_ Source: _Page Count 19 The theory of possible worlds has been minimally employed in the field of theory and philosophy of history, even though it has found a place as a tool in other areas of philosophy. Discussion has mostly focused on arguments concerning counterfactual history’s status as either useful or harmful. The theory of possible worlds can, however be used also to analyze historical writing. The concept of textual possible worlds offers an interesting framework to work (...) with for analyzing a historical text’s characteristics and features. However, one of the challenges is that the literary theory’s notion of possible worlds is that they are metaphorical in nature. This in itself is not problematic but while discussing about history, which arguably deals with the real world, the terminology can become muddled. The latest attempt to combine the literary and philosophical notions of possible worlds and apply it to historiography came from Lubomír Doležel in his _Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage_. I offer some criticism to his usage of possible worlds to separate history and fiction, and argue that when historiography is under discussion a more philosophical notion of possible worlds should be prioritized over the metaphorical interpretation of possible worlds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 1-16 [Access article in PDF] The Plot of History from Antiquity to the Renaissance Eric MacPhail In the Poetics Aristotle introduced the notion of plot or mythos as a distinctly poetic form of rationality and coherence absent from history. In the course of antiquity and the Renaissance Aristotle's notion of plot underwent a curious inversion by which (...) class='Hi'>history came to supplant poetry as the main literary form of emplotment. To account for the readjustment or even reversal of Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, we will examine the notions of order, causality, and chance expounded by classical historians and literary theorists before tracing their influence to Renaissance writers. In the Renaissance the transmission, conflation, and distortion of Aristotelian doctrine exerted a profound influence on historiography and literary criticism, particularly in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It is even possible to understand some of the new and hybrid forms of Renaissance fiction as a reaction to this transference of the idea of plot from poetry to history. While history may indeed possess no coherent plot, as Aristotle speculated, literary history can nevertheless reconstitute the genealogy of competing notions of plot and order in Renaissance narrative.We can situate Aristotle's definition of plot in the context of his inquiry into cause and coincidence. In book two of the Physics Aristotle proposes a rigorous typology of cause, distinguishing between formal, material, efficient, and final causes, and he also considers the status of chance and fortune as accidental causes or aitia kata symbebekos (197a5-6). 1 The Metaphysics takes up the question of to kata symbebekos, translated alternately as accident or coincidence, and in doing so develops several arguments that pertain to the treatment of plot in the Poetics and to the larger issue of the coherence of fiction and history. As Richard Sorabji points out, the key to Aristotle's notion of coincidence is the [End Page 1] paradox of existence without genesis or without coming into being. 2 Metaphysics VI, 2 maintains that "of things which are in other senses there is generation and destruction [genesis kai phthora], but of things which are accidentally [kata symbebekos] there is not" (1026b24). Metaphysics VI, 3 argues that if this were not so, if nothing existed without genesis, then everything would be of necessity in the sense that every future event could be traced back to a present cause. Genesis thus seems to signify an unbroken chain of causes while to symbebekotos, the coincidental, represents a break in the causal chain. For Aristotle the coincidental or the fortuitous "goes back to some starting point (arche), which does not go back to something else" (1027b12-14). A coincidence is an uncaused cause.Aristotle's Poetics furnishes a definition of plot or mythos that provides a link between the metaphysical discussion of cause and the fictional inquiry into chance. For Aristotle the dramatic plot is the integration of various actions, or synthesis ton pragmaton (1450a5), into a whole or olon consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an end (1450b27). The unity of action does not admit of any accidents within the plot as it moves continuously from beginning to middle to end, and yet the plot as a whole exemplifies the metaphysical notion of a coincidence. Aristotle defines the beginning of the plot or the arche as "that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity but after which something naturally is or comes to be" (1450b28-29). Thus the mythos, like the coincidence, originates in an uncaused cause, that scandal abhorred by rationalism. Aristotle further complicates the question of causality when he denies to historical events the type of probability or necessity that he associates with dramatic actions. Chapter 23 of the Poetics exhorts the epic poet to emulate tragedy and shun the example of histories (1459a17-22), for while historical events may possess a chronological unity, they do not form any causal chain and thus do not exhibit any unity of action.In chapter 9 of the Poetics Aristotle... (shrink)

Created during a certain time period of the world’s art development, fictional history embodies not only a set of individual authorial creative acts, but it is the only "artistic-historical model" conditioned by a number of objective aesthetic and non-aesthetic factors. As such, fictional history represents an integral part of the national worldview. Its exploration requires a combinatorial unity of methods. The article proposes a set of modern methodological principles for studying the processes of artistic modelling of history (...) in the aesthetic consciousness on the synchronous level and their representation in literary works. The methods of academic literary criticism are combined with the advanced methods of modern interdisciplinary humanities that are based on postmodern philosophy. Thus, in the chosen combination of the scientific approaches, the heuristic potential of the structural-semiotic and structural-typological methods, mythopoetics and myth-restoration, imagology, hermeneutics, and receptive aesthetics, correlates with the methods of systematic and descriptive analysis. Such diverse theoretical combinations, the existence of a kind of "methodological sinusoid" within the study, do not contradict but complement each other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Undeleter for CriticismSimon Jarvis (bio)Is there experience of beauty, or is it only that we sometimes choose to sort and name certain experiences by using a set of terms, originating often in ancient and medieval philosophy and theology and by a long process of mutation and manipulation arriving under the disciplinary heading of "aesthetics"? This question asks for at least two kinds of information. It does not only (...) ask for information about the history of the formation of the concepts of aesthetics; it also asks for information about experiences. But information about experiences is hard to come by. This is not only, perhaps, for the large reason that "information is concerned with alien objects," rather than with experiences,1 but also for the more local one that "aesthetics" does not often attempt to describe any experiences with determined fidelity.2I can illustrate this with reference to a branch of aesthetics in which I have a particular interest, the aesthetics of prosody. A good deal of subtle and sometimes brilliant work exists in this field. It is rare, however, to find writing which describes in any detail the particular experiences which a particular living individual has had in relation to a line of poetry.3 One is much more likely to find such descriptions in works of fiction (or, rarely, in brief reviews) than in professional writing on the topic of prosody. There seem at first to be some obvious and good reasons for this. Professional writing demands not that we merely report our own subjective experiences, but that we produce knowledge. Critics are not paid to be artists but to be a kind of scientists of art. But what if there is no such science? What if "there is no science of the beautiful" [Kant, CJ 172]? Would that mean that the whole subject area should simply be—deleted?That this is a possibility is confirmed by the fact that in one area of thinking about aesthetic experience, it has almost happened already. While there are still a number of paid professionals who understand part of their vocation to be bound up with investigating the experience of the beauty or other value of works of art, there are few paid aestheticians of nature.4 There have been historical periods in which numbers of printed nonfiction [End Page 3] texts were devoted both to experiences of natural beauty and also to the relative propensity of natural appearances to occasion such experiences. Such descriptions are now thought to be, insofar as they are of interest at all, the province of artists.5 This is indeed a consequence of something like an acceptance that, in the sphere of experiences of nature, at least, "there is no science of the beautiful." Most agree that "an ideal of a beautiful view is unthinkable" [CJ 80]. Yet few, perhaps, would now argue that an ideal of a beautiful poem is quite thinkable either.We are thus returned to the question posed above. If there is no science of the beautiful, must claims to experiences of beauty be treated as fictional—in the specific sense that they are matters for fiction, and not for science? Why should the concept not be altogether eliminated?Perhaps for this reason. Let us imagine that I think I have had an experience. I have been walking along a street at night, say, head down as though scrutinizing the quite complex surface of tarmacadam, kerbstone, painted parking and motoring instructions, drain covers and grilles, although perhaps in distraction I may have been allowing my eyes simply to pass lightly over all this while I think about a mortifying remark addressed to me at a recent committee meeting, or attempt to identify the catalogue number relevant to a fragment of piano music which has come into my head; may, for example, as if startled by a call or a cry of pain have raised my look from the wet pavement—which I now possibly "see" for the first time (since it is the soul which sees, and not the eye [Descartes 1: 172])—and now indeed see at a great distance ahead of me, almost at the horizon of... (shrink)

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)

Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures (...) the ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel. (shrink)

The structure of the traditional paradigm -- Narrative fiction as philosophically interpreted in the ancient western world -- Narrative fiction as philosophically interpreted in the modern and contemporary western world -- The structure of the new paradigm -- What makes an artifact philosophy? -- Literature as philosophy -- The special logic of fictive narrative philosophy -- Constructional devices -- How do we judge fictive narrative philosophy? -- When should we use direct discourse philosophy and when fictive narrative philosophy? (...) -- How might fictive narrative philosophy change the academy? -- First order metaethical principles: my own philosophical work on ethics and personhood theory as a first step for ethics & fictive narrative philosophy -- My own work in fictive narrative philosophy. (shrink)

Survey of the reception history of E.L. Doctorow, the controversial American author.

Non pas Pourquoi la fiction?, ni A quoi pense la fiction?, ni même Que fait la fiction?, mais : Comment fait la fiction? Comment la fiction fait-elle pour défendre ou illustrer une morale, alors qu'elle se définit par son indépendance à l'égard du monde dit réel? Peut-être, d'ailleurs, n'est-ce qu'en tant qu'elle est défictionnalisée que la fiction peut promouvoir ou publier une morale. Mais il est, pourtant, des morales qui contiennent une part constitutive de (...) fiction, et qui, en quelque sorte, appellent la fiction : ainsi de la morale intuitive de Victor Hugo, ou de la morale de la liberté de Sartre. La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Hugo, Tolstoï, Sartre : à première vue, les auteurs convoqués ne sont pas tous faits pour s'entendre. C'est bien pour cela qu'ils sont ici réunis. Car la fiction et la morale ne sont pas plus immuables l'une que l'autre, et c'est dans leurs intermittences, dans leurs fluctuations, dans leurs variations qu'il convient d'étudier leurs noces improbables. (shrink)

La fiction historique dont nous parlons ici a vu le jour par rapport à la pensée de l'écriture, ou de l'inscription, telle qu'elle a eu lieu dans le travail de Jacques Derrida des années 60. Au coeur de ce travail, il y a trois textes publiés en 1967 : La voix et le phénomène, De la grammatologie, L'écriture et la différence. Traverser ces travaux revient à traverser : premièrement, l'imagination du mot, qui n'était pour Husserl que pure fiction (...) ; deuxièmement, l'imagination comme séparation de la nature dans la nature chez Rousseau ; et troisièmement, la fiction comme imaginaire dans le cas du structuralisme littéraire, au-delà duquel a lieu la fiction sans imaginaire de Mallarmé. Juste avant ces travaux il y a, dans l'oeuvre publiée, le moment où la fiction historique commence à percer ; juste après, le moment où ses fondements ont déjà été établis : l''Introduction' à L'Origine de la géométrie de Husserl et 'La double séance' dans La dissémination, respectivement. C'est également l'espace compris entre le problème de l'historicité et celui d'une littérature sans condition. À cet espace appartient la possibilité de 'devenir une chose littéraire' de tout texte 'confié à l'espace public [...] dont le contenu, le sens, le référent, le signataire et le destinataire ne sont pas des réalités pleinement déterminables, des réalités à la fois non-fictives ou pures de toute fiction...' (Donner la mort)."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:David Hume: Reason in HistoryDario PerinettiClaudia M. Schmidt. David Hume: Reason in History. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 473. Cloth, $85.00Not the least interesting feature of this fine piece on Hume's philosophy is its intriguing Hegelian title, and particularly if one recalls that Hume claimed that reason is the slave of the passions and that "Mankind are so much the same, in (...) all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular" (EHU 8.7). Schmidt conclusively shows that a reader acquainted with the totality of Hume's works should not find her title puzzling. Thus the book is a contribution to recent efforts to read Hume as a philosopher who gives a much more important role to reason than is usually acknowledged, and who places reflection on history at the core of his philosophical enterprise.Instead of seeking to reverse accepted views of Hume as an ahistorical naturalist by discussing the role of reason and history in Hume's writings, Schmidt argues that this reversal will occur naturally for someone who sees the unity of Hume's entire philosophical project. In this sense Schmidt sets for herself the ambitious task of meeting the challenge set out long ago by Norman Kemp Smith: that Hume scholarship will acquire a due perspective on his work only after the unity of his activities as historian, economist, philosopher, political theorist, and man of letters is appropriately appreciated.Schmidt skillfully goes about her task by reviewing Hume's writings in an order that is reminiscent of the one Hume had in mind when he published the first two books of the Treatise. Hume wished to go on, after dealing with the understanding and the passions, to an "examination of Morals, Politics and Criticism." We know that he fulfilled this task only in part with volume three, "Of Morals." His views on criticism and politics were, though, later [End Page 212] presented less systematically in his essays and in the History of England. Schmidt reviews Hume's work by dealing first (chapters 1-5) with the topics proper to book 1 of the Treatise and the first Enquiry, then with the passions (chapter 6) and Hume's philosophies of action (chapter 7), and of morals (chapter 8). Chapters 9-18 treat, in order, political theory, economics, aesthetics, religion, and history.The general view of Hume that Schmidt presents makes it essential to establish that he has a more nuanced view of concepts than a long tradition of interpretation has acknowledged. Schmidt claims that Hume's way of ideas is by no means guilty of the charge of accounting only for private items in the mind at the expense of the public and historical dimensions of concept use. Schmidt argues that Hume gives a central role to the social and historical dimension of acquiring and mastering conceptual rules. It is not surprising, then, that Schmidt does not see Hume's distinction between ideas that are and are not copied from impressions as a philosophical razor for determining the limits of meaningfulness. She argues, rather, that Hume's first principle is intended to foster a better understanding of philosophical terms by tracing their genealogy either to sensation or to the imagination. The core of Schmidt's reading lies in showing how Hume can account for the stability and objectivity of the use of concepts like identity, cause, time, and external world, which are "merely" the product of the imagination. Hume's "deduction" of these concepts is to be found in his explanation of general rules, fictions and standards. Thus, in chapters 2 and 3,Schmidt maintains that Hume's discussion of causality is to be viewed as part of a more general discussion of knowledge and probability in which causal beliefs are seen as paradigmatic cases of natural beliefs justified and/or corrected by general rules. Once we see the role that general rules have in correcting and justifying beliefs we can also see how unfounded are the common charges that Hume fails to account for the normativity of belief, that he is a sceptic about induction, and that he... (shrink)

This study represents a comparison between two radical gestures of literary self-reflexivity: romantic irony and postmodernist metafiction. It examines the impact of early German romantic theory and its central concept of irony on German and English romantic narrative fiction and relates the same to postmodernist self-reflexive novels, including its British and American variants. A primary objective of this comparison is to account for the radical skepticism that postmodernist metafiction voices with respect to the paramount philosophical question of truth and (...) reality. The immanent tension between an absolute idealistic and a radically skeptic position which romantic irony articulates and enacts is conceived of as an important and instructive link to the understanding of postmodernism. (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 ...

I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking’s notion of a “poetics of abandonment.” Lipking’s article was included in an issue of Critical Inquiry entitled Canons, in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence, sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent reformulation of the canon. It (...) may be, as Viktor Shklovsky suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, that literary theory is the novel’s successor, in which case the resurrection of Ovid’s abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation, it is perhaps inevitable that some of today’s male literary critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers. Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary canons but to critical canons as well.In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: “Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth century as if into a mirror” . Thus Gilbert and Gubar—Lipking also cites the examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers—become the most recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking’s article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring. “In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right issues.” Lipking may be calling for “a poetics of abandonment” not in response to a perceived maternal deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly difficult time proving their legitimacy. Joan DeJean is professor of French at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, and she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of Sappho: Sappho’s Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937. (shrink)

The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical (...) lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject.". (shrink)

This e-book written in Hungarian seeks to reconstruct “the aesthetic” in the modern sense of the word, from the mid-17th century to the 1730s, through the texts of mainly British authors such as John Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Francis Hutcheson, George Berkeley, sometimes using their Spanish and French predecessors for contextualization. It assumes that “the aesthetic” is an unprecedented type of experience that had to be discovered, or rather invented; it is therefore more than a discussion of (...) some old, always existing quality or sensibility in a new theoretical guise. If the words “(school) philosophy”, “art” and “criticism” can be associated with the mostly systematic theories of aesthetics that emerged in the wake of Alexander G. Baumgarten as a loose characterisation, then the words “(popular) theology”, “nature” and “exercise” are even more so with the earlier texts that are on the table here, which played a role in the formation of “the aesthetic”. It seems that in this period, “the aesthetic” is understood above all as a new and intimate link between the sensual and the supernatural or spiritual, in which the former is not just an apropos or disposable means to the latter, but an indispensable and ever-present component that provides a constitutive framework for experience. Its unprecedented modernity lies in its nisus to capture the divine in the sensual and to make it present as sensual. In this new experiential form, both the “nature” of the transcendence and the spiritual economics of the beholder are reconfigured. The new “aesthetic” is connected to and associated with the full experience of life, the joy of existence, the openness to the transcendent through the sensuality of the natural or everyday world, the interplay of external determination and internal spontaneity, the enchanted state of mind experienced in a waking dream, the reinterpretation of the relationship between reality and fiction, the intense existential experience of spiritual and emotional movement provided by walking, wandering, boating or cheerful imagination. (shrink)

This study explores how in science fiction’s novels myths are intimately linked to their ideological dimension and criticism. It begins with a mythocritical analysis that leads to a mythoanalysis in order to understand how those myths and the big issues of the accelerating technoscientific progress in the 20th and 21th centuries are linked. My approach is based on the restricted example of Dan Simmons’ science fiction novels: by studying the myths he rewrites, I will show that those (...) myths are representing how technoscience can have an influence on history, on the development of humanity and on the issue of ethics. (shrink)

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)

Descartes's Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. Emma Gilby reassesses the significance of Descartes's writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. She argues that humanist theorizing about poetics represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes's work. She offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, questions of verisimilitude or plausibility, and the figures (...) of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, for instance. Like the poets and theorists of his age, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France. (shrink)

In this study, David Bordwell offers the first comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of ...

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.

As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread (...) through later editions. Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters. Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski "Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation." ---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead "Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power." ---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment "Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history." ---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley "Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice." ---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review. (shrink)

By meshing psychology with literary analysis, this book inspires us to view the reading of fictional works as an emotional and seductive affair between reader and writer. Arguing that current teaching practices have contributed to the current decline in the study of literature, Jean-François Vernay's plea brings a refreshing perspective by seeking new directions and conceptual tools to highlight the value of literature. Interdisciplinary in focus and relevant to timely discussions of the vitality between emotion and literary studies, particularly within (...) the contexts of psychology, affect studies, and cognitive studies, this book will open up a space in which the formation of our emotions can be openly examined and discussed. Jean-François Vernay has published extensively in the field of Literary Studies both in French and in English. His books, Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch andA Brief Take on the Australian Novel, focus on Australian fiction. Carolyne Lee is a Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published four books, the latest being Our Very Own Adventure. (shrink)

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)

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)

Arabic fiction; Palestine; history and criticism.

Machiavelli, like other Renaissance authors, weaved philosophy into works of fiction, attacking the notion attributed to Plato’s Diotima that love (eros) is philosophy’s partner. Under veiled criticism, presented in four comic texts bound together by the theme of love, Machiavelli delivers his criticism of Diotima’s eros. He joins a long line of astute manipulators, like Numa and Savonarola, who presented difficult ideas to people unlikely to accept them except under cover of divine authority. My essay rests on (...) the expanding body of scholarship on Machiavelli’s neglected literary works. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how Maimon’s method of fic- tions deals with the specific problems raised by one of his skeptical arguments, namely the quid facti. This argument leads Maimon to adopt what is sometimes called a ‘system interpretation’ of the necessity of empirical laws. Since Maimon thinks that transcendental philosophy cannot prove the fact that the categories have objective validity, he infers that hence systematization, and not the catego- ries, is what constitutes the source of necessity in empirical (...) laws. Yet, systemat- ization can only ever yield high probability but never apodictic necessity. Conse- quently, Maimon proposes to understand theoretical philosophy as science that employs and indeed can only employ the method of fictions. Since neither phil- osophical, nor physical laws can claim objective validity, philosophical princi- ples must be understood as useful fictions. Thereby, philosophy engages in a form of modeling-practice that delivers descriptions of the conceptual conditions that would be required for our scientific judgments to be justified. (shrink)

The title question becomes a rabbit-hole through which we tumble in search of an answer, encountering everyone from Herodotus to Humphrey Bogart along the way. Is History Fiction? is an invaluable guide on how to weld creative thinking and sound research into meaningful history, and how to understand the different arguments that have abounded throughout time regarding the nature of history. More than a book of theory about theory, this innovative work is an asset to the (...) undergraduate classroom and the research seminar alike. Is History Fiction? will be a welcome aid for teaching historical writing and examining an age-old question. Is History Fiction? is a must-read for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars from the humanities and social sciences, or anyone grappling with the enduring issues that have shaped the theory and practice of recording history. (shrink)