Stanley Cavell is a leading figure in American philosophy and one of the most exhilarating and wide-ranging intellectuals of our time. In this book Espen Hammer offers a lucid and thorough account of the development of Cavell's work, from his early writings on ordinary language philosophy and skepticism to his most recent contributions to film studies, literary theory, romanticism, ethics, and politics. The book traces the many lines of skepticism occurring in Cavell's work and shows how they amount to (...) a rich and subtle picture of human subjectivity. Hammer explores Cavell's passionate engagement with Austin and Wittgenstein's visions of language, and his uncovering of conceptions of the ordinary in Emerson and Thoreau. Central sections of the book are devoted to the tragic and the comic as these modes of existence come into play in Shakespeare and Hollywood cinematic drama. In elaborating Cavell's responses to thinkers such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, the author situates Cavell's writing within the wider context of contemporary continental philosophy. Hammer clearly reveals the existential dimensions of Cavell's thought. He argues that his variant of ordinary language philosophy is a vital stimulus to self-transformation in cognitive, aesthetic, ethical, and political domains, contributing significantly to a rethinking of issues such as responsibility and autonomy, and the relationship between philosophy and literature. A critical introduction to the thought of an inordinately complex writer, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literary theory, cultural theory, comparative literature, and media and cultural studies. (shrink)

A collection of 17 important readings provide those unfamiliar with Cavell's work with an overview of its strategic purpose, its central themes, and its argumentative development. The readings are taken from every one of the major fields in which Cavell has been involved--aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, literary criticism, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Brief editorial introductions to each piece are included. A previously unpublished essay on Wittgenstein serves as an epilogue. Annotation copyright by Book (...) News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell has been a brilliant, idiosyncratic, and controversial presence in American philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies for years. Even as he continues to produce new writing of a high standard -- an example of which is included in this collection -- his work has elicited responses from a new generation of writers in Europe and America. This collection showcases this new work, while illustrating the variety of Cavell's interests: in the "ordinary language" philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin, (...) in film criticism and theory, in literature, psychoanalysis, and the American transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The collection also reprints Richard Rorty's early review of Cavell's magnum opus, The Claim of Reason (1979), and it concludes with Cavell's substantial set of responses to the essays, a highlight of which is his engagement with Rorty. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's work is distinctive not only in its importance to philosophy but also for its remarkable interdisciplinary range. Cavell is read avidly by students of film, photography, painting, and music, but especially by students of literature, for whom Cavell offers major readings of Thoreau, Emerson, Shakespeare, and others. In this first book-length study of Cavell's writings, Michael Fischer examines Cavell's relevance to the controversies surrounding poststructuralist literary theory, particularly works by Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, (...) and Stanley Fish. Throughout his study, Fischer focuses on skepticism, a central concern of Cavell's multifaceted work. Cavell, following J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein, does not refute the radical epistemological questioning of Descartes, Hume, and others, but rather characterizes skepticism as a significant human possibility or temptation. As presented by Fischer, Cavell's accounts of both external-world and other-minds skepticism share significant affinities with deconstruction, a connection overlooked by contemporary literary theorists. Fischer follows Cavell's lead in examining how different genres address the problems raised by skepticism and goes on to show how Cavell draws on American and English romanticism in fashioning a response to it. He concludes by analyzing Cavell's remarks about current critical theory, focusing on Cavell's uneasiness with some of the conclusions reached by its practitioners. Fischer shows that Cavell's insights, grounded in powerful analyses of Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein, permit a fresh view of Derrida, Miller, de Man, and Fish. The result is not only a revealing characterization of deconstruction but a much-needed and insightful introduction to Cavell's rich but difficult oeuvre. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Using Stanley CavellMichael FischerContending with Stanley Cavell, edited by Russell B. Goodman, 205 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, $45.00Reading Cavell, edited by Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh, 262 pp. London: Routledge, 2006, $120.00Stanley Cavell, edited by Richard Eldridge, 260 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, $24.99.Stanley Cavell often speaks of inheriting and carrying on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other writers. (...) These writers help him move on in his own thinking, turning him around when he feels lost, provoking him when he gets discouraged or stuck. His indebtedness to J. L. Austin in the acknowledgements to Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) captures one way he benefits from all the writers who have influenced him: "To the late J. L. Austin I owe, beyond what I hope is plain in my work, whatever is owed the teacher who shows one a way to do relevantly and fruitfully the thing one had almost given up hope of doing."1 By taking up the work of the writers he values, Cavell hopes to undo what he sees as their neglect and misappropriation by the culture at large and by the academic profession. He makes his case for these writers not so much by exhortation as by his own use of them.The impact of Cavell's own writing on his readers continues to unfold, as these three books attest. Each is a helpful collection of essays by scholars in various fields discussing his work. Reading Cavell includes [End Page 198] an essay by Cavell ("The Wittgensteinian Event"), as does Contending with Stanley Cavell ("Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of Encounter"), which also features a response by Cavell to the other essays in the volume.The contributors in these three volumes all begin from the assumption that Cavell, like the writers who have influenced him, remains marginalized even though interest in his work has grown. But his isolation can be overstated. In an otherwise insightful essay on Cavell's literary criticism ("The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell" in Contending with Stanley Cavell ), Garrett Stewart laments "the regrettable undercirculation of Cavell's ideas" (p. 140) in literary studies and predicts that "mainstream literary scholars will increasingly have a hard time" with his writing—Stewart calls it "literary prose"—because it calls on reading skills that in the "epoch of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and the semiotics of social energy" have "atrophied" (p. 153). In the introduction to this same volume, Russell Goodman offers a more measured, less pessimistic assessment that gets Cavell's peculiar professional status exactly right: "Cavell occupies a curious position in all the fields in which he works: he is at the same time a major figure and one whose work people do not quite know how to use" (p. 3).In figuring out how to use Cavell, several contributors to these volumes begin by explicating his key ideas and texts. The writers in Stanley Cavell assess his contributions to several broad areas, including ethics, theory of action, philosophy of mind and language, aesthetics, and Shakespeare criticism. Reading Cavell and Contending with Stanley Cavell include essays on such central topics as his view of skepticism and his understanding of the ordinary. Of special note is Stephen Mulhall's close reading of the opening of The Claim of Reason, "On Refusing to Begin," in Contending with Stanley Cavell. One barrier to using Cavell remains his style, which readers either love or hate. Mulhall shows that the very features of Cavell's writing that some readers find most annoying—for example, his penchant for complicating and qualifying even the apparently most obvious point—in fact instruct us in how to read him. Mulhall astutely describes The Claim of Reason and Philosophical Investigations as modernist texts written in the absence of philosophical conventions that the writers can take for granted. Such writing must resemble "a half-built edifice whose form acknowledges both its origin in ruins and the completion it foreshadows" (p. 32)—but never attains.In addition to explicating Cavell, other contributors to these volumes extend his work to texts and issues he does not address. These... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the OrdinaryRoblin MeeksStanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, by Stephen Mulhall; xxv & 351 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, $52.00.Despite what his book’s title might suggest, Stephen Mulhall’s thorough explication of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy is anything but ordinary. At the outset Mulhall makes it clear that he intends to address Cavell’s exceptional formidability, and sets himself “not to attempt to (...) do what can and must only be done by Cavell’s own prose, but to clear the space that is required for it to do so” (p. vii). He grapples with those peculiar factors that fortify Cavell’s work against many readers: a viscous style and the manifold directions in which that style has stretched. An extensive exegesis, Mulhall believes, will prepare the ground for thoughtful critiques long overdue.In order to disarm Cavell’s “unfashionable tone” (p. viii), Mulhall opens with a discussion of Cavell’s earlier and more traditional work in aesthetics. He carefully attends to the ways in which Cavell appropriated and practiced ordinary language philosophy as established by Wittgenstein and Austin, and in so doing he displays Cavell’s struggle with this methodological inheritance. Conceiving it as the “paradigmatically modern philosophy” (p. 73), Cavell believes that ordinary language creates a tension between philosophy’s present and its past inflections—an urgency he finds ubiquitous in modern Western culture, echoed in contemporary painting and music. For Cavell, philosophy is invariably both subject and object.The second part of the book informs and extends the first, addressing Cavell’s elemental motivation—skepticism. Mulhall shows that Cavell “sees the practices of ordinary language philosophy as everywhere set in opposition to [End Page 407] the skeptical impulse” (p. 186). In reply to each “specific outbreak of what seems to be a fundamental human desire to repudiate that which aligns speakers with one another and with the world they inhabit” (p. 186), Cavell argues that investigations into the criteria governing what we say when—this is the sense in which he “recounts the ordinary”—can reaffirm the alignments between speakers and their world.Mulhall devotes most of his remaining pages to subjects in which Cavell observes the meeting of ordinary language philosophy and the skeptical impulse: film, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and the writings of Shakespeare, Emerson, and Thoreau—subjects traditionally located outside the philosophical pale of settlement. Mulhall demonstrates how these things have in turn shaped Cavell’s own method. Where Wittgenstein, for example, adopted a dense but laconic approach in his investigations, Cavell has come to exercise a species of Emersonian perfectionism. His abundant prose is intended to revise and to expand upon itself, offering itself up for criticism.Mulhall himself, however, does not fully accept this invitation. Since he states in his introduction that he is interested primarily in opening up Cavell’s philosophy for genuine critical response, and since he presents the strongest possible case on its behalf, he is in an ideal position—indeed, no one is better positioned—to offer an exhaustive critique. And yet the criticism he eventually levels (Cavell’s reliance upon religious metaphor is undercut by a chronic distaste for Christianity) fails to persuade; it is inadequately developed. Mulhall wants to maintain the exegete’s distance even when Cavell’s writing beckons him into the more intimate role of critic.Mulhall is right that Cavell’s philosophical aim is “to create a set of texts, to establish and maintain a texture of prose, that can earn the title of philosophy from its readers” (p. xiv). But he insufficiently explores the degree to which the skeptical impulse fundamentally infects this overarching ambition with doubt. And so he under-appreciates Cavell’s vexation. For if ordinary language philosophy—in working through the ineluctable tension between modernity and history—cannot produce work capable of being called philosophy or itself fails to find an audience, what can? Such questions ultimately lead back to Cavell’s own prose, and it is to Mulhall’s credit that he has cleared the space for such a return.Roblin MeeksCity University of New YorkCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Much current theorizing about literature involves efforts to renew our sense of aesthetic values in reading. Such is the case with new formalism as well as recent appeals to the notion of “surface reading.” While sympathetic to these efforts, Charles Altieri believes they ultimately fall short because too often they fail to account for the values that engage literary texts in the social world. In Reckoning with the Imagination, Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist (...) ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art. Altieri finds a perspective for that restoration in a reading of Wittgenstein’s later work that stresses Wittgenstein’s parallel criticisms of the spirit of empiricism. Altieri begins by offering a phenomenology of imagination, because we cannot fully honor art if we do not link it to a distinctive, socially productive force. That force emerges in two quite different but equally powerful realizations in his reading of John Ashbery’s “Instruction Manual,” which explicitly establishes a model for a postromantic view of imagination, and William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He then turns to Wittgenstein with chapters on the role of display as critique of Enlightenment thinking, the honoring of qualities like sensitivity and the ability to attune to the actions of others, the role of expression in the building of models, and the contrast between ethical and confessional modes of judgment. Finally, Altieri produces his own model of aesthetic experience as participatory valuation and makes an extended argument for the social significance of appreciation as a way to escape the patterns of resentment fundamental to our current mode of politics. A masterful work by one of our foremost literary and philosophical theorists, Reckoning with the Imagination will breathe new life into ongoing debates over the value of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Charles Altieri's Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience addresses a perceived problem in literary theory.1 That problem is how to reintegrate practices of "close reading" in a field dominated by "grand theory": deconstruction, postcolonial studies, queer studies, New Historicism, and other regimens. Unlike the New Criticism that controlled the reading, writing, and teaching of serious literature in the United States through the 1940s and '50s, in which intricate analysis of text as text (...) was all, Altieri does not begrudge conceptual space to more expansive social-theoretical approaches. But he does deny their trump status, i.e., the idea that their forms of cultural... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bookmarks Raman Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory is now published in the United States by the University Press of Kentucky ($17.00 cloth, $7.00 paper). It is a discerning introduction for students (and anyone else) to the current state of "theory"—a word which in this context seems for the present to have lost its neutral sense. Given the tendentious climate of literary studies, Selden's book (...) is all the more remarkable for its sober, equable attitude. Whether he is describing Russian formalism, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, reader-response theory, or Gerald Prince's "narratee," he is always a fair guide, generous without descending to the breathlessness "theory" so often incites. While I miss a detailed or persuasive account ofArnoldian, New Critical, or Leavisite criticism to serve as a foil for his discussion of poststructuralism, Seiden does nevertheless usually give some idea of what or who the enemy is for each of his theorists. Selden's quotations are well chosen, and he is adroit in elucidating the internal problems of theories, as, for example, when he says that Cixous's approach runs the risk of "driving women into an obscure unconscious retreat where silence reigns interrupted only by uterine 'babble.' " This is a danger, according to Seiden, well understood by Kristeva, who views women writers as "caught." He makes the point by citing Kristeva. "On the one hand," he says, "as writers they inevitably collude with [what Kristeva describes as] 'phallic dominance, associated with the privileged father-daughter relationship, which gives rise to the tendency towards mastery, science, philosophy, professorships, etc....' " On the other hand, Kristeva continues, "we flee everything considered 'phallic' to find refuge in the valorisation of the silent underwater body, thus abdicating any entry into history." Raman Seiden does not attempt to dazzle, but there is substance for thought on almost every one of the 146 pages in his book. Far weightier are two literary theory anthologies which have come our way. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle have edited Critical Theory Since 1965 (Florida State University Press, $29.95 paper). It resembles a telephone book and widi two-column pages it packs a lot in. The book begins with Stanley Cavell's 325 326Philosophy and Literature splendid essay "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," and continues with Chomsky, John Searle, Kermode, Derrida and his American followers, Ingarden, Foucault,Jauss, Frye (a figure Seiden has chosen to ignore), Girard, Cixous and various feminists, Culler, Abrams—and on it goes. It was a pleasant surprise to find Clifford Geertz's "Blurred Genres" here; curiously missing is any contribution from Richard Rorty. And though the tide says the material starts in '65, Adams and Searle actually take us back farther. The main text ends with Said on page 622, but we are dien given a 233-page appendix—an anthology in itself—which begins with Frege and Peirce and goes through selections from various linguists and philosophers from Saussure, Bakhtin, and Whorf, to Heidegger on Hölderlin, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Lacan. Adams and Searle have contributed good introductions for each author, as well as a wide-ranging general introduction (Adams) and an afterword (Searle). In the last paragraph of his opening remarks, Adams says, "The theme of poststructuralism in its deconstructive phase is that poems resist interpretation. Demonstration of how this is so has been important (though not as new as some have thought), but repeated demonstration of this has already eventuated in its own form of reduction and thematization. Every text submitted to deconstruction considered as a critical method will yield the same theme, which may be true enough but remains only that story: the allegory of uninterpretability. It quickly becomes a repetition of the older formalist discovery that every text is about itself. It is no wonder that there has been a stirring—not so much a resistance to deconstruction (there has been that too, of course)—that expresses a desire to go beyond it. There has even been the idea of returning to Kant and trying again." Critical Theory Since 1965 is a big, useful book. On the somewhat more trim and basic side is Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology... (shrink)

_The Literary Wittgenstein_ is a stellar collection of articles relating the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to core problems in the theory and philosophy of literature. Amid growing recognition that Wittgenstein's philosophy has important implications for literary studies, this book brings together twenty-one articles by the most prominent figures in the field. Eighteen of the articles are published here for the first time. _The Literary Wittgenstein_ applies the approach of Wittgenstein to core areas of literary theory, including (...) poetry, deconstruction, the ethical value of literature, and the nature and logic of fictional discourse. The literary dimension of Wittgenstein's own writings is also explored, such as the authorial strategy of the _Tractatus_, and writing and method in the _Philosophical Investigations_. Major literary figures discussed in the book include William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Friedrich Hölderlin. By mapping out the foundations of a new approach to literature, _The Literary Wittgenstein_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the relevance and application of Wittgenstein's thought to literary theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language and logic. (shrink)

This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, (...) which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language (...) criticism and philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)

Stephen Mulhall presents the first full philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell. Cavell, a leading contemporary American thinker, is best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory; Mulhall examines the broad spectrum of his thought, elucidating its essentially philosophical roots and trajectory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Philosophy Can't Say About Literature:Stanley Cavell and EndgameBenjamin H. OgdenIn "Ending the Waiting Game," the philosopher of ordinary language Stanley Cavell attempts to say what Samuel Beckett's Endgame means by explaining what the characters in the play mean by what they say. Cavell attempts to do the very thing that the work says cannot be done, or mocks as foolish and misguided, or resists giving clues to how (...) it could ever be done: he tries to say just "how Beckett's objects mean at all, the original source of their conviction."1 This is not simply a reading tactic that Cavell thinks is well-suited to the difficult task of making sense of a difficult play. It is a demonstration of the theory of language (ordinary language philosophy) that Cavell defends and applies in his collection of essays Must We Mean What We Say?, of which "Ending the Waiting Game" is a chapter. Cavell's literary criticism is in the service of his philosophy. His work of criticism is in search of something that it must find (that is, something that it claims to have found even when it may not have); what it must find is a work of literature that demonstrates the utility and validity of ordinary language philosophy.If we are to take issue with Cavell for too strenuously transposing philosophy onto literature, then we must also know something of the philosophy he draws upon. Ordinary language philosophy traces its origins to Wittgenstein, and was popularized by J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle at Oxford in the 1940's. It is a branch of analytic philosophy that foregoes any attempt to create an "ideal philosophical language" of the sort Wittgenstein developed in his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Instead of seeing the abstractions and ambiguities of ordinary usage as something to be supplanted by a more logically rigorous system, ordinary language philosophers argue that debates over the meaning [End Page 126] of abstract terms come about precisely because words are removed from their ordinary context. For Cavell, the whole idea of an "ideal language" is absurd because, as anyone who has ever tried to learn a foreign language knows, every language has its own unique set of usages and idioms and unspoken rules. In order to speak a language properly, then, one cannot just know the dictionary or formal definitions of words (its "ideal" generative grammar), but must understand the "natural environment" in which phrases and words are logical or appropriate. Often these contexts (which determine the rules for "what we should say when" [p. 20]) invest words with meanings that you won't find in any dictionary, and cannot be catalogued in a grammatical or syntactical system.So, if one asks, "Did you dress that way voluntarily?" (p. 9), the word "voluntarily" takes on a meaning that is not included among its dictionary definitions (according to Cavell). Clearly, in asking whether you dress voluntarily one is not asking whether you have free-will to dress as you please, but is calling attention to the funny way you dress. In this case, successful communication is only possible if the one who is being questioned understands from context and the ordinary use of language precisely what is being asked. If he answers, "Of course I dressed voluntarily, I believe in free will," he will have misspoken, been incorrect. Clearly, he doesn't understand what the question must mean because the statement "MUST MEAN that my clothes are peculiar" (p. 9). For it to mean anything else would be a mistake and a misuse of language by the speaker, or a misunderstanding of language by the listener. To learn a language (which for Cavell means to become like a native speaker) is to learn the nature of the contingency between the explicit meaning of an expression and the occasion on which an expression is appropriate, and to be aware of what you must mean when you speak (what you cannot help but mean or imply by the language you use).What this means is that for Cavell reading literature becomes a process of readers "naturalizing ourselves to a new form of life, a new... (shrink)

A collection of 17 important readings provide those unfamiliar with Cavell's work with an overview of its strategic purpose, its central themes, and its argumentative development. The readings are taken from every one of the major fields in which Cavell has been involved--aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, literary criticism, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Brief editorial introductions to each piece are included. A previously unpublished essay on Wittgenstein serves as an epilogue. Annotation copyright by Book (...) News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

In 1969 Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? revolutionized philosophy of ordinary language, aesthetics, ethics, tragedy, literature, music, art criticism, and modernism. This volume of new essays offers a multi-faceted exploration of Cavell's first and most important book, fifty years after its publication. The key subjects which animate Cavell's book are explored in detail: ordinary language, aesthetics, modernism, skepticism, forms of life, philosophy and literature, tragedy and the self, the questions of voice and audience, jazz and (...) sound, Wittgenstein, Austin, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare. The essays make Cavell's complex style and sometimes difficult thought accessible to a new generation of students and scholars. They offer a way into Cavell's unique philosophical voice, conveying its seminal importance as an intellectual intervention in American thought and culture, and showing how its philosophical radicality remains of lasting significance for contemporary philosophy, American philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies. (shrink)

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

Wittgenstein is often regarded as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and in recent decades, his work has begun to play a prominent role in literary studies, particularly in debates over language, interpretation, and critical judgment. Wittgenstein and Literary Studies solidifies this critical movement, assembling recent critics and philosophers who understand Wittgenstein as a counterweight to longstanding tendencies in both literary studies and philosophical aesthetics. The essays here cover a wide range of topics. Why (...) have contemporary writers been so drawn to Wittgenstein? What is a Wittgensteinian response to New Historicism, Post-Critique, and other major critical movements? How does Wittgenstein help us understand the nature of style, fiction, poetry, and the link between ethics and aesthetics? As the volume makes clear, Wittgenstein's work provides a rare bridge between professional philosophy and literary studies, offering us a way out of entrenched positions and their denials-what Wittgenstein himself called 'pictures' 'that held us captive.'. (shrink)

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

The familiar idea that literature is embedded in social practices that help explain both its existence and its value took a distinctive form in analytic philosophy, drawing on speech act theory and a conception of ‘rules’. A major influence was John Rawls's seminal paper ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ (1955) in which he introduced the ‘practice conception of rules’ according to which certain practices are defined by rules that in turn make possible certain kinds of action. The idea underlies the notion (...) of ‘constitutive rules’ in speech act theory and draws on a comparison with games. The origin of this idea can clearly be traced to Wittgenstein, with his highly original thoughts on practices, rules, and games. Yet the Wittgensteinian influence is not sufficiently acknowledged in this context (that is, the context of literary aesthetics). As someone who holds the idea of a practice or ‘institution’ to be of crucial importance in philosophy of literature, I therefore thought it would be useful to put the record straight and remind ourselves what Wittgenstein says about practices (and games) to see just what the relation is between the roots of that idea (in Wittgenstein) and its current manifestations in literary aesthetics. The results suggest that there is much to be learned from Wittgenstein and that his model might be more fruitful than that of Rawls. (shrink)

Although universally recognised as one of the greatest of modern philosophers, Wittgenstein's work in aesthetics has been unjustly neglected. This is the first book exclusively devoted to Wittgenstein's aesthetics, exploring the themes developed by Wittgenstein in his own writing on aesthetics as well as the implications of Wittgenstein's wider philosophical views for understanding central issues in aesthetics. Drawing together original contributions from leading international scholars, this book will be an important addition to studies of Wittgenstein's thought, (...) but its discussion of issues in literature, music and performing art, and criticism will also be of interest to many students of literary and cultural studies. Exploring three key themes - the capacity of the arts to illuminate our lives; the nature of the particular responses involved in understanding and appreciating works of art; the role of theory and principle in artistic and critical practice - the contributors address issues raised by contemporary philosophers of art, and seek to make connections between Wittgenstein's work and that of other significant philosophies of art in the Western tradition. Displaying the best practice of modern philosophical writing - clarity, cogency, respect for but not blind obedience to common sense, argument illustrated with detailed examples, rejection of speculation and pretension - this book demonstrates how philosophy can make a valuable contribution to understanding the arts. (shrink)

This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark text, first published 20 years ago, provides a new preface that discusses the reception and influence of his work, which occupies a unique niche between philosophy and literary studies.

In the first essay of this book, Stanley Cavell characterizes philosophy as a "willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape." Fantasies of film and television and literature, flashes across the landscape of literary theory, philosophical discourse, and French (...) historiography give Cavell his starting points in these twelve essays. Here is philosophy in and out of "school," understood as a discipline in itself or thought through the works of Shakespeare, Molière, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Brecht, Makavejev, Bergman, Hitchcock, Astaire, and Keaton. (shrink)

My letter of invitation to this seminar expresses the thought that “it will be very useful to have someone from outside the field help us see ourselves.” Given my interests in what you might call the fact of literary study, I was naturally attracted by the invitation to look at literary study as a discipline or profession but also suspicious of the invitation. I thought: Do professionals really want to be helped to see themselves by outsiders? This is (...) an invitation to get a group of people sore at me, and it will only result in the group’s having an occasion not to see itself, since any member of it can easily dismiss anything I say as uninformed. But the invitation goes on to give the title for this session as “The Nature and Function of Literary Study: As Others See Us.” Reading that, I thought: That is different. That identifies me as an other to the “academic and professional concerns” of the field—hence, not just outside but intimately outside, as if my position were an alternative to yours. And how could I not be better informed about being other to you than you are?But of course I know that there is no single unified “you” to which I am other, that some of you, perhaps most, have other others than philosophy and see your practice not against philosophy but against history or criticism or literary theory. So I should perhaps say that I am not exactly single or unified myself, that I am also other to the Anglo-American profession of philosophy, to which at the same time I belong. A way of expressing my otherness to this profession of philosophy is simply to say that I take you as also among my others, that I recognize the study of literature to be an alternative to what I do—a path I might have taken, might still irregularly be taking—to occupy a relation to the way I think, that for most of the members of my profession would be occupied by a profession of logic or science. I will not try here to account theoretically for the intimate differences that may make philosophy and literature alternative studies, which means that I will not here systematically try taking the perspective of an other. But I will be bearing in mind its certain messages and rumors that have lately been coming my way from the field of literary studies. You have, for example, not kept it secret that you have been worrying, as a profession, and sometimes in the form of conducting arguments about the obligation to literary theory as part of literary study, nor secret that these arguments sometimes take on the color or texture of strong statements of, or against, something called deconstruction. I will try to say something about these poorly kept secrets. Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of “Walden,” The Claim of Reason, and, most recently, Themes Out of School. He has been chosen by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to receive the 1985 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Criticism. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Politics as Opposed to What?,” appears in the September 1982 issue. (shrink)

Other of my intellectual debts remain fully outstanding, that to Freud ’s work before all. A beholdenness to Sigmund Freud ’s intervention in Western culture is hardly something for concealment, but I have until now left my commitment to it fairly implicit. This has been not merely out of intellectual terror at Freud ’s achievement but in service of an idea and in compensation for a dissatisfaction I might formulate as follows: psychoanalytic interpretations of the arts in American culture have, (...) until quite recently, on the whole been content to permit the texts under analysis not to challenge the concepts of analysis being applied to them, and this seemed to me to do injustice both to psychoanalysis and to literature. My response was to make a virtue of this defect by trying, in my readings of film as well as of literature and of philosophy, to recapitulate what I understood by Freud ’s saying that he had been preceded in his insights by the creative writes of his tradition; that is, I tried to arrive at a sense for each text I encountered that psychoanalysis had become called for, as if called for in the history of knowledge, as if each psychoanalytic reading were charged with rediscovering the reality of psychoanalysis. This still does not seem to me an irrelevant ambition, but it is also no longer a sufficient response in our altered environment. Some of the most interesting and useful criticism and literary theory currently being produced is decisively psychoanalytic in inspiration, an alteration initiated for us most prominently by the past two or so decades of work in Paris and represented in this country by—to pick examples from which I have profited in recent months—Neil Hertz on the Dora case, Shoshana Felman on Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on homophobia in Our Mutual Friend.1 And now my problem has become that I am unsure whether I understand the constitution of the discourses in which this material is presented in relation to what I take philosophy to be, a constitution to which, such as it is, I am also committed. So some siting of this relation is no longer mine to postpone. 1. See Neil Hertz, “Dora’s Secrets, Freud ’s Techniques,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud — Hysteria —Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, pp. 221-42; Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Yale French Studies 55/56 : 94-207; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend,” Raritan 2 : 126-51. Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of “Walden,” The Claim of Reason, and, most recently, Themes Out of School. He spent last spring at Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies. His most recent contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Politics as Opposed to What?” and “The Division of Talent”. (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)

These lectures by one of the most influential and original philosophers of the twentieth century constitute a sustained argument for the philosophical basis of romanticism, particularly in its American rendering. Through his examination of such authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, Stanley Cavell shows that romanticism and American transcendentalism represent a serious philosophical response to the challenge of skepticism that underlies the writings of Wittgenstein and Austin on ordinary language.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:François H. Lapointe PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC SURVEY ThL· survey is limited to articles written in English that have appeared in journals published between 1 January 1974 and 31 December 1976. Abbott, Don. "Marxist Influences on the Rhetorical Theory of Kenneth Burke." Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 217-33. Abel, Lionel. "Jacques Derrida: His 'Difference' With Metaphysics." Salmagundi no. 25 (1974): 3-21. Adamowski, T. H. "Character and Consciousness: D. (...) H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, and Jean-Paul Sartre." University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 31 1-34. Adams, D. J. "Style and Social Ideas in Jacques le fataliste." Studies in Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century 124 (1974): 231-48. Adams, Hazard. "Contemporary Ideas of Literature: Terrible Beauty or Rough Beast?" Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 349-77. Adorno, Theodor W. "Lyric Poetry and Society." Telos no. 20 (1974): 56-71. Ages, Arnold. "Bonald and the Jews." Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa 44 (1974): 32-43. Allen, Diogenes. "The Experience of Existence: Jean-Paul Sartre and Iris Murdoch." International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974): 181-87. Allen, Marcus. "Character Development in the Oreste of Voltaire and Les Mouches of Jean-Paul Sartre." CLA Journal 18 (1974): 1-21. Alter, Jean. "A (Terrorist) System of the Novel." Diacritics 6 (1976): 10-15. Altieri, Charles. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." MLN 91 (1976): 1397-1423. Altieri,Charles. "Wordsworth's 'Preface' as Literary Theory." Criticism 18 (1976): 122-146. [On Wordworth and Wittgenstein.] Ames, Van Meter. "Art for Art's Sake Again?" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1975): 303-307. Appleman, Philip. "The Dread Factor: Eliot, Tennyson, and the Shaping of Science." Columbia Forum, N. S. 3 (1974): 32-38. Armstrong, Paul B. " E. M. Forster's Howard's End: The Existential Crisis of the Liberal Imagination." Mosaic 8 (1974): 183-99. Arnold, A. James. "La Condition humaine as Nietzschean Tragedy." Mélanges Malraux Miscellany 6 (1974): 15-24. 366 François H. Lapointe367 Aronson, Ronald. "L'Idiot de la famille: The Ultimate Sartre?" Telos no. 20 (1974): 90-107. Arthos, John. "Du Bartas, Petrarch and the Poetry of Deism." Rice University Studies 60 (1974): 1-17. Artz, Johannes. "Newman as Philosopher." International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976): 263-88. Ausmus, Harry J. "Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Language." The Midwest Quarterly 18 (1977): 169-86. Ayala, Francisco. "Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic." Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 395-414. Bakalar, H. Nicholas. "The Cartesian Legacy to the Eighteenth-century Grammarians." MLN 91 (1976): 698-721. Barnes, Hazel. "Apotheosis and Deification in Plato, Nietzsche and Huxley." Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976): 3-24. Baron, Dennis E. "Role Structure and the Language of Literature." Journal of Literary Semantics 4 (1975): 43-52. Barooskian, Vahan D. "The Aesthetics of the Russian Revolutionary Theatre 1917-1921." British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (1975): 99-117. Bart, B. F. "Hypercreativity in Stendhal and Balzac." Nineteenth Century French Studies 3 (1974-75): 18-39. Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6 (1975): 237-72. Bashford, Bruce. "The Rhetorical Method in Literary Criticism." Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 133-46. Bass, Alan. "Time and the Witch: Femininity, Metapsychology and the Temporality of the Unconscious." MLN 91 (1976): 871-912. Bassett, Sharon. "Towards a Critique of Romanticism: Wordsworth, Pater and the 'Anima Mundi'." Criticism 17 (1975): 262-75. Batchelor, R. "Literature, Society and the Concept of Revolt." European Studies Review 5 (1975): 395-427. Battin, M. Pabst. "Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics, Part 1." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974): 155-70, and Part II in Ibid. 33 (1975): 293-302. Bauer, George. "Sartre and the 'Sugars' of History." L'Esprit Créateur 15 (1975): 377-86. Baumgarten, Murray. "The Historical Novel: Some Postulates." Clio 4 (1975): 173-82. Beauchamp, Gorman. "Gulliver's Return to the Cave: Plato's Republic and Book IV of Gulliver's Travels." The Michigan Academician 7 (1974): 201-10. Bennett, Jonathan. "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn." Philosophy 48 (1974): 123-34. Benzon, William. "Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics." MLN 91 (1976): 952-82. Bergonzi, Bernard. "A Grid of Codes: Views of Structuralism." Encounter 45 (1975): 52-58. Berry, Wanda Warren. "The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wittgenstein and Critical TheoryC. W. SpinksWittgenstein and Critical Theory, by Susan Brill; xi & 169pp. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995, $40.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.Susan Brill’s central claim for this book is that “by relying upon Wittgensteinian philosophy, literary critics will be enabled to escape the stultifying position of absolutist critical discourses without being bereft of any satisfactory means of evaluating...” (p. 2). It is a claim well (...) chosen and she gives a well executed overview of the connections between Wittgensteinian philosophy and the study of literature. Her first chapter is a lucid introduction to Wittgenstein’s heuristic, giving ample quotations and insightful guidance for even the philosophical novice. However, her chosen audience is literary critics and theorists, and she uses the Wittgensteinian corrective of descriptive investigation as a counterpoint to both traditionalist and postmodernist critical theories. Her pragmatic goal, in Wittgensteinian fashion, is to “look” at literature, [End Page 401] not “think” about it in terms of preconceiving “theory.” Those familiar with Wittgenstein will find the application of his work to literary criticism illuminating, and those unfamiliar with his philosophical methodology and ideas will get an introductory account useful for literary and critical applications.After the introductory chapter, Brill turns to specific critical approaches and some particularly Wittgensteinian twists to literature, literary theory, and criticism. First, she looks at psychoanalytic criticism which she links somewhat oddly, I think, with semiotic critical orientations—probably to offset the Gallic influence which has fascinated American literary criticism for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Then in a series of three chapters, she turns to what she calls “issues of inclusivity and exclusivity” to look at feminist theories and their literary analyses, at the problems of canonical literature and marginalized writers, and at the “deconstructive project” as compared to Wittgenstein’s descriptive one. Although these three chapters are focused on specific literary ideologies, she consistently looks for the elements of connectivity in her approach to them. Her last chapter suggests some future uses of Wittgenstein in literary theory with particular attention to New Historicism and cultural criticism.The book does have two awkward emphases arising, I think, from the particular methodology of Wittgenstein and from the fact that this is Brill’s first book. First, the Wittgensteinian concept of “game” sometimes is used so broadly by both Wittgenstein and Brill, that everything becomes a “game” and anything can be a piece, a move, a strategy, or a rule. Brill tries to tie this specifically to patterns of discourse and uses it to open up responses to literature, but what is needed is a developed definition of play particularly as it relates to aesthetic behaviors like literature. “Game” is certainly a usable structural device, but without some relationship to the goals and needs of human behavior, it tells us more about the device than the user of the device. Second, the book does tend to take critics at their own estimation, and one needs to remember descriptively that critics are a Victorian invention like corsets and morning coats and just as restrictive in design. Any folk engaged in professional discourse, particularly one engaged in its own legitimization, will tend to over-valuate their own professional worth, and one should not take them too seriously unless it is clear that their profession is doing significant damage.Of course, that question about the damaging effects of critics and philosophers motivates both Wittgenstein and Brill, and the joining of the two here will probably do good for both professions. Certainly the study will do much to bring a more open notion of theory to the study of literature. Susan Brill is a persistent scholar who has drawn together a wide net, and though her chosen task was to suggest Wittgensteinian strategies for reading literature and to caution literary critics about overinvested theories, her own literary and philosophical desire has been to be as inclusive and open as possible to the [End Page 402] dynamics of texts without losing her own value center. Scholarship would surely be a better enterprise if more did what she has done with the persistence she has shown.C. W. SpinksTrinity UniversityCopyright... (shrink)

Donald Davidson is probably the most eminent living analytic philosopher, and his writings in philosophy of language and philosophy of action have shaped much of the recent work in both these fields. However, despite the obvious shared concerns of literary theory and these aspects of philosophy, up to this point literary theorists have not paid much attention to Davidson's ideas or have only known about them through the interpretations of other philosophers like Richard Rorty. Literary theorists have (...) seen more relevance to their concerns in Continental philosophy and, among analytic philosophers, in the essentially anti-analytic work of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein than in the harder tradition of analytic philosophy—more concerned with logic and philosophy of science—represented by the work of Donald Davidson. _Literary Theory after Davidson _challenges both views, stressing the variety of ways in which Davidson's thought can contribute to the development of literary theory. Davidson himself has contributed a new essay to the collection that explores the interrelations between his theories of language and literature. (shrink)

Presupposing that all knowledge is the study of a unitary order of nature, the author maintains that the study of literature should be included within the larger field of evolutionary theory. He outlines four elementary concepts in evolutionary theory, and he argues that these concepts should regulate our understanding of literature. On the basis of these concepts, he repudiates the antirealist and irrationalist views that, under the aegis of “poststructuralism,” have dominated academic literary studies for the past two decades. (...) He examines the linkage between poststructuralism and standard social science, and he speculates about the ideological and disciplinary motives that have hitherto impeded evolutionary study in both the social sciences and the humanities. Finally, he distinguishes literature from science and argues that literary criticism integrates elements of both. (shrink)

Can one conceive something to say about Allan Bloom’s view of America and the American university that he hasn’t already heard? Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences in what we each saw in our students of the 1960s, I find two regions in which Bloom’s experience and mine differ systematically that are specific and clear enough to be stated briefly, perhaps usefully: first, our experience of the position of philosophy in the intellectual economy we were presented with in the two (...) decades prior to the 1960s; second, our experience of the modern and the popular in the arts. My citing of these differences can only prove worthwhile, however, against a background of agreement I find with his work over the centrality of a cluster of issues, of which I specify five: a first agreement concerns the illustriousness of the university in the life of a democracy; a second concerns the irreplaceability of Great Books—what Thoreau calls scriptures—in a humanistic education; a third concerns the unaware imbibing of European thought by a chronically unprepared American constitution—a condition that is as live for us, or should be, as when Emerson was founding American thinking by demonstrating his knack of inheriting, by transfiguring, European philosophy; a fourth moment of agreement concerns the goal of a democratic university education as keeping open the idea of philosophy as a way of life, call it the life of the mind, a name for which might be Moral Perfectionism ; a fifth sense of my agreement with Bloom concerns the threat that a discourse about such issues, such as the prose fashioned in Bloom’s book , is becoming unintelligible to the culture that has produced it, and not alone to the young . Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism and This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after Emerson after Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Can we gain knowledge by reading literature? This essay defends an account of reading, developed by Stanley Cavell and Hans-Georg Gadamer, that phenomenologically describes the experience of acquiring self-knowledge by reading literary texts. Two possible criticisms of this account will be considered: first, that reading can provide other kinds of knowledge than self-knowledge; and, second, that the theory involves illegitimately imposing subjective meaning onto a text. It will be argued, in response, that the self-knowledge gained in reading allows one (...) to gain other sorts of knowledge too, and that the reading process described by Gadamer and Cavell avoids excessive subjectivism. (shrink)

This volume forms part of the series of the Princeton Studies in Humanistic Scholarship in America, under the general editorship of Richard Schlatter. Uitti's exposition of theories of language and literature from ancient Greece to contemporary America is oriented toward the proposal for a coordination of studies of language and literature in a sort of modern trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. In the first part of the book, the author concentrates on Platonic "symbolic" and Aristotelian "analytic" ideas about language, (...) and then traces these two currents throughout the Middle Ages, paying special attention to Priscian, Anselm, Abelard, Petrus Hispanus, Dante, and the grammatica speculativa. He then brings the survey up to modern times, examining Descartes, the Port-Royal grammar, Du Marsais, Diderot, and Rousseau. Condillac and Coleridge are treated in detail as representing two modern theories of expression/communication, the one analytic and linguistic, the other synthetic and aesthetic. The second part of this work deals with a history of both linguistics and of American literary criticism, stressing I. A. Richards' descriptivism, new critic theories of metaphor and irony, and Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature. Uitti singles out Roman Jakobson as being most prophetic in outlining future cooperation of linguistics and literary theory, and in this light analyzes various papers in Style and Language, in particular C. F. Voegelin's and Michel Riffaterre's. This survey of the contemporary American scene points to the fact that ours is a sign-oriented culture, and that recent studies in linguistics and in literary criticism of the poetics type have been sharing the same philosophical assumptions. The author thinks that language and literature studies would function best in the future as disciplines united in the broad matrix of cultural process, and using linguistic categories. He thus shares an oft-expressed hope for a cumulative literary "science," in which individual studies are oriented toward the broader construct. This book is addressed to the nonspecialist, but the expert will profit from Uitti's generous style which opens up new vistas on every page.--C. M. R. (shrink)

Goethe and Wittgenstein -- Criticism without theory -- Wittgenstein's romantic inheritance -- Arnold and the socratic personality -- The dissolution of goodness : measure for measure and classical ethics -- Lamarque and Olsen on literature and truth -- The definition of 'art' -- Poetry and abstraction -- Larkin's 'Aubade'.

Short description: Part A : Philosophy, Literature, and Knowledge – Chapter I : Idealism and the Absolute – A. J. B. Hampton: “Herzen schlagen und doch bleibet die Rede zurück?” Philosophy, poetry, and Hölderlin’s development of language suffi cient to the Absolute – P. Sabot: L’absolu au miroir de la littérature. Versions de l’Hégélianisme’ chez Villiers de l’Isle Adam et chez Mallarmé – P. Gordon: Nietzsche’s Critique of the Kantian Absolute – Chapter II: Philosophy and Style – J.-P. Larthomas: Le (...) cas Kierkegaard (1813-1855) ou l’écriture comme dialectique de l’écoute – S. Hüsch: Style et signifi cation. Intériorité et communication indirecte chez Søren Kierkegaard – A. Milon: La question du style en philosophie: la grammaire non-style – C. Van Lerberghe: La question du style dans la phénoménologie asubjective de Jan Patocka – Chapter III: Poetry and Philosophy – J.-B. Dussert: Martin Heidegger en ses poèmes – C. de Roche: The poem and the monad: On the reception of Leibniz‘ monadology in Paul Celan’s poetics – M. de Jesus Cabral: Entre théâtre et philosophie : notes sur la poétique de Maurice Maeterlinck – Chapter IV : Literature, Philosophy, and (new) Mythology – A. Martinengo: La raison hors de soi. Herméneutique et mythe chez Paul Ricoeur – G. Boggio Marzet Tremoloso: Démythologisation comme acte mythopoïétique: le cas de Jason de Elisabeth Porquerol. – G. Coulter: Jean Baudrillard: The Literary / Poetic Philosopher – Chapter V : Literature and Ethics – J. Azoulai: L’Éthique de Spinoza dans Bouvard et Pécuchet: un vertige philosophique et littéraire – I. Vendrell: Can Literature be Moral Philosophy? A sceptical view on the Ethics of Literary Empathy – F. Picon: Envisager Todorov: Poétique, éthique et humanisme contemporain – Chapter VI : Philosophy and Textuality – E. Lecler: La littérature : la mort de la philosophie – J. A. Gosetti- Ferencei: Writing in Philosophy and the Literature and Philosophy of Writing (Plato, Mann, Blanchot) –W. Cristaudo: Bringing Back Character and Grammar: Freeing Literature from Excessive Reliance on Philosophy and Theory – C. Alfano: Parenthesising Cracks into the Ground of Philosophy: The Textuality of Stanley Cavell’s Philosophical Writing – Part B: Perspectives of a Dialogue between Philosophy and Literature: Philosophical Refl ections in Literary Creation – Chapter VII : Philosophical Dialogue and Literature – A. Baillot: Tieck et Solger, un dialogue philosophicolittéraire – V. Altachina: Le dialogue philosophique chez Diderot et chez Dostoïevski – Chapter XIII : Bergsonien Infl uences in Literature – C. Dewas: Bergson et Katzantzakis. Les limites du langage comme condition d’une métaphysique de la littérature – E. Pesenti Rossi: La philosophie à l’épreuve de la poésie : Bergson et Ungaretti – Chapter IX : Wittgenstein and Literature – G. Valdemarca: La revanche du sens commun : Wittgenstein, Musil et la chute de la certitude – A. Leaker: From the ‘numinous glow’ to ‘gut squalor’: Transcendence and the Ordinary in Wittgenstein and Don DeLillo’s Underworld – A. den Dulk: Wallace and Wittgenstein: Literature as Dialogue Concerning the Real World – Chapter X: Borges and Semprun: Writers and Philosophers – J.-F. Mattéi: Borges et la philosophie – T. Capmartin: Voyage au bout de la représentation dans Fictions: Quelques remarques ménardiennes sur Borges et le stoïcisme – V. Capdevielle- Hounieu: Jorge Semprún et l’hybridation du littéraire et du philosophique : pour une ‘fi ction essayistique’ – Chapter XI : Literary (Mis-) Readings of Philosophy – P. Lasarte: Misreadings of Arthur Schopenhauer in Sin Rumbo by Eugenio Cambaceres – S. Roldan: Qu’est-ce qui est fort comme la mort selon Maupassant? La détermination ultime d’Olivier Vertin vue sous l’angle de Schopenhauer – B. Nickel: L’infl uence de Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) sur la poésie concrète – Chapter XII: The Impact of Philosophy on 20th Century Literature and Poetry – B. Ertugrul: Walter Benjamin et Ingeborg Bachmann entre littérature et philosophie – J. Leclercq / M. Watthee-Delmotte: Michel Henry : pour un langage de la subjectivité. La pensée du roman Le Fils du roi – J. Hobus: “The happiness of the concentration camps”: Reading Imre Kertész’ Novel Fatelessness with Albert Camus’ Concept of the Absurd – S. Frogel: Man without God: Nietzsche, Kafka and Camus Der Herausgeber Sébastian Hüsch, Studium der Philosophie, Geschichte,. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, the major proponent of philosophical hermeneutics, reveals himself here as a highly sensitive reader and critic of the German literary tradition. This is not the work of a specialist as narrowly defined in the typical literary study. Although he is a master of the techniques of criticism, Gadamer always sees the study of literature as a fundamentally human activity where human beings, generation after generation, pose their questions to an encroaching darkness that threatens to rob them (...) of their confidence in the meaning of life and death. Never pedantic or antiquarian, these studies show such literary giants of the German past as Goethe and Hölderlin as our contemporaries. Gadamer demonstrates his ability to achieve the creative interplay of literature and philosophy which, in isolation, easily degenerate into sterile academic games. Typical of this dialogue are essays on Rainer Maria Rilke, including an examination of a problem of punctuation in one of his poems. What would be, in less capable hands, one more solution to a literary problem, turns out to be one of Gadamer’s creative approaches to the mystery of man’s relation to time and death. (shrink)

Benjamin Tilghman has been a leading commentator on analytic philosophy for many years. This book brings together his most significant and influential work on aesthetics. Spanning a period of thirty years and covering topics in aesthetics from literature to painting, the collection traces the development of Tilghman's two principal themes; a rejection of philosophical theory as a way of resolving problems about our understanding and appreciation of art and the importance of the representation and presentation of the human (...) and human concerns in art. Tilghman is profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his work is informed throughout by his conception and practice of philosophy. Written with exceptional clarity and with many references to original work in both painting and literature, this collection will be an invaluable resource not only for professional philosophers but for those working in the arts generally, art historians, critics and literary theorists. (shrink)

René Girard’s mimetic theory has significantly influenced the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies, as well as sociological anthropology and philosophy. Nevertheless, I argue that a somewhat different line of interpretation, an interdisciplinary one, has not been sufficiently investigated. This involves an interpretation which focuses on the vicissitudes of the mimetic and “victimage” circle not (or not only) in sociological terms, but by analysing their articulation on the level of knowledge. The sociological and epistemological perspectives do not exclude each (...) other, but can be integrated. The main aim of this paper is to clarify this articulation, and to show that integration between these two perspectives is possible only by bringing into play a real ‘literary aesthetics’. The notion of literary aesthetics needs to be considered in both the common and the etymological sense, as a theory of feeling and of experiencing. In doing so, I firstly cover in brief the main stages of Girard’s thought in the light of this perspective, to then focus on the relationship between literary aesthetics and knowledge. Finally I argue that this picture, if seriously considered, could lead to a mystical outcome, and will discuss the possible alternatives to that outcome. (shrink)

The novels of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer are increasingly regarded as representing a new trend, an 'aesthetic sea change' in contemporary American fiction. 'Post-postmodernism' and 'New Sincerity' are just two of the labels that have been attached to this trend. But what do these labels mean? What characterizes and connects these novels? Dulk shows that the connection between these works lies in their shared philosophical dimension. On the one hand, they portray excessive self-reflection and endless (...) irony as the two main problems of contemporary Western life. On the other hand, the novels embody an attempt to overcome these problems: sincerity, reality-commitment and community are portrayed as the virtues needed to achieve a meaningful life. This shared philosophical dimension is analyzed by viewing the novels in light of the existentialist philosophies of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Camus. (shrink)

These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Marshalling a wide range of texts from literature, philosophy and criticism, Richard Eldridge traces the central themes and stylistic features of Romantic thinking in the work of Kant, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Updike. Through his analysis he shows that Romanticism is neither emptily (...) class='Hi'>literary and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. This is the first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism and will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy, literature and aesthetics who are interested in what, philosophically, literature can show that philosophy cannot say. (shrink)

In "On Variations of Classical Chinese Literary Theory for a Framework of Global Literary History" Peina Zhuang discusses texts of classical Chinese literary theory as a reservoir for philosophical reflections on literary art. The aesthetics of Chinese literature originate in Confucianism and Taoism and hence represent an important background for any discussion of ancient, modern, or contemporary Chinese literature and literary history. Zhuang analyzes texts of classical Chinese literary theory within such a framework (...) of a literary history and aims at furthering Chinese literature to become an integral part of world literatures. Further, Zhuang argues that "history" and "literary history" present a different picture of works on classical Chinese literary theory owing to the variation caused in representing their literary and aesthetic features. Zhuang also posits that the translation of Chinese literary texts to Western languages, while relevant and important, is not enough to advance Chinese literature from a peripheral status to a status of recognition hence the importance of scholarship with regard to literary history specifically. (shrink)

Art, Beauty and Imitation in Plato's Philosophy -- Art and Imitation in Aristotle -- Horace, Pseudo-Longinus and the Aesthetics of Literature in Hellenism -- Plotinus, Neo-Platonic and Christian Conception of Beauty -- The Middle Ages and Dante Alighieri -- The Heritage of Kantian Philosophy in Romanticism -- Moritz: Beyond the Concept of Imitation -- Theory of Poetry of Early German Romanticism -- Hegel: Art as a Form of the Absolute Spirit -- Schopenhauer: Art as Disinterestedness and Knowledge of Reality (...) -- Nietzsche: Knowledge and Art -- Symbolism and Aestheticism -- Benedetto Croce: Art and intuition -- Linguistics and Criticism -- Antonio Gramsci: The Role of Intellectuals in Culture -- Structuralism -- Martin Heidegger: The Work of Art and Truth -- Hans-Georg Gadamer: Poetry and Interpretation -- Critical Theory: A New Attitude towards Art and Society -- Perspectives of Post-Structuralism -- The Practice of Deconstruction -- Contemporary Schools and Traditions in Literary and Critical Theory -- Postmodern and the New Character of the Literary Work. (shrink)