Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a “psychoanalytic critic” because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, (...) I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,” and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows—or perhaps I should say playmates.The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom’s psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to show how the represented female psyche refuses and problematizes the dominant concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the “situational-thematic”: studies of Oedipal triangles in fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth. It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions, since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic study of readers’ responses willingly brackets the impossible notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may concern real readers or the reader as psychological everyman . But like the other traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic structure—a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical. Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, which has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling. (shrink)

A major preoccupation of that novel [Zola’s Nana] is the undressing of the courtesan Nana. One could even say that a major dynamic of the novel is stripping Nana, and stripping away at her, making per progressively expose the secrets of this golden body that has Paris in thrall. The first chapter of the novel provides, quite literally, a mise-en-scène for Nana’s body, in the operetta La Blonde Vénus. When she comes on stage in the third act, a shiver passes (...) over the audience, for, we are told, she is nude. Yet, we quickly discover, not quite nude: she is covered by a filmy shift under which her splendid body lets itself be glimpsed: se devinait. “It was Venus born from the waves, having only her hair as a veil.”2 The denuding of nana progresses in chapter 5 when Comte Muffat and the Prince make their way backstage to her dressing room . They surprise her naked to the waist, and she then covers herself with a bodice, which only half hides her breasts. Despite the repeated references to nana as nude, it is only in chapter 7, at the very midpoint of the novel, that Nana is finally completely naked. In this scene, she undresses before her mirror while Comte Muffat watches, especially looking at her looking at herself. Thus she is fully unveiled, frontally in the mirror, and from the backside in Muffat’s direct view. And yet, as we shall see in a moment, even the completely naked woman’s body bears a troubling veil. 2. Émile Zola, Nana , p. 47; hereafter abbreviated N. I wish to thank Helen Chillman, Librarian of the Slides and Photography Collection, Art and Architecture Library, Yale University, for her help in assembling the illustrations accompanying this essay.Peter Brooks is Tripp Professor of Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The author of The Melodramatic Imagination and Reading for the Plot , he is currently working on a study of narrative and the body, tentatively called “Storied Bodies.”. (shrink)

I suppose I should be grateful to Charles Bernheimer for setting me back on the path of righteousness from which I appear to have so grievously strayed. But I think Bernheimer and I are in deep disagreement about the purposes of literary criticism, and this may make me, in his perspective, a hopeless case. Bernheimer reads my article, “Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil’d,” as intending “to empower women by putting their sexuality at the generative origin of story” . (...) He ascribes to me the motive of “offering feminists a gift” . He even suggests, in a particularly offensive move: “This offer, I would guess, provides the generative energy for Brooks’s critical story” . I can do without such attributions of motive. My intent, far less ambitious, was to describe some attitudes toward the nude female body that I found in novels and paintings of the later nineteenth century. I don’t believe that criticism need be harnessed to the “empowerment” of anyone in particular, nor that it need denounce what Bernheimer identifies as “patriarchal oppression” , “misogynist strategies” , and the “hegemonic privileges” of the male gaze everywhere they are to be found . Does criticism really need to burden itself with this litany of clichés? Do they tell us anything new? Peter Brooks is Tripp Professor of Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. He is nearing completion of a book tentatively entitled Storied Bodies. (shrink)

Understanding recreational experiences is a longstanding research tradition and key to effective management. Given the complexities of human experience, many approaches have been applied to study recreational experience. Two such approaches are the experiential approach (based in a positivistic paradigm) and emergent experience (based in an interpretive paradigm). While viewed as being complementary, researchers have not offered guidance for incorporating the approaches into a common model of recreational experience. This study utilized longitudinal, qualitative data to examine aspects of recreational experience (...) posited by these two approaches. Results provided a framework for synthesizing across the two approaches. Respondents had clear pre-activity expectations, and most respondents realized their expected outcomes. This supports the experiential approach. Of the 48 activity narratives, 27 experienced something unexpected, and 45 described process-oriented, intrinsic motivation, suggesting evidence of emergent and unique characteristics specific to an individual’s realization of recreational experience. This supports the application of the emergent experience approach to understand how individuals create meaning from recreational engagements. The paper proposes a model for integrating results of the two approaches. While not advocating for any specific approach, the findings can serve as an example of building a holistic model of the outdoor recreation experience. The purpose of the model is to allow for a more complete understanding of how individuals create recreation experiences, more complete documentation of the benefits of outdoor recreation for both researchers and managers, and better synthesis across studies. (shrink)

This study extends experimental tests of (cumulative) prospect theory (PT) over prospects with more than three outcomes and tests second-order stochastic dominance principles (Levy and Levy, Management Science 48:1334–1349, 2002; Baucells and Heukamp, Management Science 52:1409–1423, 2006). It considers choice behavior of people facing prospects of three different types: gain prospects (losing is not possible), loss prospects (gaining is not possible), and mixed prospects (both gaining and losing are possible). The data supports the distinction of risk behavior into these three (...) categories of prospects, Further, probability weighting and diminishing sensitivity of utility as predicted by PT are observed. Loss aversion is, however, less pronounced, except for choices where one prospect is degenerate. The data suggests that the probability of losing may be relevant for loss aversion. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 72-74.

This lavishly illustrated book highlights the conservation importance of congregatory animals species--those which gather in vast groups. It also focuses on the irreplaceability of the congregation sites which are able to support such large gatherings of animals, fish, or birds.

From the late nineteenth to twentieth century, the Bhagavad-Gītā became a transnational text influenced and molded by British colonialism and Orientalism. In this article, I argue that a particularly influential western figure, Peter Brook, adapted and represented the Gītā for a transnational audience in ways that expanded a neocolonial and Orientalist interpretive horizon for its contemporary reception. This essay examines how Brook’s particular approach to and universalist representation of the Gītā reveal an important decolonial paradox: the extension of colonial (...) relations into artistic and scholarly exchanges when attempting to enhance a text’s cross-cultural intelligibility. I advance this argument by critically exploring Brook’s universalist claims and ethical reflections on war, showing how his neocolonial vision of order—along with his impulse for control and speedy consumption of “performance capital”—ultimately undercut his universalizing aspirations. Finally, this examination elucidates a positive strategy for addressing the decolonial paradox in a contemporary Indian setting. (shrink)

Semiotic objections to market exchange of a good or service maintain that such exchanges signal an inappropriate attitude to the good or to associated individuals, and that this provides a weighty reason against having or participating in such markets. This style of argument has recently come under withering attack from Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (2015a, 2015b). They point out that the significance of any market exchange is explained by a contingent semiotic norm. Given the tremendous value that could (...) be realised by markets in, for instance, bone marrow, or kidneys, deferring to such norms across the board would have very significant opportunity costs. In the absence of any rationale for these norms, they should be ignored completely. We provide one important rationale. Unlike many semiotic objections to markets, we provide a broadly consequentialist semiotic argument. We argue that a range of behaviours play important signalling roles in interpersonal social practices; in particular, in practices involving caring, esteem, and testimony. Markets in these behaviours would distort these signals. Moreover, many of the productive advantages yielded by markets rely in turn on positive market norms that also inhibit the signalling behaviours associated with these nonmarket behaviours. We conclude that there will inevitably be trade-offs between the distributive advantages of new markets and these interpersonal social practices. (shrink)

_The Global Justice Reader_ is a first-of-its kind collection that brings together key foundational and contemporary writings on this important topic in moral and political philosophy. Brings together key foundational and contemporary writings on this important topic in moral and political philosophy Offers a brief introduction followed by important readings on subjects ranging from sovereignty, human rights, and nationalism to global poverty, terrorism, and international environmental justice Presents the writings of key figures in the field, including Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, (...) John Rawls, Thomas Pogge, Peter Singer, and many others. (shrink)

In his article “Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil’d” , Peter Brooks makes the claim that, for a certain dominant mode of nineteenth-century narrative, the female sexual organ is the occult source of the narrative dynamic. On a superficial reading, Brooks’s piece might appear to empower women by putting their sexuality at the generative origin of the story. But the opposite is the case: his argument reflects rather than critiques the misogynist strategies of the texts he discusses. I (...) will begin my analysis of his article with a brief return to the story by Barbey d’Aurevilly whose climactic scene Brooks offers as “a kind of allegory of the cultural story [he has] been delineating” . Charles Bernheimer is professor of romance languages and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Flaubert and Kafka and Figures of Ill Repute , he is currently working on a study of fin-de-siècle literature and art, The Decadent Subject. (shrink)

Ongoing advances in paleoclimatology and paleoecology are producing an ever more detailed picture of the environments in which our species evolved. This picture is important to understanding the processes by which our large brain evolved. Our large brain and its productions—toolmaking, complex social institutions, language, art, religion—are our most striking differences from our closest living relatives. Indeed, humans are unique in the animal world for our brain size relative to body mass and in the elaboration of our cultures. We are (...) also the world’s dominant organism (Vitousek et al. 1997). We achieved our present anatomy and behavioral repertoire very recently. Fossil material attributable to our species goes back perhaps 200,000 years and artifacts that strike us as representing fully modern behavioral capacities are only about 50,000 years old (Klein 1999; McBrearty and Brooks 2000), about which time anatomically modern humans spread from Africa to Eurasia (Lahr and Foley 1994). Our ecological dominance began with the evolution of agriculture starting about 10,000 years ago. Explaining the late coming of human brains is a major evolutionary puzzle. Most important animal adaptations are old. Eyes, internal skeletons, adaptations for terrestrial life and for flight all date back hundreds of millions of years. Given that big brains and culture were such an overwhelming success for us why didn’t they evolve long ago? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ancient Drama Illuminated By Contemporary Stagecraft:Some Thoughts on the Use of Mask and Ekkyklēma in Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier CaravansÉrail and Sophocles' AjaxPeter W. MeineckIn July 2005, the Lincoln Center Festival presented Théâtre du Soleil's epic production of Le Dernier Caravansérail, a six-hour performance divided into two parts that articulated the plight of contemporary refugees from predominantly Muslim countries and their attempts to seek refuge in the West. Conceived (...) and created by the French auteur Ariane Mnouchkine, the production split audiences, critics, and commentators. 1 Always controversial, Mnouchkine's bold theatricality and collaborative creative process with her metamorphic Théâtre du Soleil brought a work to New York with a sweeping sense of on-stage dynamics, scenic movement, and visual dexterity that evoked Athenian staging devices of the fifth century b.c.e. and created astute parallels between the ancient and modern stage. Focusing on the use of the mask and the ekkyklēma in the suicide scene of Sophocles' Ajax, I will discuss the ways in which an understanding of the creative process of a contemporary dramatist such as Mnouchkine offers another paradigm for the comprehension of ancient texts.Mnouchkine's connection to the dramatic form of ancient Greece seems, at first sight, to be marked. In 1992 the Brooklyn Academy of Music [End Page 453] presented her version of the myth of the House of Atreus, Les Atrides, where Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis was staged prior to the three parts of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Rehearsed and refined over several years, Les Atrides ran for over ten hours in the non-traditional space provided by the vast Park Slope Armory in Brooklyn. But Mnouchkine's method was not a recreation of Greek tragic theatre or even an updating to accommodate a contemporary audience; rather, it was a theatrical attempt to discern the nature of one of the great foundation myths of the West and to extrapolate the meaning of the myth as it relates to modern political and social institutions. In a 1990 interview, when Mnouchkine was asked if she drew inspiration from Greek theatre space, she responded, "Not at all! First of all, I wasn't familiar with it, and didn't want to be. I prefer to work by confirmation, to have my work confirmed by documents after the event." 2 Mnouchkine adopted an approach to Greek tragedy that was markedly Brechtian, a process of verfremdung (defamiliarisation), utilizing the dramatic styles of Asian theatre. In the case of Les Atrides, she adapted the Indian Kathakali tradition, which deeply infused the production's impressive choral work. Yet Mnouchkine believed that total alienation was a misnomer; her version of Greek tragedy must not become self-reflective or derisive, or use aesthetic realism to "sterilize" the imagination of the audience. In "translating" the techniques of Asian theatre to distance her audience from their preconceived notions of Greek drama, Mnouchkine may have brought us closer to an understanding of staging ancient theatre in her use of masks, scenic devices, stage machinery, choral delivery, and physical acting techniques. 3Théâtre du Soleil's intensive work in Kabuki, Kathakali, and Commedia (whose origin she also sees in the East) has been influenced by the physical theatre movement encapsulated by artists such as Jacques Lecoq and the expression of the mythic elements of drama inspired by directors like Peter Brook. These elements, combined with a refashioning of some of the fundamental staging traditions inherent in Eastern theatre, have infused Mnouchkine's work with a mise en scene that not only transports her own drama but also can help form a greater appreciation of similar theatrical devices employed by the Athenians. After all, Greek drama was created, first and foremost, as a performative craft; any subsequent [End Page 454] life as a written text was a secondary effect of the presentation of the drama to a live audience in the theatre at one given time and place. With this in mind, what can Le Dernier Caravansérail reveal about a play such as Sophocles' Ajax?Ajax is a good choice for this discussion because the staging issues of the play continue to confound. 4 Ajax... (shrink)

It’s easy to experience a slight vertigo effect when viewing a chart displaying the Holocene era of climate history. The striking isolation of the past 10,000 years of stable and accommodating aver...

A mechanism for planning ahead would appear to be essential to any creature with more than insect level intelligence. In this paper it is shown how planning, using full means-ends analysis, can be had while avoiding the so called symbol grounding problem. The key role of knowledge representation in intelligence has been acknowledged since at least the enlightenment, but the advent of the computer has made it possible to explore the limits of alternate schemes, and to explore the nature of (...) our everyday understanding of the world around us. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has forced a close examination, by people other than philosophers, of what it means to say for instance that "snow is white." One interpretation of the "new AI" is that it is questioning the need for representation altogether. Brooks and others have shown how a range of intelligent behaviors can be had without representation, and this paper goes one step further showing how intending to do things can be achieved without symbolic representation. The paper gives a concrete example of a mechanism in terms of robots that play soccer. It describes a belief, desire and intention (BDI) architecture that plans in terms of activities. The result is a situated agent that plans to do things with no more ontological commitment than the reactive systems Brooks described in his seminal paper, "Intelligence without Representation.". (shrink)

Erratum to: Book Symposium on Peter Paul Verbeek’s Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 Content Type Journal Article Category Erratum Pages 1-27 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0058-z Authors Evan Selinger, Dept. Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA Don Ihde, Dept. Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA Ibo van de Poel, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands Martin Peterson, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands Peter-Paul Verbeek, (...) Dept. Philosophy, Twente University, Enschede, the Netherlands Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

"--Peter Brooks, Princeton University "This is an important book and a superb piece of writing, combining passionate enthusiasm with calm arguments and informative examples.

Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, x + 207 pp.