L'esthétique, en tant que discipline philosophique traitant de l'art née au sein de la culture occidentale, n'a été introduite que tardivement dans les autres cultures, notamment asiatiques, où existaient pourtant de longue date des notions, formulées dans leurs langues pour rendre compte de l'expérience esthétique et évaluer les oeuvres artistiques. Alors, ne peut-on trouver, des résonances entre langages artistiques entre l'Asie et l'Occident? Tel est le pari qui sous-tend le recueil de textes rassemblés ici.

Beginning with Erich Auerbach's reflections on the Goethean concept of world literature, Ottmar Ette unfolds the theory and practice of Literatures of the World. Today, only those literary theories which are oriented upon a history of movement are still capable of doing justice to the confusing diversity of highly dynamic, worldwide transformations. This is because they examine transareal pathways in the field of literature. This volume captures literary processes of exchange and transformation between the Mediterranean, Atlantic and (...) Pacific as well as the interplay of different ways of narrating space and time. Thus, this volume speaks from a fractal point of view and unfolds multiple perspectives. Literatures of the World allow the reader to think in different logical frameworks at the same time, therefore shaping our future on the basis of the diversity of humankind. (shrink)

Pandey, V. Introduction.--Kalelkar, K. S. Jainism, a familyhood of all religions.--David, M. D. From Risabha to Mahavira.--Chalil, J. E. Glimpses of Southern Jainism.--Gopani, A. S. Life and culture in Jaina narrative literature, 8th, 9th and 10th century A.D.--Gopani, A. S. Position of women in Jaina literature.--Ranka, R. Evolution of Jaina thought.--Pandey, V. Jaina philosophy and religion.--Shah, C. C. Jainism and modern life.--Sankalia, H. D. The great renunciation.--Shah, U. P. Jaina contribution to Indian art.--Gorakshkar, S. Early metal images of (...) the Jainas.--Bhagwati, U. Bibliographical aids for the study of Jainism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Scottish PhilosophyManfred KuehnAlexander Broadie. A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 392. Cloth, $140.00.Alexander Broadie is well known to those who have an interest in Scottish Philosophy. His 1990 book, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy: A New Perspective on the Enlightenment (Barnes & Noble), attempted to show that there were two great periods in the history (...) of Scottish culture, the "circle of John Mair" around 1500 and the so-called "Scottish Enlightenment" of the last half of the eighteenth century. Broadie argued that one could "trace a line of philosophical influence from Mair's circle to the philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment."The present book has a much wider scope. It is an attempt to tell the entire story of Scottish philosophy from its beginnings to the 1960s. The book has twelve chapters, including a short Introduction (1–6) and an even shorter Conclusion (365–69). The first philosopher discussed is John Duns Scotus. The next five chapters are called "The Fifteenth Century," "The Circle of John Mair," "Humanism and After," and "Scotland Moves into the Age of Enlightenment," which deals with Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, and Francis Hutcheson. Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, which constitute the bulk of the book, deal with David Hume, Adam Smith, and The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are treated relatively briefly under the titles "The Nineteenth Century: Ferrier to Seth" and "Realism and Idealism: Some Twentieth-century Narratives." The book has a fairly extensive bibliography and a very useful index.The summaries of the different philosophical positions are lucid, balanced, and fair. They provide very useful introductions to the thought of the philosophers discussed in the book. Someone interested in the background of Hume and Reid and looking for a first orientation could do a lot worse than consulting this book.I do have a problem with the way Broadie places the accents in his history. The two chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries take up only about one sixth of the book, yet they are among the most interesting—at least for me. They would have deserved a more detailed treatment. The discussion of the Middle Ages and Humanism is rather long. The same holds for the eighteenth century. The discussion of Hume in particular, whose philosophy has received much attention of late, could have been significantly shortened. Thomas Brown, Dugald Stewart's successor, who is not as well known, but was a brilliant philosophical mind, would have deserved a section of his own—or so I believe. Since he did discuss Mair and his circle extensively in his earlier publication, this part of the book could also have been abbreviated. Whether Duns Scotus belongs in a "history of Scottish philosophy" I do not know. In any case, it appears that the concerns of his earlier book on The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy exercise an undue influence on the new book.I would have liked to hear a little more about what makes a certain philosopher a Scottish philosopher and what makes Scottish philosophy Scottish. It may well be impossible to write a national history of philosophy in the strictest sense of the word. Philosophy, perhaps still more than Literature and Literary Criticism, knows no national boundaries. As Lewis White Beck once pointed out, any national history of philosophy encounters the problem of figures whose importance transcends the limits of the philosophical discussion in any one nation or language: "No history of English or German philosophy can be understood [End Page 124] without Descartes," Locke or Hume, for that matter. A national history of philosophy may therefore "appear at best episodic, at worst arbitrary. Why not write a history of philosophy mentioning only men whose names begin with the letter 'p'?"Broadie believes that these philosophers "responded to each other partly because they were close by and partly because they were so interested in each other's thinking" (5). This context justifies us or "makes it appropriate to speak of Scottish philosophy, parallel to the way in which writers speak of German philosophy" (6). This point goes both too far and not... (shrink)

Using the example of the feminist magazine Courage, the article shows how its participatory production process enabled a psy-feminist knowledge generation that also included women with psychiatric experience. The magazine makers combined the women’s observations, perceptions and interpretations with visual representations and a canon of literature that extended far beyond the field of psychiatry (criticism). Instead of medical psychopathologies, the women of Courage implemented writing styles and visual languages, which emphasised the experience of mental suffering and alterity and (...) related it to the social position of women. At the same time, Courage also presented alternative feminist treatments and therapies. The Courage’s critique of psychiatry was characterised by a multi-perspective approach that removed the topic of “women in psychiatry” from the narrow field of psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy and expanded it to include artistic, patient- and experience-oriented and socio-critical perspectives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Did Literature Stop Being Cultural?Sandy Petrey (bio)Debate over the future of French Studies in the United States has sometimes neglected a vital fact: even though the field of French Studies incorporates everything relevant to the francophone world, no single department of French Studies can be that comprehensive. If we want to teach anything serious, we must focus our collective energy and intellect on some manageable component of (...) the many topics French Studies can legitimately address. To try to cover everything is to condemn ourselves to watered-down, dumbed-down versions of history, political science, art, economics, sociology, and the many other areas pertinent to things French.I believe the makeup of French departments in the United States means that our dominant focus should remain literary. Since we aren’t going to retool ourselves so spectacularly as to master all the disciplinary perspectives relevant to the francophone world, we have to make choices. As far as I can see, the best choice is an orientation toward literary criticism, the area in which most productive scholars in French departments in the United States were trained. We’ve learned how to deal with words, and chances are very good that we will do more things that deserve doing if we address words than if we address immigration statistics, changing styles on Maghreb dance floors, or the status attached to owning a pit bull in French housing projects.This doesn’t mean that immigration statistics, dance styles, and pit bulls are forbidden topics, just that we can best approach them if our primary focus remains literary while we open secondary focuses onto other areas. Those openings can renew our field without compromising our identity, allow us to adopt the interdisciplinary concerns animating cultural studies without repudiating literature’s traditional place in foreign language programs. I categorically reject the idea that the literary studies/cultural studies opposition is absolute, that concentrating on literature imposes the necessity of ignoring dance floors and pit bulls. My answer to the question in my title, “When did literature stop being cultural?,” is that it didn’t, whether we take “cultural” in the dirty-word sense of “high culture” or the buzzword sense of “cultural studies.” Literature’s credentials among the accomplishments of high culture matter to language departments in a great many ways, but more relevant to current professional concerns is that cultural studies can address the monuments of the French literary tradition as well as the monuments of French reaction to the Spice Girls. To impose a choice between literary studies and cultural studies strikes me as horribly misguided, something like imposing a choice between breathing and eating.Yet that choice is being imposed with more and more insistence, its suicidal consequences accepted with less and less concern. At times, those preaching an either/or approach have done so in defense of literature, and I refuse the idea that literature is Emerson’s “jealous mistress” who tolerates nothing else in her domain. To study either high culture or popular culture as if the other were unworthy of concern impoverishes both, which means the literary studies/cultural studies binary is pernicious no matter which side defends it. Although the either/or model has sometimes been asserted in the [End Page 12] name of literature’s integrity, however, its most influential recent articulations have come from partisans of cultural studies. The sides have changed. Instead of the argument that the nature of cultural studies means it must be excluded from literary analysis, we now hear that the nature of literary analysis means that it must be excluded from cultural studies.Let me take as evidence the MLA’s most recent publication on trends in language and literature departments, Profession 1997, and the Russell Berman article it contains, a brief for a new form of “Graduate Education toward a Foreign Cultural Literacy.” Berman’s essay makes a strong and informed argument for interdisciplinarity, the best features of which have in Berman’s representation come together to create cultural studies. Throughout this argument, I find the scary logical and political missteps endemic to recent contentions that cultural studies and literary studies are mutually exclusive. Berman’s essay is doubly... (shrink)

Dans les années 1760, l'atelier du baron d'Holbach est, avec Ferney au temps de Voltaire, le principal lieu de diffusion des idées hétérodoxes qui permettent la radicalisation des Lumières en France. L'activité de traduction d'Holbach, plus importante en quantité que son activité d'auteur, est étudiée ici pour la première fois de manière systématique. En comparant les ouvrages clandestins traduits et publiés par Holbach avec leurs vrais ou prétendus originaux (majoritairement anglais), Mladen Kozul analyse les manipulations énonciatives, thématiques et éditoriales qu'Holbach (...) opère dans les textes anglais pour en légitimer le discours et les transformer en livres clandestins français. Il montre qu'Holbach, fidèle aux procédés d'une culture rhétorique qui brasse et recycle textes et discours, s'appuie sur les stratégies des encyclopédistes qu'il perfectionne en employant les méthodes de la librairie clandestine. Les textes traduits par Holbach orientent d'une manière décisive la perception qu'a le public des correspondances entre les idées des Lumières en France et celles provenant d'autres cultures de l'Europe occidentale, et notamment d'Angleterre. Les figures d'auteurs anglais qui se dégagent du livre clandestin apparaissent comme des constructions qui installent, aux yeux du lecteur français, le mirage d'un front philosophique transculturel radical, uni et solidaire. Les pratiques du baron nous permettent ainsi d'interroger le rapport complexe du public cultivé des Lumières à l'altérité culturelle. En repensant les notions de traduction et d'auteur, Mladen Kozul invite à voir en Holbach l'inventeur d'une des premières manipulations médiatiques d'envergure en Occident. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Latin Literature. A HistoryRichard F. ThomasGian Biagio Conte. Latin Literature. A History. Translated by Joseph B. Solodow. Revised by Don Fowler and Glenn W. Most. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xxxiii 1 827 pp. $65.00.The work under review is a translation of Gian Biagio Conte’s 1987 book Letteratura latina; Manuale storico dalle origini alla fine dell’ impero, a book whose title (...) page acknowledged the collaboration of Alessandro Barchiesi, Emanuele Narducci, Giovanni Polara, Giuliano Ranucci, and Gianpiero Rosati. In the translation these scholars have been moved into C.’s “Acknowledgements,” making room for the new group on the title page, as given above. Of these, Don Fowler provided a bibliography and “in a sense has helped to direct the whole editorial enterprise,” while Glenn Most (like Solodow, one of C.’s English translators), rewrote sections on reception. Elaine Fantham introduces the work with an encomiastic “blurb” and general appreciation of the scholarship of C. C.’s own preface adds to the “gang of five” original collaborators a new group of three (Mario Labate, Alessandro Schiesaro, Rolando Ferri) who “have freely given me the support of their attentive and considerate criticism.” One recent reviewer talks of “the thorough control of the material by the single mind of the original author” (Robert P. Sonkowsky, The Key Reporter 61.3 [1996] 13), as does another for whom “the book is the production of a single mind” (J. Griffin, “The Long Latin Line,” review in New York Review of Books [Oct. 6, 1994] 43); it therefore seems only right to register my dissent from such a judgment.Much in Latin studies right now seems to involve a pack mentality: teams toil away for their grex, writing encomiastic and disingenuously uncritical reviews, or footnotes acknowledging the help of other teammates, attending conferences, organizing group-solidifying essay collections, even new series and manifestoes promising a “New Latin”—a term that seems to have no particular theoretical or intellectual content, nor a purpose other than to appeal vaguely for some sort of postmodernist approval. Barbara F. McManus’ summary of a paper on the uses of e-mail for mobilizing interest groups, delivered at a conference on computers and the classics by the very editor of the book under review, Don Fowler (“The Scroll and the Screen: Computers and Classical Literary Criticism”), gives a clear account of procedure and techniques in use:Electronic communication allows small groups with strongly related interests to form, cohere, and influence the larger disciplinary community; because such groups start with fundamental agreement on intellectual frameworks and approaches, they can develop ideas rapidly and in depth.(2/8/97 )What happens when other, less organized and more individual, insights fail to coincide with the “fundamental agreement” of the “group,” and how, we might wonder, will such individualism hold up in the face of this mission to “influence the larger disciplinary community”? [End Page 471]Be all this as it may and whatever the realities of authorship, the achievement of Gian Biagio Conte’s volume is a signal one. Latin Literature is a work of considerable value, a work which I have already used with success in teaching the history of Latin literature. Whatever the state of its authorship, I would now move to a review of some of its merits, which are considerable, and in which C. himself is obviously a participant throughout. The book begins with the origins of Latin literature and extends to Bede and the national literatures that were to transmit Latin literature into the vernaculars, that would in turn connect the essential themes and fundamental concerns of classical Latin literature to the cognate and evolving experiences of later antiquity and the middle ages. The original authors worked to a formulaic scheme: generally “Life,” “Works,” some treatment of cultural/political/social context, “Literary Success” (for the Italian “Fortuna”—I would have preferred “Reception”), and bibliography. This latter, again by Fowler, is developed from the Italian version and is generally made more international, often with the result that it sits somewhat uneasily with the original articles, which are largely unchanged, and whose authors presumably made... (shrink)

Bringing together poststructuralist ethical theory with late Victorian debates about the morality of literature, this book reconsiders the ways in which novels engender an ethical orientation or response in their readers, explaining how the ...

The authors aptly describe their work as a narrative. The protagonists are sometimes great thinkers, sometimes ideas about literary criticism, sometimes different approaches to literature whose intermingling histories are here described. At the same time the authors are in quest of a varied and many-sided presentation of the nature and writing of literature. Accordingly the insights of philosophers and literary men are stressed more than the consistency of their opinions; understanding is valued more highly than the certainty (...) of systems. In this way classical texts are placed in an interesting new light and lesser known episodes of this history are brought to life.--R. G. S. (shrink)

In the two centuries covered by this volume, from about AD 250 to 450, the Roman Empire suffered a period of chaos followed by drastic administrative and military reorganization. Simultaneously Christianity emerged as a new religious force, to be first recognized by Constantine and then eventually to become the official religion of the Roman state. The old pagan culture continued to provide the basis for education and the staple literary diet of the leisured classes; but it now had perforce to (...) coexist and indeed to compete with a new, specifically Christian-oriented literature. These and associated developments are reflected in the Latin books of the period. Of the traditional forms and genres, some atrophied, some were transformed and invigorated; and yet others, such as autobiography in something like the modern sense, emerged in response to the pressures of the times. Professor Browning's masterly and comprehensive survey is mostly concerned with pagan literature, but takes into account Christian texts written in classical forms and directed at classically educated readers. The volume ends with a chapter on Apuleius by Professor Walsh, followed by a brief Epilogue from the same hand, sketching the part played by classical studies in the formation of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. (shrink)

Ethics; Islamic literature; history and criticism.

The first two volumes of a four-volume study, destined surely to become the standard work in its field. Literary criticism in the broadest sense is the book's subject, but the author tries to avoid purely philosophical aesthetics at one extreme--Kant is given 3 pages to Schiller's 24--as well as unsubstantiated judgments of taste at the other. Since he tries to see the past as bearing upon and productive of the literary theory of the present, the book might be said (...) to be more an account of the sources and growth of contemporary thinking about literature and criticism than a "history" in the usual sense. Professor Wellek has a rich store of scholarly knowledge at his disposal, and his interpretive generalizations are well supported by references and texts; yet the argument moves easily and clearly. A fine piece of creative scholarship.--V. C. C. (shrink)

Arabic literature; history and criticism.

Oscar Kenshur’s “Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism” should go a long way toward convincing most readers that the cure for “ideological” criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the “more-historical-than-thou” offensive against Marxists and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1 There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about the (...) nature of ideological analysis that should be debated. However, he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur’s argument is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants to tile—most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a “corrective” to overzealous claims for the significance of ideological criticism that has the effect not of “sav[ing history] from its friends” but of returning it to the status of “background” or “context” that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The terms in which he casts his argument—epistemology and/or ideology—redefine “ideological criticism” in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save “history” from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth-century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length study of the various discourses in which and against which their works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur’s argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for ideological analysis. 1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA 102 : 292-303. Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He is the author of Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the Discourses of Natural Philosophy. (shrink)

Dilemma one, Between the theoretical concepts and authorial intention -- Dilemma two, Good manners and eristic -- Dilemma three, Between strangeness and familiarity -- Dilemma four, Between scholarly research and faith.

This book argues that the negotiation of agency is central not only to the experience of war but also to its representation in cultural expressions, ranging from a notion of disablement, expressed in victimization, immobilization, traumatization, and death, to enablement, expressed in the perpetration of heroic, courageous, skillful, and powerful actions of assertion and dominance. In order to illustrate this thesis, it provides a comprehensive analysis of literary representations of the American War of Independence from 1775, the beginning of the (...) war, up until roughly 1860, when the Civil War marked a decisive historical turning point. As the first national war, it has an unquestionably exemplary status for the development of American conceptions of war. The in-depth study of exemplary texts from a variety of genres and by authors like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville, demonstrates that the overall character of Revolutionary War literature presents the war as a forum in which collective and individual agency is expressed, defended, and cultivated. It uses the military environment in order to teach the values of discipline and self-subordination to a communal good, which are perceived as basic principles of a Republican virtue to guide the actions of the autonomous individual in a popular democracy. (shrink)

We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. "To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory." (...) At OOO's heart is the idea that objects--whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human, or non-human--are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out OOO's history, ideas, and impact, taking in art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. From Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, and videogames to Dadaism, Voltaire, and string theory, this book will change the way you understand everything. (shrink)

Questo testo deriva dalla commistione dello studio della filosofia orientale, di quella occidentale e della storia della musica. L’idea che pervade il testo è la ricerca, spesso difficile e spigolosa di una verità culturale unica, una matrice comune che possa giustificare, unire, amalgamare culture eterogenee e diverse tra loro. Punto di partenza è la creazione, termine particolare che porta in sé diversi significati: religioso, culturale, musicale; per poi addentrarsi nella mitologia antica e nella filosofia romantica: elementi distanti ma quanto mai (...) vicini. Nella scelta delle fonti si è cercato dare maggiore attenzione a due dei maggiori testi religiosi dell’occidente e dell’oriente: l’Antico Testamento e parte delle Upanishad, le fonti vediche per eccellenza che qui si riportano in appendice. Infine ci si accosta con delicatezza al patrimonio culturale dei musicisti di ispirazione liberale che alla luce della modernità potremmo definire open mentality. (shrink)

Der Kalam in der judischen Literatur ist ein unveranderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1895. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ernahrung, Medizin und weiteren Genres. Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur. Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquitaten erhaltlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese Bucher neu und tragt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur und historischem Wissen auch fur die (...) Zukunft bei. (shrink)

An unprecedented reading of Hegel’s Logic that sets this difficult work in a dialogue with literary texts. In this book, Angelica Nuzzo proposes a reading of Hegel’s Logic as “logic of transformation” and “logic of action,” and supports this thesis by looking to works of literature and history as exemplary of Hegel’s argument and method. By examining Melville’s Billy Budd, Molière’s Tartuffe, Beckett’s Endgame, Elizabeth Bishop’s and Giacomo Leopardi’s late poetry along with Thucydides’ History in this way, (...) Nuzzo finds an unprecedented and productive way to render Hegel’s Logic alive and engaging. She argues that Melville’s Billy Budd is the most successful embodiment of the abstract movement of thinking presented in Hegel’s Logic, connecting Billy Budd’s stutter to the puzzlingly inarticulate beginning of Hegel’s Logic, “Being, pure Being,” identical with “Nothing,” and argues that the Logic serves as an especially appropriate tool for understanding the sudden violent action that strikes Claggart dead. Through these and other readings, Nuzzo finds a fresh way to address interpretive issues that have remained unresolved for almost two centuries in Hegel scholarship, and also presents well-known works of literature in an entirely new light. This account of Hegel’s Logic is framed by the need for an interpretive tool able to orient our understanding of the contemporary world as mired in an unprecedented global crisis. How can the story of our historical present—the tragedy or the comedy we all play parts in—be told? What is the inner logic of our changing world? “Angelica Nuzzo presents an original interpretation of Hegel’s Logic by representing it as a logic of action. This novel approach is supported by insightful readings of the literary texts she covers in the book.” — Andrew Cutrofello, author of All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity. (shrink)

Language‟s definition varies in the literature. One of the most accurate definitions of language is that the language is the voice through which people express their purpose, it is a tool for communication, understanding and interaction between people, and this is a phenomenon that reflects human knowledge and culture. At the same time, it is a powerful factor that animates people and helps them to develop and thrive. The beauty of the language is reflected in examples of poetry and (...) prose of folk literature. It is one of the most famous and widely spoken languages in the world. Arabic is the language of science and culture and helps to transmit religious, scientific and literary knowledge throughout history. There is no doubt that Arabic literature emphasizes the beauty of the Arabic language from preIslamic times to the present day. Arabic literature attracts the attention of the whole world, both ancient and modern. One of the countries where the Arabic language and its literature is taught is Azerbaijan. There are universities and institutes that contain faculties of Arabic literature and its departments. One of the scientific institutions that study the Arabic literature is the Institute of Oriental Studies named after Ziya Bunyadov of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. It should be noted that the most important results of scientific research and books of the Institute are used in educational institutions within the country and abroad. (shrink)

Values, history and criticism of Thai literature.

Der Beitrag nimmt Erich Auerbachs Postulat einer transnationalen Ideengeschichte als Ausgangspunkt, um aktuelle Potenziale einer ideenhistorisch geprägten Literaturwissenschaft zu prüfen. Einerseits ausgehend von der sozialgeschichtlichen bzw. sprachkritisch geprägten Neuausrichtung der Ideengeschichte, wie man sie mit dem Schlüsseljahr 1969 und den Namen Foucault und Skinner in Verbindung bringen kann, und andererseits vor dem Hintergrund ihrer kulturwissenschaftlichen Expansion lotet der Artikel die Möglichkeiten einer Ideengeschichte aus, die sich wieder stärker der Interpretation von Bedeutung, von Ideen als geistigen Tatsachen zuwendet. Dazu schlägt er (...) einen topisch-rhetorischen Begriff der Texthandlung vor, der es dem Leser gestattet, sich dem Autor als dem eklektischen Nutzer und Neuarrangeur verfügbaren Wissens zu nähern. Die Literaturwissenschaft könnte sich auf diese Weise als hermeneutisches Leitverfahren der Ideengeschichte empfehlen, mit dem der Stellenwert eines souveränen Lesersubjekts auch angesichts zur Unübersichtlichkeit neigenden Text-Kontext-Formationen aufrechterhalten werden kann. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION: THE NAME MADHYAMAKA The Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism goes back to Nagarjuna, the great Indian Buddhist philosopher who is placed ...

Abstract:Curiously, Marxist literary and art criticism often historicizes everything but the artist's labor. This essay articulates "techne-Marxism" as a critical standpoint that locates the ontological core of the artwork in conceptual and technical labor. It posits techne as the materialist substrate of art forms often explained away as part of an ideology of bourgeois taste rather than the proper bedrock of a Marxism that avoids alienating labor in a symptomology of historical structure. Ultimately, the value of techne-Marxism is its (...) ability to synthesize socially objective knowledge about art and the critic's ability to build labor-oriented evaluative judgments out of that knowledge. (shrink)

Wie nah sind sich Literatur und Philosophie? Die beiden Disziplinen stehen für ganz unterschiedliche Formen der Welterkenntnis und der Erkenntnisvermittlung. Doch ohne das Verständnis des jeweils anderen Bereiches kommen die literaturwissenschaftliche und die philosophische Analyse schnell an ihre Grenzen. Dass es zahlreiche Berührungspunkte zwischen Literatur und Philosophie gibt, zeigt dieses Handbuch. In 16 ausführlichen Kapiteln schafft es einen Überblick über Problemkonstellationen, bei denen die Trennung beider Fachgebiete relativiert oder aufgehoben ist.

How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? How might it challenge and critique the relegation of certain deaths to the realm of the unmournable? What might this reveal about the role of the literary in the French and francophone world and shifting conceptions of the nation state? Essays from the Revolution to the present day explore these questions from a variety of perspectives, bringing out the ways in which mourning (...) blurs the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical, the self and the other, and ultimately reasserting its truly critical resonance as a concept. (shrink)

Cover -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One: Writing against Theodicy: Secularization in Baudelaire's Poetry and Critical Essays -- Chapter Two: The Mourning of God and the Ironies of Secularization in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris -- Chapter Three: Sublimation and Conversion in Zola and Huysmans -- Chapter Four: The Staging of Doubt: Zola and Huysmans on Lourdes -- Chapter Five: Religious and Secular Conversions: Transformations in Céline's Medical Perspective on Evil -- Conclusion -- (...) Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 314-334 [Access article in PDF] The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Studies F. Elizabeth Hart I Literary scholars have begun incorporating the insights of cognitive science into literary studies, bringing to bear on questions of literary experience the results of explorations within a wide range of fields that define today's cognitive science. The investigation of the human mind and its reasoning processes encompasses a (...) rich variety of empirical and speculative disciplines, including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, computer science, philosophy, and anthropology. These disciplines are all related to one another by the questions they ask about the brain and mind and the ground they cover in staking out their research agendas; but each also contributes uniquely in terms of individual scope and focus. Literary critics, eavesdropping on this maturing coalition, are now producing critical works that apply cognitive research to a similarly impressive range of literary concerns, with results so far that seem to span the gap between traditional and more contemporary literary critical approaches.All such criticism is dependent on scientific studies of the brain and mind and so accepts axiomatically some degree of epistemological efficacy in scientific empiricism. But this acceptance has not been naive or uncritical and has, in fact, been at times carefully qualified by critics' sensitivity to debate--to the lack of consensus among cognitive scientists, and to the fact that cognitive science is itself in its infancy stage, with its own practitioners often openly tentative about their results and descriptive capabilities. As it happens, such debate, in recent years, has even proven beneficial for literary scholarship since an important [End Page 314] paradigm shift has taken place that now makes some aspects of cognitive science more compatible than ever with the interests of literary studies. This is because, whereas an earlier phase of cognitive science focused its energies on Artificial Intelligence and on theories of language and psychology that supported AI, grounding its theories implicitly in a metaphor of the mind as a computer, today's cognitive scientists tend to concentrate instead on the more organic metaphor of the "embodiment" of mind, that is, of the mind's substantive indebtedness to its bodily, social, and cultural contexts, and on the figurative phenomena of metaphor, metonymy, image schemata, "fields," "frames," other "integrative mental spaces" (as they are called), and the gradient structures and prototypical bases of semantic categories, all of which contribute to recasting human reason into a set of highly imaginative--not logical but figural--processes. 1 For literary theory and criticism, this shift in cognitive science toward "the body in the mind" 2 --tantamount to a wholesale rejection of philosophical rationalism--has given rise to a new kind of interdisciplinary practice, to the potential for a sincere engagement between diverse sciences and even between literature and science that stretches all the bounds of what literary scholars generally mean when they speak of being interdisciplinary (e.g., exchanges with history, art history, anthropology, film studies, sociology).In the discussion that follows, I would like to explore this new interdisciplinarity in literary studies by examining its epistemological implications. I begin with a description of the kinds of criticism now being produced under the rubric of cognitive literary criticism or--to reflect the field's scope more accurately--cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary criticism. This description is not intended as a comprehensive or evaluative survey, since in-depth review articles of extant works are available elsewhere. 3 Rather, I hope to familiarize my readers with the basic orientations of this theory and criticism so that they can grasp the epistemological relations that will become the essay's focus. To lay a further groundwork for this focus, I will review various uses of the term "cognitive" (or "cognitivism") in the scholarship and offer an analysis of its meanings, first in cognitive science and then in literary theory. Building, then, on what "cognitive" might signify for literary studies, I show how a literary approach based on today's cognitive science is uniquely situated among other approaches because of its underlying theory of human... (shrink)

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

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Umwertung aller Werte?" verfügbar.

Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm. In 1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies which called themselves feminist reading or writing.1 By the next year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation that feminist literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation."2 Since then, the (...) expressed goals have not been notably unified. Black critics protest the "massive silence" of feminist criticism about black and Third-World women writers and call for a black feminist aesthetic that would deal with both racial and sexual politics. Marxist feminists wish to focus on class along with gender as a crucial determinant of literary production. Literary historians want to uncover a lost tradition. Critics trained in deconstructionist methodologies with to "synthesize a literary criticism that is both textual and feminist." Freudian and Lacanian critics want to theorize about women's relationship to language and signification.· 1. See my "Literary Criticism," Signs 1 : 435-60.· 2. Annette Kolodny, "Literary Criticism," Signs 2 : 420.Elaine Showalter is professor of English at Rutgers University. The author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, she is currently completing The English Malady, a study of madness, literature, and society in England. (shrink)