In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

The rise of world literature is the most noticeable phenomenon in literary studies in the twenty-first century. However, truly well-known and globally circulating works are all canonical works of European or Western literature, while non-European and even "minor" European literatures remain largely unknown beyond their culture of origin. World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon argues that world literature for our time must go beyond Eurocentrism and expand the canon to include great works from non-European and "minor" (...) European literatures. As much of the world's literature remains untranslated and unknown, the expansion will be an exciting process of discovery. By discussing fundamental questions around canon, circulation, aesthetic values, translation, cosmopolitanism and the literary universal, Zhang Longxi proposes a new and liberating concept of world literature that will shape world literature worthy of its name. This book speaks for a more inclusive idea of world literature, and shows students and scholars alike that all the literary traditions, particularly non-European traditions, will be able to make important contributions and expand the canon of world literature. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the character of the literary and contends that if, instead of accepting the legitimacy of the question “what is literature?” and trying to answer it, one were to subject the question itself to a critical scrutiny—i.e. in order to lay bare what the question presupposes about the literary—it becomes obvious that any attempt to answer the question by uncritically accepting the legitimacy of the puzzle it puts forward can only give rise to contradictions. For the question (...) requires and presupposes for an answer an ontologically independent foundation, and the latter, given its immutability, requires the positing of a reality/representation disjunction—where the latter of the pair permits of and accommodates the experience of change—thereby ensuring that representation, too, requires a foundation, which, due to the impossibility of a foundation being the foundation of its other, that is, mutability, ends up undermining the very possibility of a disjunction, and, hence, the coherence of the foundationalist enterprise. Given that the problem of incoherence is bound to recur in all attempts to explain the literary in a foundationalist framework and given that the logic of foundationalism is one with the logic of nihilism—for the incoherence necessitates the denial of the possibility of literature—a release from the contradictions and a reinstatement of the reality of literature can come about only if one is awakened to the incoherence of the foundationalist undertaking. The resulting turn away from foundationalist thinking to differential thinking—where the incoherence of the demand for coherence is grasped and the reality of time reinstated—sheds light on the twining of the destinies of the literary and the philosophical: if philosophy as differential thinking awakens us to the displacement of being in the flow of time, literature sets into work the displacement of meaning in the functioning of language. This confirms that not only are the attempts to unearth a ground for the literary a mistake, but denying the reality of the literary event—i.e. upon failing to find a ground—is equally a mistake. (shrink)

"Time and the Museum: Literature, Phenomenology, and the Production of Radical Temporality, is the first explicit in-depth study of the nature of museum temporality. It argues as its departure point that the way in which museums have hitherto been understood as temporal in the scholarship - as spaces of death, othering, memory and history - is too simplistic, and has resulted in museum temporality being reduced to a strange heterotopia (Foucault) - something peculiar, and thus black boxed. However, to (...) understand the ways in which museum temporalities and timescapes are produced, and the consequences that these have upon display and visitor response, is crucial, because time is itself a political entity, with ethical consequence. Time and the Museum highlights something we all experience in some way - time - as a key ethical and political feature of the museum space. Utilizing the fields of literature and phenomenology, the book examines how time is experienced and performed in the public areas of three museum spaces within Oxford - the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, and Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Using concepts such as shape, structure, form, presence, absence, authenticity and aura, the book argues for a reconsideration of museum time as something with radical potential and political weight. It will appeal to academics and post"--. (shrink)

Many great authors claim that reading literature can expand your phenomenal imagination and allow you to imagine experiences you have never had. How is this possible? Your phenomenal imagination is constrained by your phenomenal concepts, which are in turn constrained by the phenomenology of your own actual past experiences. Literature could expand your phenomenal imagination, then, by giving you new phenomenal concepts. This paper explains how this can happen. Literature can direct your attention to previously unnoticed phenomenal properties of your (...) own past experiences, as brought to mind by involuntary memory. This process gives you the opportunity to notice those phenomenal properties for the first time, and so also to form phenomenal concepts of those properties. Forming a new phenomenal concept strictly expands the range of your phenomenal imagination. It gives you the capacity to imagine more than you could have before, including certain specific kinds of experience that you yourself have never enjoyed firsthand. Literature’s capacity to expand your phenomenal imagination in this way is central to its social, moral, and epistemic value. (shrink)

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

The paper investigates, first of all, the epistemological status of one of the most elusive, yet vital, genres of literature, that aimed at childhood and adolescence. The “for” or “of” with which reference is made to the literature also known as ” youth” risks, in fact, to preserve the status quo of a discipline that has struggled (and still struggles) to find its own validity and legitimacy, discounted over time with an “invisibility” or a derubrication to derivative literature, secondary, (...) weak in its artistic and aesthetic canons. On the contrary, the aim here is to confirm, as witnessed by the most recent scientific studies, the total autonomy of literature for childhood and adolescence which, relying on at least two codes, iconic and verbal, boasts considerable expressive freedom, lending itself also as a faithful interpreter of post-modernity. One theorises, therefore, the possibility of speaking of a literature ‘from’ childhood and ‘from’ adolescence, underlining the need to consider the specification in the same way as a geographical and cultural location. Since we are dealing with works written and illustrated by individuals who are not boys or girls by birth (since the latter are not yet masters of iconographic writing), the most relevant will be those that faithfully draw on the physical and metaphysical region of childhood, restoring its complexity and expression, as a direct emanation of that other culture, which still and always exists and resists in us. (shrink)

This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic art into (...) some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies. (shrink)

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers—among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature , first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading (...) as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarme;, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language. (shrink)

This article turns to the relationship between style and gesture in the German-language pop novel. While unsuccessful gestures are often seen as a subversion of social conventions condensed in literary style, an author like Leif Randt consciously adjusts style and gesture to cultural expectations. Since he at the same time insulates his own writing from extra-literary appropriations of literature, style and gesture in his novels become prominent representatifs of aesthetic autonomy.

Our past century was exemplary in a number of ways. The advances it made in science and medicine were unparalleled. Also without precedent was the destructiveness of its wars. In part, this was due to an increasing technological sophistication. The time lag between a scientific advance and its technological application was, in the urgency of the century, constantly diminished. Modern weaponry combined with mass production, communication and mobilization to produce what came to be known as “total war.” This was (...) a war without any of the limits that characterized the conflicts of the previous centuries. It was this lack of restraint that, perhaps more than anything else, led to the terrible excesses of this century: its war time terror bombings, deportations, and genocidal slaughters. It also led to the chief problem this century presents to ethics: that of the grasp and comprehension of collective evil. This problem is not just theoretical. An inability of those involved in its collective processes to take thought--to actually apprehend the evil they were engaged in--characterized the disasters of our century. At least in part, the participants’ lack of restraint was based on a lack of recognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005) 1-23 [Access article in PDF] Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural Approach Brian Boyd University of Auckland Many now feel that the "theory" that has dominated academic literary studies over the last thirty years or so is dead, and that it is time for a return to texts.1 But many more outside literary studies—in fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, law, psychology, and religion—have (...) recently come to recognize that the deep past that shaped our species can help to explain our present and recent past. Since a bio-cultural model of the human can only be richer than a solely cultural model, and since it implies neither genetic determinism nor limitation to the status quo, I want to argue for a bio-cultural or evolutionary approach to literature, first in very general terms, and then through a few aspects of a single familiar example, Hamlet.2 Such an approach, I suggest, can offer both a more comprehensive theory of literature and a closer investigation of literary texts. I Traditional views of literature tended to see it as reflecting nature, especially human nature, all the way from Plato's discomfort with, or Aristotle's admiration for, mimesis to Shakespeare's or Stendhal's images of art as holding the mirror up to nature. Common-sense traditional views of art and literature have easily shaded into transcendental views, widespread because religious beliefs have been so pervasive and because both artists and their patrons in state or church benefit by nurturing a sense of awe at art's putatively divine origins and power.In the twentieth century, first in sociology, anthropology, and even [End Page 1] psychology, then by the 1960s in the combination of these with Saussurean linguistics that produced structuralism and its aftershocks, and therefore impacted on literature, there has been a rejection of human nature as a given and a stress on human nature as the product only of culture and convention. "Theory," or what the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism more pointedly calls cultural critique, rightly critiques traditional common-sense and transcendental views of art, pointing out that the nature, human nature, or supernature that art or literature was supposed to reflect was merely what was assumed of these things from within a local cultural perspective.3 Roland Barthes, for example, criticized "the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature."4 Modern Theory also rejects the individual as another bourgeois or capitalist or Western notion, as when Fredric Jameson echoed Barthes's Death of the Author by announcing the Death of the Subject.5 Criticism since the 1960s "has denied, on theoretical grounds, the relevance of the single historically definable author."6However, as many have lately realized, there are problematic ethical consequences of both the denial of human nature and the denial of the individual. After such denials, on what basis do we then claim equal rights for all humans, and on what basis do we assign responsibility for particular actions?7 If there is no "single historically definable author," does that mean that someone penning a racist screed cannot be held accountable?A critique of unquestioned Western assumptions about human nature was needed, but the post-1960s critique was shortsighted: it has not looked nearly far enough. While structuralism and its more or less rebellious offspring were continuing the lineage of early twentieth-century social sciences, the natural sciences were moving in the opposite direction, towards the first comprehensive scientific attempt to understand human nature in the context of evolution and human, animal, and artificial cognition and behavior.In the humanities there has of late been widespread skepticism about science. Some postmodernists have what they deem "a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims." But, as Daniel Dennett comments, "this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naïveté, made possible only by... ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power."8 Science does not generate only true answers: ideas proposed within it can of... (shrink)

This article maps existing research from 5,874 scholarly publications on social entrepreneurship (SE) utilizing scientometrics. The mapping indicates a taxonomy of five clusters: (a) the nature of SE, (b) policy implications and employment in relation to SE, (c) SE in communities and health, (d) SE personality traits, and (e) SE education. We complement the scientometric analysis with a systematic literature review of publications on SE in the Financial Times 50 list (FT50) and Business & Society and propose a multistage, multilevel (...) framework that highlights the clusters of existing research on SE based on their stage and level of analysis. This review study also helps outline a set of future research directions, including studies examining (a) the process stage at the micro-level and macro-level, (b) linkages across levels and stages, (c) linkages across stages over time or longitudinal studies, (d) SE in resource-constrained environments, (e) technological advancement and its impact on SE, (f) the types of social enterprises and their outcomes, and (g) various emerging topics in SE. (shrink)

A collection of one man's essays in book form tends to be viewed today with some suspicion, if not hostility, by philosophical critics. It would seem that the author is guilty of an academic sin of pride: causing or helping to cause separately conceived articles to surpass their original station and assume a new life, a grander articulation. It can hardly be denied that the essays which follow must face this sullen charge, for they were composed at different times for (...) different sorts of audiences and, for the most part, have already been published. Their appearance in a new form will not allay commonplace criticisms: there are repetitions, certain key terms are defined and defined again in various places, a few quotations reappear, and, beyond this, the essays are unequal in range, depth, and fundamental intent. But it is what brings these essays together that constitutes, I trust, their collective merit. Underlying the special arguments that are to be found in each of the chapters is a particular sense of reality, not a thesis or a theory but rather a way of seeing the world and of appreciating its texture and design. It is that sense of reality that I should like to speak of here. Philosophy stands in a paradoxical relationship to mundane ex istence: it is at once its critique and one of its possibilities. (shrink)

-/- For I have to remind you, somewhat bluntly and simply, that my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed towards literature, towards that writing which is called literature. -/- What is literature? –Jacques Derrida, “The Time of a Thesis, Punctuations” -/- Literature is everywhere in Jacques Derrida's writing. It is there from one end to the other of his work, even in essays or books that superficially (...) do not seem to involve “literature.” If Derek Attridge had not already invented or borrowed the phrase “Acts of Literature” as the title for his fine anthology of Derrida's writings about literature I might have called this chapter “Derrida's Acts of Literature.” The phrase “acts of literature” is a double genitive, subjective and objective at once. It names acts performed by literature, and at the same time acts that create or comment on literature. In what sense can literature, or writing about literature, or writing literature, or reading literature be an “act”? That is one of my main questions here. -/- Derrida, along with all the other things he is (as this volume testifies), is one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper tries to discuss some of the theories concerning the relation between literature and knowledge. On the one hand, most of the time, philosophers donot believe in the force of literature to generate knowledge. On the other, litterateurs are more optimistic, considering that there is a specific kind of knowledge that literature (sometimes they emphasize: only literature) is able to deliver. These are the two antagonistic theories I have to arbitrate in this paper. In my opinion, literature is (...) an ally of science and philosophy and it can provide a large amount of knowledge about some aspects of reality that cannot be put into concepts. Some examples like dreams and love regarded both by philosophers and writers try to demonstrate that sometimes only literature can conquer some territories of the human mind and sensibility. At the end, the paper asserts, along with Peter Swirski, that interdisciplinarity is a compulsory condition if we want to take advantage from the whole knowledge that sciences, as well as arts, among which literature is to be mentioned, can offer us. The conclusion is borrowed from Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel: Knowledge is the literature’s only morality. (shrink)

This work is bibliographic research and has as general objective to identify in the works of Richard Rorty theoretical elements that can guide investigations about the relationship between philosophy, literature and education. And as specific objectives of the way, explicit of Narrative in the definition of Rorty's creation and investigator of the main narrative and thematic characters concerning the main characters of the work. The ocean at the end of Neil Gaiman. However, from Rorty's perspective, it is possible to consider (...) that education has an important role in relation to society. Since, as worldviews essentially proposed by literature, it instigates creativity, autonomy and approximation to reality, promoting a direct relationship between the character and the reader. What to do in one of human solidarity, and mostly. Therefore, the unique neopragmatist narrative philosopher introduces as the main tool for a moral and political change since, this is highly intertwined with imagination, such creation goes against tradition, which considers reason as the source of transformation. In addition, Richard Rorty (199) understands factors such as real space, knowledge, language and morals, based on the notion of time and search, because, for the philosopher, nothing escapes time and chance. (shrink)

Starting from personal experiences which led him to give up teaching at the University of Venice, Alfonso Berardinelli concentrates on the difficulties and paradoxes of the relationship between educational institutions, on the one hand, and the anarchist and misanthropic character of modern literature on the other. The majority of the `classics' of modern times, from Baudelaire to Kafka, from Tolstoy to Svevo, are `scandalous' even today: one cannot teach them without trying to convey the shock of their extraneousness from the (...) modern world and its culture. Modern literature is, in actual fact, almost always anti-modern, asocial, anti-social, apocalyptic. It is not possible to turn it into a simple `object of study' without betraying it. (shrink)

How empty and barren would life be if all our art and literature were taken away. What a calamity!Beyond the circle of the reading room are the world's greatest collection of books and the finest works of art from all places and times—sculpture from the Parthenon, Ming vases, Viking jewelry, great stone bulls and lions from Assyria, Egyptian mummies, medieval tapestries—brought together and taken out of context and time, like Keats's Grecian urn, because in themselves and in conjunction they (...) create—they are—art. In the courtyard before the huge pillars of the classical front of a Greek temple, thousands of people waited in long lines, like pilgrims at a shrine, to be admitted to look for a few moments at the rare .. (shrink)

What is an event? From a philosophical perspective, events are irregular occurrences--moments of change and interruption--categorized by human perception, language, and thought. While philosophers have pored over this subject extensively in recent years, The Event: Literature and Theory seeks to ground it: What is literature's approach to the event? How does literature produce and give testimony to events? Ilai Rowner's study not only revisits some of the most important thinkers of our time, including Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, (...) and Martin Heidegger, it also develops a critical approach to literature that questions the meaning of the literary event through examinations of literary works by Marcel Proust, Louis-Ferdinand Ce;line, and T. S. Eliot. Rowner offers a new method of thinking about the particular characteristics of the event within literary works and defines the creative value of literature as the aspiration toward the un-happening within the happening. In this study the experience of literature--as an act of both writing and reading--becomes the struggle to capture the excessive movement of the event while yet revealing the creative energy within the work of literature. (shrink)

This study examines the value of literary interpretation. A case is argued on the basis of the possibility of literary works being understood as 'about' diverse 'themes'. The process of understanding literature, it is argued, inevitably involves the concerns and the personal and historical situatedness of the interpreter. In the performance history of Shakespeare's The Tempest we see clearly how the thematic focus and the representation of the elements of the work changes, sometimes radically, over time. An interpretation of (...) The Tempest with an emphasis on today's concerns is the basis for a discussion which shows the interdependence of the questions of why literary works have survived as valued objects of attention over time, and how literature can matter to the reader. Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics shows, in its emphasis on the historical situatedness of understanding, how the reader'S situation and concerns feeds into the process of making sense of literary works and thereby makes literary interpretation interact with the life of the interpreter. 'Themes', or what the work is seen to 'be about', is central to the process of literary interpretation. This, in particular, is where literature has its openness to accommodate application to diverse concerns and situations. To remedy the deficiency of Gadamer's hermeneutics on this point, the role of themes in literary interpretation is first illustrated by an interpretation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and then analyzed. The study argues that while different literary interpreters may have different purposes, for their procedures to constitute interpretations three criteria need to be observed. In having to reach an equilibrium between the requirements of faithfulness to the literary work on the one hand, and the understanding of it through one's own situation and concerns on the other, the process of literary interpretation makes a valuable contribution to understanding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:192. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1983 The Hume literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; £9.50), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the years 1977 to 1982 were listed in Hume Studies in previous Novembers. What follows here will bring the record up to the end of (...) 1983. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions, and to send me offprints of their own articles and reviews. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recently-appearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQ American Philosohical Quarterly JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JP Journal of Philosophy PAS Proceedings of the Arisotelian Society PB Philosophical Books PQ Philosophical Quarterly PR Philosophical Review RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie RM Review of Metaphysics TLS Times Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British standard (no. 4148). 193, ARNOLD, N. S. 'Hume's Skepticism about Inductive Inference', JHP 21, 31-55. BARKER, S. 'Hume on the Logic of Design', Hume Studies 9, 1-18. [19-24] BERMAN, D. 'David Hume and the Suppression of Atheism', JHP 21, 375-87. BOX, M.? Gloss on Goldsmith's Remark on Hume', Notes & Queries 30, 59-60. BRETT, N. 'Hume's Debt to Kant', Hume Studies 9, 5973. BROUGHTON, J. 'Hume's Skepticism about Causal Inference', Pacific phil. Q. 64, 3-18. CALVERT, B. 'Another Problem about Part IX of Hume's Dialogues', Int. J. Phil. Relig. 14, 65-70. COLWELL, G.G. 'Miracles and History', Sophia 22, 9-14. DARWALL, S. L. Impartial Reason, ch. 5 ('Hume's Internalism1 ). Ithaca, N. Y. DEL VECCHIO, M. 'Un Impotesi di Lettura Esegetlica del "Dubbio Scettico" Humeano', Riv. crit. Stor. FiI. 38, 457-64. FOGELIN, R. J. 'The Tendency of Hume's Skepticism', in M. Burnyeat, The Skeptical Tradition, 397-412. Berkeley, CaI. GASKIN, J. CA. 'Hume's Attenuated Deism', Arch. Gesch. Phil. 65, 160-73. GEMES, K.? Refutation of Inductive Scepticism', Australas. J. Phil. 61, 434-8. GUTTENPLAN, S. 'Hume and Contemporary Ethical Naturalism', Midwest Stud. Phil. 8, 309-20. HARRIS, H. S. 'Hume and Barker on the Logic of Design', Hume Studies 9, 19-24. HARTSHORNE, C 'Hume's Metaphysics and its Influence', in C Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, 136-50. HIRSCH, E. 'Hume's Distinction between Genuine and Fictitious Identity', Midwest Stud. Phil. 8, 321-38. 194, IMMERWAHR, J. 'David Hume, Sexism, and Sociobiology ', Sth. J. Phil. 21, 359-70. KIVY, P. 'Hume's Neighbour's Wife: An Essay on the Evolution of Hume's Aesthetics', Br. J. Aesth. 23, 195-208. KUEHN, M. 'Kant's Conception of "Hume's Problem"', JHP 21, 175-93. KUEHN, M. 'Hume's Antinomies', Hume Studies 9, 25-45. McCRACKEN, CJ. Malebranche and British Philosophy, ch. 7. Oxford. McLYNN, F.J. 'Jacobitism and David Hume: The Ideological Backlash Foiled', Hume Studies 9, 171-99. MALHERBE, M. 'La notion de circonstance dans la philosophie de Hume', Hume Studies 9, 130-49. NATHAN, G. J.? Humean Pattern of Justification', Hume Studies 9, 150-70. NIELSEN, K. 'Hobbesist and Humean Alternatives to a Religious Morality', Int. J. Phil. Relig. 14, 33-47. PENELHUM, T. 'Natural Belief and Religious Belief in Hume's Philosophy', P£ 33, 166-81. [182-6] PONKO, T. A. 'Artificial Virtue, Self-interest, and Acquired Social Concern', Hume Studies 9, 4658. ROD, W. 'The Rationalist Theory of Double Causality as an Object of Hume's Criticism', Erkenntnis 19, 315-29. ROHATYN, D. 'Hume's Dialectical Conceits: The Case of Dialogue XII', Phil. & phenomenol. Res. 43, 519-32. RUSSELL, P. 'On the Naturalism of Hume's "Reconciling Project"', Mind 92, 593-600. SCARRE, G. 'What was Hume's worry about Personal Identity?', Analysis 43, 217-21. SCARRE, G. 'Was Mill Really Concerned with Hume's Problem of... (shrink)

The transformation of literature and publishing reflects not only shifts in societal thought and cultural values but also deeper philosophical and spiritual inquiries into meaning, ideology, and moral authority. This study examines the _Morningstar Literature Series_ (1946–1953) as a case study to explore the religious, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of Chinese literature and publishing during the tumultuous transition around 1949. By situating this transformation within broader metaphysical and ideological debates, the research investigates how literature functioned as a conduit for spiritual (...) reflection, political reorientation, and moral discourse in a period of historical upheaval. Using grounded theory, this study constructs a model that examines the interplay of objective and subjective factors, official policies, and ideological measures that shaped literary production and dissemination. The model identifies nine dimensions, including political prominence, enlightenment, and the decline of commercial motives, to illustrate how literature and publishing were not only cultural instruments but also vehicles for shaping moral consciousness, ethical reflection, and metaphysical discourse. This research systematically organizes the foundations, strategies, and consequences of this literary shift, revealing the philosophical and theological underpinnings embedded in the era’s intellectual and spiritual landscape. By analysing the role of literature as a medium for ethical, ideological, and religious transformation, this study broadens the discourse on publishing history, emphasizing the ways in which literature serves as both an artifact of historical change and a means of negotiating existential and spiritual questions. It offers insights into the philosophical and religious dimensions of literary transformations, contributing to a deeper understanding of how literature functions as a bridge between political ideology, cultural identity, and moral philosophy in times of profound societal transition. Future research should further explore the intersection of literature, religious philosophy, and spiritual consciousness in shaping cultural and intellectual history. (shrink)

In this essay, I look back at some of the earliest attempts by the first generation of literature-and-medicine scholars to answer the question: Why teach literature and medicine? Reviewing the development of the field in its early years, I examine statements by practitioners to see whether their answers have held up over time and to consider how the rationales they articulated have expanded or changed in the following years and why. Greater emphasis on literary criticism, narrative ethics, narrative theory, (...) and reflective writing has influenced current work in the field in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1970s. The extraordinary growth of interest and work in the field nationally and, especially since 1996, internationally has included practitioners in many additional areas such as disability studies, film studies, therapeutic writing, and trauma studies. Along with the emergence of narrative medicine, this diverse community of scholars and practitioners—affiliated more through their use of narrative methodologies than the teaching of literature—makes the perennial challenge of evaluation and assessment even more complicated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature as Fable, Fable as ArgumentLester H. HuntIIn an ancient Chinese text we find the following exchange between the Confucian sage Mencius and one of his adversaries:Kao Tzu said, "Human nature is like whirling water. Give it an outlet in the east and it will flow east; give an outlet in the west and it will flow west. Human nature does not show any preference for either good or (...) bad, just as water does not show any preference for either east or west.""It certainly is the case," said Mencius, "that water does not show any preference for either east or west, but does it show the same indifference to high and low? Human nature is good just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards."1The subject of this colloquy is a familiar one in philosophy as we know it in the West. Its form and style are also vaguely familiar: it is a clashing exchange of theories, in which the speakers do not seem to be speaking merely to express themselves, but in order to persuade others that they are right. Yet at the same time it seems quite alien to us. It would be hard to find anything in it that a Western philosopher since the time of Plato would recognize as an argument. The participants seem to be speaking entirely in illustrative analogies and clever aphorisms, not in arguments at all. The style seems to be literary rather than philosophical. Yet what they are doing does look curiously like arguing. There is a rhythm of statement and counter-statement, in which each speaker seems to be answering the claims of the other.A related, though different, sort of ambiguity, in which the author [End Page 369] really does seem to be both arguing and not arguing, can be found in the following text, traditionally attributed to a Westerner of the sixth century B.C.:Between the North Wind and the Sun, they say, a contest of this sort arose, to wit, which of the two would strip the goatskin from a farmer plodding on his way. The North Wind first began to blow as he does when he blows from Thrace, thinking by sheer force to rob the wearer of his cloak. And yet no more on that account did he, the man, relax his hold; instead he shivered, drew the borders of his garment tight about him every way, and rested with his back against a spur of rock. Then the Sun peeped forth, welcome at first, bringing the man relief from the cold, raw wind. Next, changing, he turned the heat on more, and suddenly the farmer felt too hot and of his own accord threw off the cloak, and so was stripped.Thus was the North Wind beaten in the contest. And the story means: "Cultivate gentleness, my son; you will get results oftener by persuasion than by the use of force."2Here Aesop, to use the traditional name for the author of this ancient fable, is plainly doing something "literary": he is telling a story. But narration in the Aesopian mode is never simply telling a story, and in this case what is present in addition to the story seems to have something logical about it. Personally, I read this fable with a certain sense, however faint, that I am being enlightened by it. That of course is Aesop's aim. He is not merely expressing his opinion, but in some way showing us the truth of it. This is the sort of thing that, in philosophy, is done through argument. However, as in the text from the Mencius, it seems there may be no argument here.Clearly, we are dealing with forms of persuasion that are common at certain times in the development of a culture: namely, those periods when the philosophical muse is a mere suckling babe. We are looking, one might think, at a level of development so rudimentary that the distinction between argument as we think of it today and other forms of persuasion has not been made... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Imagination, and Human RightsWillie van Peer“the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen”Aristotle: Poetics, 1451aAristotle’s dictum has been of vital importance to the development of literary theory, and its significance can still be felt today. It is the foundation of the distinction we make between journalism and literature, between history and fiction. Literature, Aristotle proposes, is (...) about things that could happen, not about things that have taken place in reality. Literature is thus inscribed in the realm of the imagination. However, imagination does not operate in an epistemological vacuum. A fictional text entertaining no relation with the world would have no meaning. Perhaps giants, dragons and witches do not really exist, and perhaps it is not really possible to cover seven miles with each step of those wonderful boots that Tom Thumb discovered. But we have no difficulty in imagining those things, precisely because they entertain an intimate relationship with forms and things, events and actions that happen in daily life. The details of the relationship between reality and fiction are less important for the present argument than the fact that fiction is embedded in our pragmatic attitudes. 1 Ernst Bloch has given this human tendency a name: The Hope Principle. Our desire for a better world expresses itself in hope, a distinctive feature of the species Homo Sapiens. The importance of the imagination in the project of humanity has received eloquent and systematic treatment in the philosophical work of Hans Vaihinger and Helmuth Plessner. 2 Imagination also gives impetus to history, because it drives us toward the realization of aims and plans that initially lived only in our hearts and minds: “Someone dreaming never remains in the same place.” 3 [End Page 276]Similar things have been asserted about literature, by Horace, Sidney, Matthew Arnold, and others. Reading is supposed to make us better humans, heightening our awareness, increasing our sensibility, and thus indirectly guiding our actions toward the establishment of a better world. Sometimes noble motives are associated with this function. Reading literature, it is then assumed, makes the reader more socially tolerant, more perceptive about other humans, and more politically conscious. This is the so-called Edification Hypothesis. Anthony Savile sums up this view when he submits the thesis that literature has a unique power to make us understand the thoughts and feelings of other human beings. This ethical perspective on literature has been expressed since Greek Antiquity. 4 It will be remembered that Plato condemned literature precisely for this reason: because it diverts our attention from the real world, itself already an imperfect reflection of Pure Ideas. Aristotle rejects this view and develops a theory squarely opposed to that of his teacher. According to him, literature contributes to the elevation of mankind, to paideia. By showing us that which is possible, and by involving us in the inescapable passage of tragic events, readers and spectators are drawn into emotions of fear and compassion, emotions that lead to katharsis, a process that purifies us of megalomania (hubris), safeguarding democratic government and protecting us from unrestrained tyranny. 5The Aristotelian view that literature has an edifying effect had been generally present in Western tradition till about 1800. Until then literature was viewed almost universally as an ethical category. Consider, for instance, the self-evident way in which Richardson prefaces Pamela: “If to divert and entertain, and at the same time to instruct and improve the minds of the YOUTH of both sexes: If to inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable: If to set forth in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial, and the social duties....” 6The embarrassment a modern reader may feel when confronted with such overt claims to morality is largely a product of the nineteenth century, when literature came to be seen as a predominantly aesthetic category, eluding all attempts at moral categorization. This movement has resulted in a liberation of literature from moralism. At the same time, it has created nontrivial difficulties in thinking about ethical and political issues, so... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Literature: Why It Matters by Robert EaglestoneAihua ChenEaglestone, Robert. Literature: Why It Matters. Polity Press, 2019. 123pp.Is literature a worthy topic of study in an era fixated on science, technology, and information? This has become a subject of debate in recent years, especially as enrollment in college literature courses has declined. J. Hillis Miller has noted that “all who love literature are collectively anxious today about whether literature (...) matters” (13), insisting that it does since it has “three essential human functions: social critique, the pleasure of the text, and allowing a materialization of the imaginary or an endless approach to the unapproachable imaginary” (31). Other literary scholars concur with Miller, though from differing perspectives, including Dennis J. Sumara in Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters (2002) and Mark William Roche in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (2004). In his recent monograph, Literature: Why It Matters, Robert Eaglestone joins this discussion, offering a timely and judiciously formulated manifesto in defense of literary studies that is groundbreaking in the way it treats literature as a living object whose study can inspire ongoing conversation. Eaglestone presents his argument in four segments: “What is Literature?” “Studying Literature,” “Why Does Literature Matter?” and “What Does Literature Teach?”In his first chapter, Eaglestone reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to defining literature as fiction and narrative, that is, as something “made up.” He argues instead that literature is undefinable and exists as a kind of “living conversation” (6). For Eaglestone, literature, like a conversation, is a form of communication among many parties. In this case, the conversation engages the text, the reader, and the author in discussions of nearly everything. Learning about literature involves understanding the form of that discussion in the same way one comes to understand how speakers create meaning in dialogue with one another. And like conversation, readers’ creative response to a literary text fully engages their minds, their hearts, their feelings about the past, and their hopes for the future. In Eaglestone’s view, literature is “not timeless but time-full.” It involves “a past, visible in various ways, including the historical context of a work and the ‘family trees’ of influence and genre; a person (it’s always read now); and a future (that would be you, joining [End Page 118] the conversation)” (20). As in actual conversation, questions of equality and freedom matter a great deal since “literature is a crucial part of our constant dialogue about humanity’s ever-changing self-understanding — not about what we are but about who we are” (22).In the second chapter, Eaglestone asks questions concerning how we go about “Studying Literature.” Here, he extends the metaphor introduced in the preceding chapter of literature constituting a living conversation. He puts forward four ways of pursuing literary studies: as dialogue and dissensus, as a different model of education, as a kind of “knowledge-in-action,” and as craft and activity. For Eaglestone, literary study is an ongoing dialogue whose “aim is to help develop a continuing dissensus about the texts we study in order to root, explore and develop our own selves and distinctiveness” (29–30). He cites critics as diverse in outlook as F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Arthur Applebee in support of his claims. He further invokes Brazilian educationalist and activist Paulo Freire’s notions of critical pedagogy in forming the view that literary studies offer a different model of education. Rather than following the “banking” model of accruing knowledge and then dispensing it to students, Freire “insists that teaching must be a dialogue” (32). Eaglestone argues that literary study conforms to the image at the center of Freire’s vision of a different form of education because “in a discussion of literature, each person, teacher or student, brings themselves, their own ideas, creativity and understanding, to the discussion and, through dialogue, they invent new knowledge” (33). As for literary studies as a kind of “knowledge-in-action,” Eaglestone invokes American educational theorist Arthur Applebee’s study, Curriculum as Conversation (1996), further underscoring the importance of metaphor spotting and close reading in carrying out this sort of critical... (shrink)

This new edition of "What is Literature?" also collects three other crucial essays of Sartre's for the first time in a volume of his.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 62-79 [Access article in PDF] Literature Itself:The New Criticism and Aesthetic Experience Daniel Green I AFTER ALMOST TWO DECADES of tumult and transformation in university departments that still claim literature as part of their disciplinary domain, what is most remarkable about literary study at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how similar it is to what passed for such study at the beginning (...) of the twentieth century. Like philology one hundred years ago, academic literary study today—at least at the most eminent universities and in the most prestigious journals—is a highly esoteric activity, unlikely to appeal to anyone outside its own "professional" boundaries, anyone whose foremost interest in works of literature is simply to read them. It is, therefore, an endeavor that could hardly exist outside the university's institutional protection, and it is most strikingly concerned not with the appreciation of the intrinsic qualities of literature but with the historical and cultural "knowledge" that can be acquired from works of literature through a special kind of analysis. The effort, chronicled by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, to make "literature itself" the focus of academic study and to establish "aesthetic criticism" as the primary mode of literary study must surely be judged a failure, the current academic scene clearly dominated by the sort of scholars Graff terms "investigators." 1But of course the motives for rejecting the merely literary as a focus of study are quite different among current scholarly investigators as compared to the philologists of 1901. The attitude of the latter can probably be captured in the words of one of them quoted by Graff: "Why then waste time and brains in thrashing over again something which is after all only subjective opinion? Mere aesthetic theorizing [End Page 62] should be left to the magazine writer or to the really gifted critic" (p. 124). Such "researchers" did not deny the value of reading works of literature; they simply considered this value to be essentially "subjective," not an appropriate object of academic scrutiny. While these remarks do imply some condescension toward the "really gifted critic" and this critic's "mere aesthetic theorizing," they do not repudiate the very idea of an aesthetic approach to literature. The present generation of academics engaged in the investigation of literature, on the other hand, have repudiated the aesthetic approach, either explicitly, through the well-publicized critiques of the canon, of the very notion of the great work, or of the remaining approaches still associated with New Criticism, or implicitly through the gradual establishment of cultural investigation as the new norm for the professional training of graduate students and as the dominant mode of analysis in the influential journals. Moreover, the primary motive behind the renunciation of the aesthetic has more to do with politics than with methodology: for these scholars, the aesthetic is literally useless, quite irrelevant to the paramount goal of "intervening" in a continuing ideological struggle that is thought to be the main business of the university scholar.In the context of the history of modern literary criticism (as opposed to the history of the American university), the current situation mirrors that which prompted the emergence of The New Criticism in the 1930s. Although Vincent Leitch identifies "the evocative mode of Impressionist criticism, the moralism of Neo-Humanism, the anti-modernist cultural criticism of Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks," as well as the "sociologizing" of Marxist criticism" as the collective bêtes noires of the New Critics, it was clearly the latter they considered to be the most unwelcome. Not only had it effectively eclipsed the other practices, but it could be said to have exhibited most of those characteristics against which New Criticism expressed the deepest antipathy. 2 Compared to the close reading New Critics would espouse, Marxist criticism was superficial, willing to settle for the most readily available interpretation (according to the Marxists' own critical assumptions), moralistic, committed to the idea that the best literature was that which could be shown to be good for you, historicist, concerned to place works... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Imagination, and Human RightsWillie van Peer“the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen”Aristotle: Poetics, 1451aAristotle’s dictum has been of vital importance to the development of literary theory, and its significance can still be felt today. It is the foundation of the distinction we make between journalism and literature, between history and fiction. Literature, Aristotle proposes, is (...) about things that could happen, not about things that have taken place in reality. Literature is thus inscribed in the realm of the imagination. However, imagination does not operate in an epistemological vacuum. A fictional text entertaining no relation with the world would have no meaning. Perhaps giants, dragons and witches do not really exist, and perhaps it is not really possible to cover seven miles with each step of those wonderful boots that Tom Thumb discovered. But we have no difficulty in imagining those things, precisely because they entertain an intimate relationship with forms and things, events and actions that happen in daily life. The details of the relationship between reality and fiction are less important for the present argument than the fact that fiction is embedded in our pragmatic attitudes. 1 Ernst Bloch has given this human tendency a name: The Hope Principle. Our desire for a better world expresses itself in hope, a distinctive feature of the species Homo Sapiens. The importance of the imagination in the project of humanity has received eloquent and systematic treatment in the philosophical work of Hans Vaihinger and Helmuth Plessner. 2 Imagination also gives impetus to history, because it drives us toward the realization of aims and plans that initially lived only in our hearts and minds: “Someone dreaming never remains in the same place.” 3 [End Page 276]Similar things have been asserted about literature, by Horace, Sidney, Matthew Arnold, and others. Reading is supposed to make us better humans, heightening our awareness, increasing our sensibility, and thus indirectly guiding our actions toward the establishment of a better world. Sometimes noble motives are associated with this function. Reading literature, it is then assumed, makes the reader more socially tolerant, more perceptive about other humans, and more politically conscious. This is the so-called Edification Hypothesis. Anthony Savile sums up this view when he submits the thesis that literature has a unique power to make us understand the thoughts and feelings of other human beings. This ethical perspective on literature has been expressed since Greek Antiquity. 4 It will be remembered that Plato condemned literature precisely for this reason: because it diverts our attention from the real world, itself already an imperfect reflection of Pure Ideas. Aristotle rejects this view and develops a theory squarely opposed to that of his teacher. According to him, literature contributes to the elevation of mankind, to paideia. By showing us that which is possible, and by involving us in the inescapable passage of tragic events, readers and spectators are drawn into emotions of fear and compassion, emotions that lead to katharsis, a process that purifies us of megalomania (hubris), safeguarding democratic government and protecting us from unrestrained tyranny. 5The Aristotelian view that literature has an edifying effect had been generally present in Western tradition till about 1800. Until then literature was viewed almost universally as an ethical category. Consider, for instance, the self-evident way in which Richardson prefaces Pamela: “If to divert and entertain, and at the same time to instruct and improve the minds of the YOUTH of both sexes: If to inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable: If to set forth in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial, and the social duties....” 6The embarrassment a modern reader may feel when confronted with such overt claims to morality is largely a product of the nineteenth century, when literature came to be seen as a predominantly aesthetic category, eluding all attempts at moral categorization. This movement has resulted in a liberation of literature from moralism. At the same time, it has created nontrivial difficulties in thinking about ethical and political issues, so... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the function of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism within Adorno’s thought. In order to do so, I have chosen to focus on the issue of the social significance of the work of art and the role played by the concept of literary material. Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, can be read as a reinterpretation of the idealist aesthetic model based precisely on a non-idealist notion such as that of aesthetic material.If one is (...) to allow a seemingly brutal simplification, there are two ways to think about the social meaning of literature. One identifies somehow the subject of the text, assesses whether or not this challenges the society from which the literary work stems, and on this ground establishes its social character. According to this perspective, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl can be seen as socially engaged literature, while Proust’s Recherche cannot, or can only to a lesser extent. The other approach argues instead that any literary work, and in any of its instances, says something about the society in which it takes shape. In this contribution I would like to focus on this latter approach. In particular, I am interested in understanding how literature is connected to society, that is, through which identifiable elements literary works express certain aspects of society. The Hegelian idealistic idea according to which Greek tragedy expresses the constitutive features of Athenian society, and which is found again and again in the authors who in various ways have taken up Hegel’s legacy, is generally accepted as such and valued for the explanatory opportunities it offers. It is my opinion, however, that one notion in particular can be retrieved within the whole inherited baggage of that aesthetic tradition, which may be able to further clarify the relationship between literature and society. This concept is that of material and the author who has most thoroughly investigated it is Adorno. In this paper I will try to outline the main features of a counterintuitive notion such as that of “literary material” and thereby explain why it plays such an important role in Adorno’s rework of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism. The concept of material, in fact, is key to the definition of another aesthetic category around which, according to Adorno, most of the problems connected to works of art gravitate, that is to say, the notion of form. From Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, one of his most insightful readers, Peter Szondi, draws the main principle for his study of the historical form of modern drama, namely the idea that form is essentially a precipitation, a sedimentation of contents. The work of art, then, at least according to this definition, is essentially identified by its form. Or, better said, the artwork must be interpreted as the way in which a certain (historical) content sediments in a certain external form. That the form of the work of art is precipitated content means, in simple terms, that no effective disjunction can be assumed between form and content. This is how Adorno reinterprets the concept of “identity of form and content” stressed by classical aesthetics. The content is such only insofar as it is precipitated into a certain form. This amounts to saying that no objective distinction can be established between one and the other. Now, if one were to ask how the form is made, Adorno’s answer is quite straightforward: the form is made by means of organization and, precisely, by means of the organization of the material. As one reads in Aesthetic Theory, in fact, “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials,” and the particular form of an artwork is defined as the “organization” of its “materials” (Adorno 1970, transl. 1997: 201). The concept of material, therefore, is key to the definition of the very notion of work of art in its constituent components, namely the relationship between form and content. In this paper I will first of all clarify the notion of artistic material in general and subsequently I will turn to strictly literary material. Finally, and this is the main goal of this essay, I will show to what extent this definition of the material possibly contributes to a better understanding of a widely and variedly debated literary phenomenon of our time, namely the form of the so-called postmodern novel. (shrink)

Does Augustine put his finger on time? -- Time for history -- Determination -- Self-determination -- Time, knowledge and truth.

Examining the literature of slavery and race before the Civil War, Maurice Lee demonstrates for the first time exactly how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Unable to mediate the slavery controversy as the nation moved toward war, their writings (...) form an uneasy transition between the confident rationalism of the American Enlightenment and the more skeptical thought of the pragmatists. Lee draws on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, bringing a fresh perspective to the literature of slavery - one that synthesizes cultural studies and intellectual history to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis. (shrink)

Moral distress has been well reviewed in the literature with established deleterious side effects for all healthcare professionals, including nurses, physicians, and others. Yet, little is known about the quality and effectiveness of interventions directed to address moral distress. The aim of this integrative review is to analyze published intervention studies to determine their efficacy and applicability across hospital settings. Of the initial 1373 articles discovered in October 2020, 18 were appraised as relevant, with 1 study added by hand search (...) and 2 after a repeated search was completed in January and then in May of 2021, for a total of 22 reviewed articles. This review revealed data mostly from nurses, with some studies making efforts to include other healthcare professions who have experienced moral distress. Education-based interventions showed the most success, though many reported limited power and few revealed statistically lowered moral distress post intervention. This may point to the difficulty in adequately addressing moral distress in real time without adequate support systems. Ultimately, these studies suggest potential frameworks which, when bolstered by organization-wide support, may aid in moral distress interventions making a measurable impact. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Margolis LITERATURE AND SPEECH ACTS The trivial truth that literature employs language has been fastened on regularly and repeatedly to spawn a remarkable variety of misconceptions. Most famously, in the context of aesthetics, it has led to the untenable thesis that all art is language,1 and to the more pointed claim that works of art somehow affirm propositions that may be linguistically rendered and straightforwardly judged true or (...) false. It has also embarrassed a good deal of theorizing about the nature of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic orientation, and has led to preposterous views about the aesthetic status of the literary arts and the exaggerated importance of words in literature. These developments are reasonably well known, partly because they form a venerable portion of the history of aesthetics, partly because the doctrines at stake take so many apparently persuasive guises—even in our own time. There are other views, however, also largely based on the example of literature, that are at once useful because they are corrective of other abuses and are in their turn prone to newer mistakes that bid fair to become fashionable. The ambivalent corrective I have in mind may be marked by the thesis that a work of art is an utterance of some sort. In effect, the thesis stresses the distortion that results from pretending to address art relevantly solely in terms of the palpable properties of some object or product—more or less on the model of examining a perceptually accessible physical object. Attention is required, on the theory, to the act or agency of the artist by which the work is "uttered," in a sense quite close to that in which a forger is said to "utter" a bad check: by this simple strategem, we are led to see that biographical, historical, intentional considerations are instructive about a work of art in an essential way and that the properties of an artwork cannot possibly be restricted to its merely sensory or sensuous features (if indeed, admitting conceptual art, a particular work has any such features at all). The proposal, therefore, is at least a heuristically useful one. Whether it ought also to be enshrined as definitional of 39 40Philosophy and Literature art is another question altogether, qualified partly by its being entirely possible to save the corrections without the thesis, partly by the debatable force of definitions themselves. A rather specialized but utterly misleading and unpromising version of the utterance theory maintains that literature as such, as well as such particularly important distinctions within literature as fiction, poetry, and metaphor, may be perspicuously defined or distinguished in terms of a speech-act model. We must be careful here. The general thesis that the phenomenon of language cannot be adequately analyzed apart from contextual considerations bearing on speakers' intentions, shared assumptions and background beliefs between speakers and hearers, and the actual histories of conversations and the like has now been abundantly confirmed by a variety of theorists—including, prominently, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. P. Grice, John Searle, Keith Donnellan, George Lakoff, and Zeno Vendler. Still, the general concession that familiar syntactic and semantic studies of the phenomenon of language omit an entire dimension of language, as Austin so ably demonstrated, has rather little to say about the distinctions normally debated in the context of literary theory and the appreciation and criticism of literature. (This may well seem paradoxical. The argument has yet to be supplied.) But since the application of the speech-act model to literary analysis shows some tendency to attract advocates, it may be useful to draw explicit attention here to the inherent limitations and difficulties of the enterprise. Obviously, if language must be analyzed at least in part in terms of the context of performing speech acts, it will be impossible to ignore altogether the speech-act dimension of literary utterances. The question remains: what can and what cannot be illuminated by means of the speech-act model? Precisely how restricted a general speech-act model is—that is, one not restricted just to literature—can be seen at a stroke simply by noting that the meanings of sentences (i) cannot be equated with what speakers... (shrink)

Since the 1950s, the cognitive revolution has been transforming work in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. Literary scholars, however, have only recently begun to grapple with the significance of cognitive understandings of language, mind, and behavior for literary and cultural studies. This unique issue of Poetics Today brings the concerns of literary history and cultural studies for the first time into a sustained and productive dialogue with cognitive methods, findings, and paradigms.The introduction situates the collection in relation to previous work, (...) defines the issues, highlights the stakes. Articles by Mark Turner and Paul Hernadi propose a bold extension of notions of literary history to include not only preliterature oral forms but the entire history of the species, viewing literary activity as a crucial human adaptation. Ellen Spolsky's essay provides an unprecedented statement of common ground shared by cognitive-evolutionary approaches and poststructuralist theory. The final three essays examine works by Aphra Behn, A. L. Barbauld, and Jane Austen in terms of their contemporary cultural and political contexts as well as in light of paradigms drawn from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary theory. A commentary by Tony Jackson surveys the entire issue from the viewpoint of an informed outsider. (shrink)

The idealistic current of thought has been flowing since the time of Plato and before; and while it has been diverted from time to time and even partially dammed up, it has persisted and found its way into our own period. Those who decide philosophical questions on the strength of what they take the Zeitgeist to be have been sure for a long time that philosophical idealism in its variegated forms is at best a narrow trickle (...) about to disappear in the mud of scientific naturalism or the fine grained sand of Anglo-American analysis. Some view any idealistic utterance as a mere seepage, an oddity; others, in a self-ascribed posture of contemporary “maturity,” ignore even the presence of the seepage, perhaps fearing that it might be a spring. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s relationship to the literary output of his time and his later influence on it is the theme unifying the two anthologies and the monograph under review. While Nietzsche’s stature among philosophers is now secure and uncontested, his philosophical reception in the early years was delayed and overshadowed by his literary reception: enthusiastically endorsed by writers, he was disparaged as a Dichterphilosoph by academic philosophers. But by aligning Nietzsche with positions in contemporary philosophy, commentators now underappreciate Nietzsche’s literary style (...) and his desire to be seen as one of the great literary stylists and innovators. These studies redress that imbalance. They raise the larger question of what constitutes philosophy and suggest that his philosophizing breaches the divide that some place between the disciplines of philosophy and literature, particularly in an era of great academic specialization. Their goal is to show the importance of literature for Nietzsche, both in his capacity as a reader and as an author, and they approach this question from an interdisciplinary angle, combining aspects of literary science and philosophical history. (shrink)

This essay argues that the ‘thought figure’ of world literature has been under incalculable strain from its inception, given the diversity of linguistic and cultural contexts within which it must be understood. After a brief introductory discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s talk on world literature (1907), the essay goes on to connect world literature debates with those in global modernism, especially modernism in the colony. Looking at the networks of modernism, and the role of little magazines in India, particularly Bengal, in (...) creating a sense of world literature through reviews and translations, it stresses the importance of location, language, and perspective in the wake of decolonization. However, in the present time of ecological and planetary crisis, with a global upsurge of xenophobia, insularity, and ethnic, racist, or communal violence, the notion of a world, or of a world literature, is hard to sustain. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature_ is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory _The Companion_ opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up to the 18 th -20 th (...) centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender. Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject. (shrink)

A woman's right to say no to a proposal of marriage, in defiance of her family and friends, was an essential feature of Victorian middle- and upper-class ideology, as it is represented in novels of the time. This right was based on the assumptions that falling in love is to some degree fortuitous, but that it is a permanent ontological change of selfhood. A good woman is justified in saying no even to an advantageous marriage proposal if she does (...) not love her suitor. Anthony Trollope's novels offer varied dramatizations of these assumptions, while Henry James's novels recount their incipient breakdown. (shrink)

What explanation can be given for the relevance of literature to Bourdieu's theoretical work? In order to explain this choice of object, in the first part of this article I consider the national and international context within which Bourdieu's theory has been built. In the French intellectual space literature was a central theoretical object. In the international context, the attention paid to literature was justified by the importance given to the symbolic phenomena in the main contemporary theoretical traditions. In order (...) to appreciate the singularity and difficulty of Bourdieu's theoretical acquisition, I try to reconstruct the problems that he attempted to resolve, the theoretical possibilities with regard to which his hypotheses were defined, and the position that he held in his field of production at the time in which they were formulated. In Bourdieu's thought, this conjunctural dimension does not imply that a theory is particularized or relativized. So he presented his theoretical frameworks on literature as a model applying to any kind of cultural products. In the second part of my paper I intend to test these claims by examining under what conditions and to what extent his `Principles of a science of works' have been considerd transposable to other national contexts and/or to new objects. (shrink)

This symposium represents the first major foray of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry into what may well become one of its significant strands of scholarship. The JBI has always encouraged critical and marginal areas of bioethics scholarship and particularly those which make use of contemporary continental philosophy and cultural theory in addition to traditional analytic methods. For that reason this symposium is an expression of a “natural fit” or a “match made in heaven” (or at least the Platonic version of (...) that idea). The authors span times and sites in history and culture, from ancient Greece to present day Brisbane. They draw on a variety of literary genres and figures, ranging from Greek tragedy to an epic Chinese novel; from Jane Austen to William Styron, a major American novelist and essayist; from the modern English science fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese expatriate in London, to the 20th-century English poetry of Philip Larkin. The symposium also engages with some recur. (shrink)

This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, (...) the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time. (shrink)

When the world reveals a part of its beauty, what should our reaction be? How can we respond adequately? Is not our initial reaction one of a “discrepancy between our impressions and their habitual expression?” It is this question that Proust poses in one of the crucial passages early on in his masterpiece. Describing his walks along Méséglise's Way, and “the humble discoveries” he made there, the narrator details for us the overwhelming, decisive impression made on him by a shaft (...) of sunlight:After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had struggled cheerfully, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, beside a little hut with a tiled roof in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept his tools, the sun had just reappeared, and its golden rays, washed clean by the shower, glittered anew in the sky, on the trees, on the wall of the hut and the still wet tiles of the roof, on the ridge of which a hen was strutting. The wind tugged at the wild grass growing from cracks in the wall and at the hen's downy feathers, which floated out horizontally to their full extent with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless things. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, translucent again in the sunlight, a dappled pink reflection which I had never observed before. And, seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried out aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!” But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture. (shrink)

[ https://plus.google.com/108060242686103906748/posts/cwvdB6mK3J6 ] The phenomenal description on own thoughts regard me to describe Coleridge, along with William Wordsworth, was instrumental in initiating a poetic revolution in the early nineteenth century which is known as the Romantic Movement. Coleridge invokes the Divine Spirit that blows upon the wild Harp of Time. Time is like the stringed musical instrument on which the Spirit produces sweet harmonious melodies. Coleridge is perhaps best known for his haunting ballad Rime of Ancient Mariner, the (...) dream-like Kubla Khan and the unfinished Christabel, but he wrote several other smaller poems, quite remarkable for their imaginative power. (Edited with own analysis)…[http://philpapers.org/profile/112741] http://www.academia.edu/18834746/LITERATURE_I_DO-_THE_ROMANTICS_AND_SUBJECTIVITY_SAMUEL_TAYLOR_COLER IDGE. (shrink)

When we are most immersed in literary reading, and when that immersion is most significant, we may experience a literary work as constitutive of a ‘world’. With reference to the phenomenological tradition, it can be shown how this world is both a novel creation and serves to disclose, not least by shifting our perspective from, the world of ordinary experience. In this light, it will be shown how the problem of mimesis poses a challenge for recent neuroscientific approaches to literature. (...) At the same time, neuroscientific findings show the insufficiency of phenomenological accounts which fail to acknowledge the physiological and cognitive processes that underlie literary imagining. I introduce the notion of the ‘mimetic dimension’ in order to clarify what accounts based on phenomenology and neuroscience can and cannot explain about literary mimesis and the experience of a literary world. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Possible Selves and Webs of Belief The Textually Cultivated “I”: Making up One's Mind Metaphorical Identification and Self‐Individuation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Is Literature? What Is Art?Integrating Essence and HistoryJerry Farber (bio)I. Aesthetic ExperienceThere remains a widespread belief among literature professors that literature doesn't exist; that is, that it has no stable, transhistorical identity. The very term "literature," we are reminded, shifts its meaning from one century to another. And even if someone should insist that, when they talk about literature, they're not talking about writings in general or a (...) familiarity with books or whatever else the term "literature" may have signified in the past, but only about those texts that one might consider aesthetic, what has this person gained? Not much—since a literature professor who, in recent decades, has turned for answers to the philosophical study of aesthetics will have been likely to confront either a Wittgensteinian dismantling of "art" or, more commonly these days, an institutional theory that defines "art" not on the basis of any properties that it might possess or of any function that it might serve, but solely on the basis of its relation to a cultural institution that, in return, is identified in relation to "art." One might be forgiven for concluding that to follow this quest for essence from "literature" to "aesthetic" or "art" is to go from one sinking ship to another.So literature—as Terry Eagleton, for example, has continued to insist through two editions of his widely read Literary Theory: An Introduction1 —doesn't exist. Which makes it awkward to be a literature professor and helps to explain why so many of us have tried to reinvent ourselves as professors of something else. But this is by no means a mere problem of academic nomenclature, since more than a few of us continue to believe on some level (a level obviously below the graduate level) that there is something there all the same, something that is more stable and less culturally contingent than our theories tell us it is. We just don't know how to legitimize that belief. This dilemma tends to be reflected one way or another in [End Page 1] our teaching. We may repress any essentialist qualms and seek a lofty theoretical consistency as cultural historians for whom aesthetics is merely one more thing to situate—and we pass this disbelief in literature on to our students. Or we may learn to live with cognitive dissonance and pass that on to our students. Literature is hardly alone among the arts in its identity problem, but it does seem to have a more advanced case.Someone came for a job interview on my campus a few years ago, fresh out of a fairly prestigious doctoral program. He made his presentation and then mentioned during the question period afterward that, in his classes, he did make an effort not to ignore a text's aesthetic qualities. He stopped, looked around apprehensively, and said, "I know the term's problematic, of course...""So how do you resolve that?" I asked.He shrugged. "I don't know really."Nonetheless, just as there has been a "return of the aesthetic" in broader terms, books and articles have been appearing from the mid-90s on, arguing for or heralding a reemergence of the aesthetic in literary study.2 Certainly this makes sense, if only as a way of trying to shore up our precarious position in the academy, since, as has been repeatedly observed, literary study, in the absence of any delimiting aesthetic criterion, simply dissolves into other disciplines. And if literature doesn't exist, why spend money on literature professors? Why not hire real historians, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, etc., to do those more respectable and definable things we keep claiming we do? But still, practical motives aside, what is to be the theoretical basis for any return to literary aesthetics? Can this merely be a matter of fashion? Will "the return of the repressed" do as a justification?The time has come, I think, not to revert to a simple, blind faith in "literature" and "art," but to find a way of reconciling our stubborn essentialist belief, on one hand, and our constructionist perspective, on the other—a way of understanding and teaching literature... (shrink)

ArgumentThe purpose of this volume is to investigate a number of selected examples of contact zones between the sciences and literature. We will be dealing with prominent cases of how science and literature encounter and interact with each other and profit by this recourse to their corresponding other, yielding aspects of self-reflection and self-representation. The volume will not attempt to address the question whether the so-called “two cultures” can be brought closer together or superseded by a third. We will be (...) dealing neither with science and literature in an autobiographical or “life-world” sense, nor with popular scientific texts with quasi-literary claims, such as Stephen Hawking's theory of time, nor, in the parallel universe of popular fiction, with science fiction. (shrink)