutions, advancing the “anti-institutional institution” (p. 19) of theory and replacing discipline-based “academic structures” (p. 19).Thankfully, Krieger mitigates these relatively crude oppositions by discussing how poststructuralism has energized the intramural debates within the theoretical camps. In the end he finds the current opposition between deconstruction (with its embrace of textuality) and new historicism (its embrace of contingencies) to be an either/or fallacy. The “poem... helps create history,” he asserts, “even as... history had to help create the poem” (p. 45).In his third chapter, Krieger relies upon this “middling” insight to describe [End Page 403] the fight between those who see literary works as tools of ideology and those who regard them as resistant to ideology (p. 48). The tradition of resistance may support “a given ideological structure,” but at the same time it believes that literature is a “structure of complexities that eludes any attempt to make [it] into an ideology’s servant” (p. 55). And so Krieger escapes from “unified meaning” (p. 64), an escape he traces through a history of literary thought that culminates in Paul de Man.Krieger is now ready for some classifying of his own: the new historicism in one category, grouped with the ideological (closed, totalizing, and controlling traditions); deconstruction in a separate category, grouped with the counterideological (open and liberating traditions). He does not reject ideological theories out of hand; he proposes “a balancing act [of letting] loose the counterideological potential of” certain texts “while resisting the universalizing thematic consequences” of this very process (p. 76).Having traced the institutionalization of theory, having contextualized and thus legitimized the many sides of contemporary theory’s debates, Krieger concludes by uttering an enlightened “plea for theory to reengage the lingering promise of the aesthetic [and] to allow a chance for the extraordinary particular, which is not already contained within a ruling universal” (pp. 90, 91). If this were possible—and he has shown it to be both historically and theoretically defensible—then one should also acknowledge “the authority of human consciousness” (p. 91), for it alone is receptive to that “extraordinary particular.”More than the usual powder for theory’s morning-after headache, Krieger’s volume is a compelling argument for theory to acknowledge the very traditions it has sought to discredit and exclude.Paul M. HedeenWartburg CollegeCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Callimachus and His CriticsFrederick T. GriffithsAlan Cameron. Callimachus and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xiv + 534 pp. Cloth, $49.50, £37.50."Elegy was the great preoccupation of the age of Callimachus, and it was naturally the style appropriate for elegy rather than epic that Callimachus addressed in the prologue to his own original and polemical new elegy" (437). Professor Cameron's keenly anticipated argument (outlined in TAPA 122 (...) [1992] 305-12) does not disappoint, especially now that he includes among the "critics" not only such ancient "Telchines" as Asclepiades and Posidippus but also the Roman Callimacheans and "moderns with Hesiodic initiations on the brain" (415). To counter "the curious modern preoccupation with Hellenistic epic and epyllion" (ix), seen most starkly in interpretation of Catullus and the Augustans, Cameron interweaves two ambitious projects.First, the organizing argument is a reconstruction and dating of the Aetia so as to establish that the prologue (frag. 1 Pf.) introduced books 1 and 2 ca. 270 [End Page 339] B.C. amid debates about contemporary elegy. In place of the now generally discredited "feud" with Apollonius over monumental epic, Cameron posits a quarrel with Asclepiades and Posidippus over the epicizing Antimachean mode of elegy. The prologue is not a recusatio of grand epic (a Roman preoccupation); indeed, "... there is no mention of epic in the Aetia prologue" (457), and elegy would be a curious medium for dictating taste in hexameter. Nor does the prologue claim novelty for the Aetia as catalogue-style "Hesiodic elegy," which had been in fashion since the Lyde, and indeed so much so that "it was pseudo-Hesiodic rather than pseudo-Homeric writing that aroused Callimachus's ire" (363). The "Telchines" are the admirers of the Lyde, a poem that Callimachus assails as an "epic pastiche" (483), a monotonous, and the stylistic antithesis of the interesting subjectivity and personal voice demonstrated in his own Cydippe (ca. 279-274). For having compromised the distance of elegy from epic, Antimachus is left pointedly unnamed next to Mimnermus and Philitas (316) and further overshadowed by allusion to Aratus (in, frag. 1.11) as the proponent and paragon of. In sum, the prologue's polemic lies more completely within the moment and between the lines than has been suspected, and entirely within elegy but outside of theory: "So Callimachus's famous literary theories do not really amount to much-as theories" (452).Second, to understand how the Aetia speaks for its age we must understand the age rightly. To provide "a prolegomena to the study of Hellenistic (and so also Roman) poetry" (ix) Cameron pauses frequently in his reconstruction of the Aetia to launch diatribes against the folly of reducing Hellenistic poetry to the aestheticism and obscurantism of the "ivory tower," or to genre inversion (contra Rossi), Buchpoesie (contra Bing), or, worst of all, some "contest of Homer and Hesiod" about big and small epics. This rarefied "Alexandria" existed first in Rome and at a great remove from the continuities of Hellenic culture that shaped Callimachus' "real literary context, a world of cities as well as courts, a world of private symposia and public festivals" (ix). Multibook epics were too rare (contra Ziegler) to require recusatio, while the popularity of short hexameter poems precluded controversies such as are implied by the term of "epyllion" (contra Gutzwiller) or imputed to Theocritus (Id. 7, 13, and 22) and Callimachus (H. Apollo and Hecale). "To judge from the debate about the Lyde, it was elegy that preoccupied the more reflective poets and critics of the age" (451).Only a scholar with Cameron's range, good ear, and courage could undertake a two-pronged offensive of this sort, which is not less "original and polemical" than the elegy it celebrates. Recently published papyri, Byzantine misreaders, and the shifty tribe of epigrammatists have all been marshaled with equal authority for what is in part the elegiac pre-history to his distinguished The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford 1993). By the nature of the fragmentary evidence, both the elegy-centered age and its important (if not definitive) Aetia can be reconstructed only at the level of hypothesis, and readers will differ as... (shrink)