This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

This paper explores trans poetics as a way of doing trans philosophy. I begin by giving an overview of the current state of trans philosophy. I then give examples of other literatures wherein poetics is taken to be philosophically robust. After giving a brief history of trans poetics, I turn to the poetics statements and poetry of three trans poets—D'Lo, Ching-In Chen, and micha cárdenas—featured in the 2013 anthology Troubling the Line. I show how poetry is often uniquely able to (...) capture the ambiguity of the WTF of trans experience in ways that differ from philosophical argumentation. I conclude by suggesting that poetics might move us away from a potential politics of suffering in trans philosophy to a politics of liberation. (shrink)

The most recent attempt to explain Aristotle's use of in Poetics 13 is that of T. C. W. Stinton , 221–54). Stinton insists that must not be restricted to any one definition, but should be understood to include a ‘range of applications’ embracing both moral error and ‘ignorance of fact’.

Resumen: Este artículo intenta visibilizar algunos aspectos del rol fundacional de la narrativa de Juan Emar en las letras nacionales, en particular, su fecundo diálogo con la antipoesía de Parra. Se propone que tanto en Miltín 1934 de Emar como en la Antipoesía de Parra asistimos a la práctica de una carnavalización del motivo de lo divino-sublime. En esta dirección, ambas poéticas vanguardistas modulan en el espacio hispanoamericano una de las aristas del “proyecto inconcluso de la modernidad” : la muerte (...) nietzscheana de Dios y de su espacio simbólico; connotado por el tópico de la música de las esferas. Tópico que en ambos autores se da en el marco de un cuestionamiento a una estética de lo sublime que predominaba en la crítica de la época.: This article attempts to draw attention to the foundational role of the literary production of Juan Emar in the national letters, in particular, its fruitful dialogue with the antipoesía de Parra. It is proposed that both in Miltín 1934 and the Antipoesía de Parra we attend the practice of carnivalization of the divine-sublime. In this direction, both avant-garde poetics modulate one of the edges the “unfinished project of modernity” : the simbolic death of God and the simbolic space; connotated by the topico of the spheres music. Topico that in both authors is given in a questioning of a critique of an aesthetic of the sublime; that prevailed in criticism of that period. (shrink)

When details of the literary critic Paul de Man's anti-Semitic wartime journalism surfaced in the 1980s, enemies of deconstruction in the academy claimed that the always-controversial style of thought tended inherently towards nihilism in its tight focus on the paradoxes of language and in its relative indifference to truth claims. More recently, ‘speculative realists’ in philosophy have lambasted deconstruction and critical theory more generally with neglecting the reality of the physical world as it exists outside language and human comprehension. But (...) what if Paul de Man's own engagements with Kant and the European philosophical tradition in the latter years of his life reveal a side of deconstruction that was as concerned with the intransigence of the material world as it was with the paradoxes of language? In this article, I take the measure of recent debates in Continental philosophy around realism and language, with the aim of bringing to light a less visible side of de Man's philosophical poetics, one that has nonetheless been pursued by scholars critically concerned with the precisely philosophical resonances of de Man's bracing theories of language and materiality. (shrink)

"Humanists and social scientists alike will profit from reflection on the efforts of the contributors to reimagine anthropology in terms, not only of methodology, but also of politics, ethics, and historical relevance. Every discipline in the human and social sciences could use such a book."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory.

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Poetics is the first philosophical account of an art form and is the foundational text in the history of aesthetics. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics is an accessible guide to this often dense and cryptic work. Angela Curran introduces and assesses: Aristotle’s life and the background to the Poetics the ideas and text of the Poetics , including mimēsis ; poetic technē; the definition of tragedy; the elements of poetic composition; the Poetics’ recommendations for tragic (...) plot patterns; catharsis ; epic and comedy; the nature of our emotional response to drama; the proper pleasure of tragedy; and the role that art plays in a human life the relevance of Aristotle’s work in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophical psychology to the Poetics a comparison of Plato and Aristotle on the value of mimetic art the continuing importance of Aristotle’s Poetics to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of film. (shrink)

In this incisive political analysis, Kristin Ross thinks through everyday existence across a range of practices-from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction-and across the forms taken by collective political action in contemporary struggles. Ross returns to Henri Lefebvre's powerful intuition that ordinary life is both residue and resource, the site of profound alienation and, by the same token, the origin of all emancipatory initiatives and desires.

An influential thinker on the concept of singularity and its implications on politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and literature.

This book draws on studies of movement, gesture, and early film to offer a series of readings on repetition through the body in Homer. Each chapter presents an argument based on a specific posture, action or gesture, through which to rethink epic practices of embodiment and formularity.

This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence was an intentional (...) intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken. Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 54, Issue 5, Page 1278-1305, October 2020.

Anglophone philosophers have shown a surprising interest in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s aesthetics in recent years. At the same time, new approaches to aesthetics have been proposed that come very close to the original conception of aesthetics that Baumgarten introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century. In light of these developments, this article undertakes a critical examination of a central concept in Baumgarten’s poetics and aesthetics—extensive clarity. It argues that historians of philosophy and contemporary aestheticians should be wary of this (...) concept for two reasons. First, in Baumgarten’s poetics, the extensive clarity of sensible representations constitutes a dubious standard with which to determine whether those representations are “poetic.” Second, in aesthetics, using extensive clarity as an alternative standard with which to determine the perfection of sensible cognition undermines the “marriage of reason and experience” that characterized the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy and raises the specter of dualism that Kant tried, with questionable success, to address in the ‘Schematism’ chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. The article concludes that historians of philosophy should acknowledge the philosophical shortcomings of Baumgarten’s conception of extensive clarity and contemporary aesthetics should not reproduce them. (shrink)

This essay provides a queer reading of Édouard Glissant’s critique of Western metaphysics as presented in his 1990 work Poetics of Relation. Glissant’s text is interpreted as offering conceptual tools for understanding the production of an outside of the gender binary, as well as for a critique of the naturalisation of the bourgeois framework underlying queer visibility and inclusion as political ends. Based on the self-transgressive character shared by the notions of Relation and queerness, it is further argued that both (...) the potentialities and the aporetic elements of Glissant’s proposal can elucidate those of queer theories and practices. (shrink)

In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of "the end the world" in Derrida's late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida's work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World (...) is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida's thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy's. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a "spectro-poetics" devoted to and assigned to the other's singularity. (shrink)

The first part of the present paper offers a critical response to Wang Ning's proposed construction of world poetics, based on a brief reexamination of the changing meanings and implications regarding the concept of world literature. The second part is an elucidation of the dynamics and tensions between global tendencies and local manifestations, taking the May Fourth writers and Xueheng School as examples. I argue that by transcending the binary opposition between the local and global, world poetics transforms perspectives from (...) Eurocentrism to a "glocalized" vision, and provides a solid foundation for further exploration of world literary theories. (shrink)

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias's Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus' On the Sublime. The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the (...) experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience—including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge—in the life of their culture. Readership: Scholars and students of Greek literature, Greek poetics, and literary theory and criticism. (shrink)

An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous "motions" within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art's shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, (...) this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period's exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind. (shrink)

And in general it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for the artist can teach, and men of experience cannot. When pragmatism first gained favor in the early twentieth century, some British philosophers like Russell regarded it as evidencing their perception of America’s crude and enterprising spirit.1 The Imperial jab lay in this: that just (...) as business indicates the exchange of products and services to meet basic needs as well as others, for the pragmatist, knowledge is tied to social practices and instrumentality (that is, being able to effect changes in the world). The slight lies .. (shrink)

Knowledge, Robert Rowland Smith remarks, is "derived by inference from specific cases in respect to a general order."1 The meaning of a literary work—our knowledge of it in that sense—is determined, according to this model, by the relationship between these two categories: between the "specific case" and the "general order." To gain knowledge of a text would be to understand what it means; and to understand what it means, one needs to negotiate from the particular to the general—thematically, contextually, generically, (...) intertextually, linguistically, rhetorically. But in this essay I argue that such a negotiation may be understood to generate serious difficulties when it comes to literary texts since, as Susan... (shrink)

Leonardo Bruni’s well-known oration, the Laudatio Florentinae urbis, has long stood at the center of discussions on the emergence of the modern republican state. Recent historiographical trends have emphasized the degree to which Bruni’s oration represents a propagandistic attempt both to portray Florence as a territorial power of Northern Italy keen to impose its sovereign authority on neighboring polities and as a republic intent on fashioning an image of itself as a popular sovereignty. It is in this second element of (...) Bruni’s oration that we can discover his rhetorical purposes: he needed to give a distorted image of Florence as enjoying “popular” rule precisely because Florence was in fact moving in the opposite direction towards a more oligarchic concentration of political authority. The essay investigates the changes contemplated in revisions to Florence’s juridical codes at precisely the time of the oration’s composition, suggesting that when these two sources are juxtaposed, Bruni’s oration appears as a strongly ideological literary work the rhetorical gestures of which camouflage the actual historical and legal developments of Florence’s political life in the early fifteenth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:After Extinction ed. by Richard Grusin, and: Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction by David FarrierChris CrewsRichard Grusin, editor. After Extinction. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 272pp.David Farrier. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 176pp.Thinking Critically and Poetically with the AnthropocenePublished within a year of each other, Richard Grusin’s edited collection, After Extinction, and David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics offer (...) two valuable perspectives on the themes of extinction and the Anthropocene. Most readers are likely familiar with some version of the Anthropocene by now, and its usage in these books (with a few exceptions) follows a common refrain in the humanities and social sciences, where it is used as an umbrella term to describe a wide range of (mostly negative) impacts to the Earth associated with industrial civilization and human activities.The topic of extinction is a much older issue, but increasingly frequent (and alarming) reports about biodiversity loss and extinction from bodies like the United Nations, combined with activism from groups like Extinction Rebellion, have raised its profile. Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which performs a sort of Derridean hauntology throughout the pages of After Extinction, further reinforced this trend. As Richard Grusin notes in his Introduction to After Extinction, the book emerged from a conference hosted by the Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee which focused on the question of what comes after extinction. Each chapter is thought-provoking, but at times they sat uneasily together, producing a sort of Chthulucenic cacophony drawn from multiple disciplines and themes, from entangled humanism and the power of photography to a rethinking of disability and Indigenous languages in the Anthropocene. [End Page 156]I found David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics harder to pin down, despite being a more cohesive text. The book offers a series of ecocritical musings that engage with a series of poets and authors whose work Farrier uses to draw out a poetic imagination of the Anthropocene. Farrier develops this Anthropocene poetics through a dizzying array of textual and artistic examples that draws inspiration from queer ecology and New Materialism (e.g., Elizabeth Grosz, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Quentin Meillassoux) to problematize the liminal spaces and borders between human and non-human agencies and affect, animacies and intimacies, while suggesting that poetry is well suited (perhaps best suited?) to help us rethink our relationship to deep time and geologic agency. While reading Farrier’s book, I could not help but think of Bruno Latour’s comments about how we need a new geostory to help us make sense of the Anthropocene.Farrier engages widely with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing to develop some key themes, yet there is no attempt to force the concept of the Anthropocene into any prefigured box, despite his study’s grounding in ecocriticism and his stated sympathy with the fledgling field of Anthropocene studies. As Farrier notes, “I pursue a more inclusive approach to defining the Anthropocene, that is, that each discipline must do so according to its own terms and, by implication, that each discipline must reappraise its boundaries and assumptions in the Anthropocene’s shadows” (3). Farrier’s familiarity with both the scientific basis and cultural debates around the Anthropocene allows him to pull this off successfully.A key aim for Farrier is to explore what an Anthropocene poetics might look like, and to show how such a poetics can allow for more fluid engagements with the Anthropocene. He does this through three framing devices: intimacy (deep time), entanglements (sacrifice zones), and swerve (kin-making), each of which allows him to think more deeply about our growing awareness of deep time (past and future) and our entanglements with a changing planet. Farrier suggests this awareness is creating a deeper appreciation for how the human project is (and always has been) deeply bound up with other than human beings and non-human agencies. As Farrier argues: “One of the most striking and unsettling aspects of the Anthropocene is the newly poignant sense that our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and... (shrink)

Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians, University of Michigan Press, ISBN - 9780472102303Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba, Duke University Press, ISBN - 9780822313601Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides’ Traffic in Women, Cornell University Press, ISBN - 9780801428456.