V Individuum est ineffabile: bearing of this experience on Erasmus' view of history; Christ as the prototype of individuality 79 VI Erasmus' biographical ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 171-173 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding, by David Ellis; ix & 195 pp. New York: Routledge, 2000, $35. In his discussion of biography as a form, Ellis points to his study as a response to the scarcity of "monographs on (...) class='Hi'>biography... and [that] none of them are particularly satisfactory" (p. 2). He further points out that "the comparative dearth of analytic enquiry into biography is surprising" (p. 3). In short, his first pages get off to a rocky start in their tatty justification of a critical study. Though a critic of D. H. Lawrence, Ellis uses the English writer sparingly, pointing out in his "Preface" what he feels is a need "to keep illustration involving Lawrence to a decent minimum" (p. viii) while concentrating on those problems which face the biographer. That said, he sets about to characterize biography as an integration of "a disinterested enthusiasm for information... [fashioning a]... compelling story in which many details with no direct relevance to the life of his subject can be considered as contributing successfully to a period atmosphere" (p. 35). Ellis is thinking specifically of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene through which he has brought to the discussion his intent of pointing to an approach which concerns itself with chapters on "Ancestors," "Primal Scenes," "Body Matters," "the Sociological [End Page 171] Imagination," "History, Chance and Self-determination," "Compatibility, Sartre and Long Biographies." All are aspects of biography.As well as the approach he suggests by these areas of concentration, Ellis draws broadly from many subjects of biography, always keeping a critical eye on its form. Anne Stevenson's approach "is towards psychological determinism" (p. 135); Ackroyd in his biography of Dickens raises "through a degree of intellectual play" the questions of when "lineage" is appropriate, that is, the extent to which it has any productive consequence. He also uses Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf as examples. Writing of the role of the historian raises difficulties for writers creating biographies from such an early period as that of Chaucer; Ellis points to Derek Pearsall's "excellent Life of Geoffrey Chaucer" (p. 121).Ellis neither can nor should ignore Lawrence and what better chapter to include him in than "Body Matters" in its concentration on illness. Here Ellis draws on Lawrence's concern with the harm of his health on his work (p. 78). He also considers Flaubert, Sartre, and Woolf. Briefly he mentions Stendhal's imagination of his "future audience" after his death (p. 109), sensibly rejects the long ago depleted and so, parenthetically, apparently permanent speculation on what Keats's might have become had he lived a full life "in a time of drugs for treatment of tuberculosis" (p. 123) and the equally mined issue of what prompted Hemingway's suicide (pp. 132-33). Certainly he is aware of the danger that such a use of material may pander to the pleasure of mere name-hunters (what if there were no index!). At the same time, if the effect of his range of examples invites additions of our own, while keeping before us that his study is about biography as form, it is successful.In "Primal Scenes," the fourth chapter of his book, Ellis gives what he feels is necessary space to Freud, the creator of the term. He points to Wordsworth's "spots of time" as only one indication of the difficulty--if not impossibility--of capturing biographically those moments in childhood by which the individual written about might be defined (p. 57). (Such an impossibility should not be surprising to those of us readers who recognize the nearly impossible task for ourselves in our own lives.) Surely both the biographer and autobiographer share this ignorance and frustration. In a very interesting move, Ellis points to Compton Mackenzie's discussion of a critical event in his six-year old life surrounding the interruption of an Easter evening with his parents and siblings, interrupted by the arrival of friends. Ellis writes... (shrink)

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how (...) the ancient collective biographical tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates the psychological and intellectual demands writing biography makes on the biographer and explores the complex and frequently conflicted relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and what areas - theory of character, for instance - must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory. Psychoanalytic theory used for biography, she argues, can yield insights for psychoanalysis itself, particularly in the understanding (...) of creativity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been (...) doing the chores for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

Written around the year 100, Plutarch's Lives have shaped perceptions of the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks and Romans for nearly two thousand years. This engaging and stimulating book introduces both general readers and students to Plutarch's own life and work. Robert Lamberton sketches the cultural context in which Plutarch worked--Greece under Roman rule--and discusses his family relationships, background, education, and political career. There are two sides to Plutarch: the most widely read source on Greek and Roman history and the (...) educator whose philosophical and pedagogical concerns are preserved in the vast collection of essays and dialogues known as the Moralia. Lamberton analyzes these neglected writings, arguing that we must look here for Plutarch's deepest commitment as a writer and for the heart of his accomplishment. Lamberton also explores the connection between biography and historiography and shows how Plutarch's parallel biographies served the continuing process of cultural accommodation between Greeks and Romans in the Roman Empire. He concludes by discussing Plutarch's influence and reputation through the ages. (shrink)

The assassinations of the Prophet Muḥammad’s antagonists were, according to the sīra, the harsh measures he took toward the consolidation of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. These incidents’ narratives are often labeled in modern scholarship as “completely free of any tendentiousness.” This contention seems, however, to be grounded in the lack of full cognizance of the sources’ ulterior motives and of the extent of literary devices deployed in the traditional biography of the Prophet. The present study identifies the (...) topoi appearing in the murder accounts of the Prophet’s political opponents that shed light on the extent of these stories’ dependence on each other and on the possibility of literary borrowing between them. This analysis shows that the use of literary tools in the sources are more widespread than what may appear at first sight. Our accounts exhibit striking resemblances with one another in both form and content, a point seriously undermining the trustworthiness of the sīra as a straightforward source for reconstructing the Prophet’s life. (shrink)

Stanley Fish opens the collection with a persuasive argument for the role of intention and biography. Michael McKeon, Gordon Turnbull, and Jerome Christensen are concerned with the late eighteenth--and early nineteenth-century English cultural discourse that gave rise to the nearly simultaneous emergence of literary biography, Romantic sensibility, and reflexive human consciousness. The essays by Alison Booth, Cheryl Walker, and Sharon O'Brien reveal that the recognition or lack thereof the biographical subject has received and remains both a problem (...) and an opportunity for women writers and readers. The essays by Valerie Ross, Rob Wilson, Steven Weiland, and William Epstein pursue the question of difference and cultural reification in the theory and practice of a specifically American biography and biographical criticism. (shrink)

The conventional description of biography as a form of nonfiction narrative begs questions about the stories biographies tell, the facts that constitute their raw material, and the language in which they are cast. These questions are seen as central for students of the arts and humanities and are addressed as three interrelated issues as exemplified in literary biography. First, it is argued that biographies have a cellular structure that derives from the imposition of a master narrative (...) over the subject’s life, one that creates continuity and coherence from the heterogeneous accumulation of mininarratives found in the biographer’s sources. The factual status of these sources is shown to be complex due to the ambiguous nature of the subject’s literary works considered as data; to be unstable due to unavoidable features such as archival gaps, and the selectivity, speculation, and error that are inherent in the biographical process; and to be malleable because of the particular agenda that motivates every biography. Finally, the “literariness” of biographical language is shown to be fundamental in the rhetorical evocation of the subject. Art and artifice combine in a genre that provokes questions about the relationship between the life stories biographers construct and the narratives by which we make sense of life. (shrink)

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to (...) refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger's biting monitor, Hachikō and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy's gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination. (shrink)

“Biography” is a sober, precise and modern word. Like other words formed from a Greek root, it has a competent and knowing air. It makes a good appearance in the summary of reviews, on the platform at conferences, between “biology” and “bibliography,” between “necrology” and “radiography,” in that scientific elite of the lexicon that travels in “business” class from one language to another, always at home in the time belts, hotel lobbies, conference rooms or amphitheaters. Compared with this prosperity, (...) the word “Life” is old-fashioned, a poor relative doomed to retirement homes. In the period between the two wars it disappeared from bookstore windows and book jackets. The hesitations of André Maurois, the author of Aspects de la biographie (1928), are characteristic of a transition: he wavered between La Vie de Disraeli (1927), Ariel ou la vie de Shelley (1923), Prométhée ou la vie de Balzac (1965) and Byron (1930). We sense that the title Vie was on the way out or had to yield to a proper name or an allegorical figure. However, it was a word in good standing, nobly Latin in origin, as great a signore in its class as those Massimi or Colonna who claimed their ancestors were mentioned by Titus Livy. Its genealogy is still more ancient, if we recall that its metonymic and literary meaning in Latin is a translation of the Greek word Bios, which the Hellenes, inventors of the genre and who had a more pedantic use of their language than we do, were content to use up until the end. “Biography,” according to Liddell-Scott, is not found in Antiquity except in a very late neo-Platonian, Damaskios, who put this humorless escogriffe into circulation when twilight was descending on the Roman Empire, between the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., at the dawn of the Middle Ages. It made its entrance into modern languages in the last quarter of the 17th century, when the humanism of the Renaissance was coming to an end, and the Enlightenment was beginning its rise. This late and ill-boding word began a slow ascension, long delayed: it did not come into usage outside the circles of antiquarians until the 19th century. The old word “Life” proudly kept its importance until the ‘20s of our era in the particularly conservative language of titles of works. Its definitive effacement to the profit of “biography” brought that of the word “memoirs” or the word “confessions,” which yielded to “autobiography,” while “hagiography” without being able to impose itself so well in usage, took much gravity and credibility away from the “Lives of the Saints.”. (shrink)

Feminist Auto/biography as a Means of Empowering Women: A Case Study of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Janet Frame's Faces in the Water Feminism, as a political, social and cultural movement, pays much attention to the importance of text. Text is the carrier of important thoughts, truths, ideas. It becomes a means of empowering women, a support in their fight for free expression, equality, intellectual emancipation. By "text" one should understand not only official documents, manifestos or articles. The (...) term also refers to a wide range of literary products—poetry, novels, diaries. The language of literature enables female authors to omit obstacles and constraints imposed by the phallogocentric world, a world dominated by masculine propaganda. Through writing, female authors have an opportunity to liberate their creative potential and regain the territory for unlimited expression. In order to produce a truly powerful text, they resort to a variety of writing styles and techniques. Here the notions of a situated knowledge and context sensitivity prove useful. There are three methodologies working within situated knowledge, namely, the politics of location, self-reflexivity and feminist auto/biography. All of them regard text as a fundamental tool to signify one's authority, yet feminist auto/biography, a concept widely discussed by the British theorist Liz Stanley, appears to be the most empowering mode of writing. It challenges the overused genre of auto/biography and reconstructs its role within feminist epistemologies, thus creating a favourable environment for text production. The works by Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame can be analyzed from the point of view of auto/biographical empowerment, even though their auto/biographical potential is mainly instinctive. Nevertheless, they help to comprehend the strength of the auto/biographical.The aim of this article is to "investigate" two novels by these authors, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame, and their compatibility with Stanley's concept. The paper attempts to answer several questions. Are these novels actual feminist auto/biographies or rather fictional auto/biographies with feminist undertones? What kind of narrative strategy is used to achieve the effect of authority over the text? Last but not least, what is the function of auto/biographical narration in the case of these two novels? The article also explores the idea of writing as a means of regaining control over one's life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 387 and contributed an important and helpful study. This dissertation is a model of its kind. One hopes the author will continue his scholarly efforts. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM E. MAY John Henry Newman: A Biography. By IAN KER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 764. $24.95 (paper). The Achievement of John Henry Newman. By IAN KER. Notre Dame: (...) University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Pp. x + 209. $24.95 (cloth). Ian Ker has inherited the mantle of the late Charles Stephen Dessain as the finest textual expositor of the Newman corpus, and Ker's biography should become a standard reference tool in the field. Ker ap· prenticed under Dessain in the production of the monumental (31volume ) Letters and Diaries, and his biography shows his command of the materials of that as yet unfinished project. Ker's hook joins the biographies of W. Ward (1912) and M. Trevor (1962) as significant "lives of Newman" to consider, and it addresses their earlier shortcomings : Ward's inadequate appraisal of the Anglican Newman and Trevor's unconcern for Newman's theological writings. Of Newman's intellectual contribution, Ker's treatment is similar to Dessain's John Henry Newman, an exposition of the major themes and intellectual moves, and theologically-minded inquirers need read both. Ker offers the hook as a personal life, a literary appraisal, and an intellectual study. The personal life and literary analysis are ably carried off; Ker's background in English literature and his editorial work on the letters have served him well. The intellectual study takes the form of synopses of Newman's hooks and articles, which are woven into the chronological narrative of the life. This aspect of Ker's hook is by no means "the theological achievement of JHN" (cf. Tracy's work on Lonergan); such a project still awaits Newman studies and someone of the conceptual breadth of the late Jan Walgrave to achieve it. Ker provides accurate and readable summaries of Newman's writings, and if a biography is meant to introduce the sundry aspects of a person, especially a complex thinker like Newman, then Ker's treatment of the intellectual aspect offers a fine introduction. I shall consider these three dimensions of the biography, and first the personal life. Newman considered that a person's life is best told 888 BOOK REVIEWS through that person's correspondence. Ker's biography is approached chronologically, and Newman's published letters guide the tale. Newman 's advice is particularly apropos for his own biographer, since Newman 's hooks and articles often displayed a "reserve" in which his true feelings were couched and nuanced. His letters, especially to confidants, were candid and often hard-hitting, as when he described the Curia in these words: " And who is Propaganda? one sharp man of business, who works day and night, and dispatches his work quick off, to the East and West, a high dignitary, [perhaps an Archbishop], hut after all little more than a clerk... with two or.three clerks under him " (p. 519). (Ker displays some reserve himself, omitting Newman's episcopal aside.) Ker's use of the letters is most revealing during Newman's Roman Catholic period when he encountered opposition from Archbishop Manning and W. G. Ward in England, from Archbishop Cullen in Dublin, and from Cardinal Barnaho in Rome. One senses how the laity rallied round him. Some of Newman's most pungent thoughts on ·theological freedom, on the suspicious nature of the clergy toward educated laity, on the wherewithal to make an institution a genuine university, on the role of patience and.trust in God when authorities are hearing down, are to he found in Ker's choice of letters. With so much material to mine-Newman wrote 20,000 letters-it is understandable that Ker does not include, save rarely, what Newman's opponents were thinking. Ker's account of Newman's Anglican period is equally illuminating, and indeed it is a highlight of the biography. While the Apologia has provided the main lines of the story, Ker puts flesh and hones to Newman 's struggle with his conscience. In coming to Oxford, Newman... (shrink)

Trailblazing marine biologist, visionary conservationist, deep ecology philosopher, Edward F. Ricketts has reached legendary status in the California mythos. A true polymath and a thinker ahead of his time, Ricketts was a scientist who worked in passionate collaboration with many of his friends—artists, writers, and influential intellectual figures—including, perhaps most famously, John Steinbeck, who once said that Ricketts's mind “had no horizons.” This unprecedented collection, featuring previously unpublished pieces as well as others available for the first time in their original (...) form, reflects the wide scope of Ricketts’s scientific, philosophical, and literary interests during the years he lived and worked on Cannery Row in Monterey, California. These writings, which together illuminate the evolution of Ricketts’s unique, holistic approach to science, include “Verbatim transcription of notes on the Gulf of California trip,” the basic manuscript for Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s _Log from the Sea of Cortez;_ the essays “The Philosophy of Breaking Through” and “A Spiritual Morphology of Poetry;” several shorter pieces on topics including collecting invertebrates and the impact of modernization on Mexican village life; and more. An engaging critical biography and a number of rare photographs offer a new and richly detailed view of Ricketts’s life. (shrink)

L'approche biographique s'adresse à l'histoire de la vie de l'individu singulier, rencontrée dans sa texture complexe, en ce qu'elle trame toujours en elle, et la psyché, et l'individu social, et le sujet.

The Oscar Wilde trials (1895) have usually been interpreted either as a historical document which gives insight into the regulation of sexuality in the late nineteenth century, or as literary biography explicating the playwright's life and works. Taking its cue from recent scholarship in ‘law and literature’, and also from Wilde's own conception of the relationship between art and life, this article proposes a reading of the trials which blurs the distinction between legal history and literary criticism (...) by considering them as a form of literature. It argues that the trial transcripts enact and reflect Wilde's vision of what literature is and how it should be read, and as such should be given a place amongst his literary works, alongside such aesthetic manifestos as ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Critic as Artist’. (shrink)

Written by one of the world's preeminent authorities on Kierkegard, this biography is the first to reveal the delicate imbrication of Kierkegard's life and thought. To grasp the importance and influence of Kierkegaard's thought far beyond his native Denmark, it is necessary to trace the many factors that led this gifted but (according to his headmaster) 'exceedingly childish youth' to grapple with traditional philosophical problems and religious themes in a way that later generations would recognize as amounting to a (...) philosophical revolution. Although Kierkegaard's works are widely tapped and cited they are seldom placed in context. Nor is due attention placed to their chronology. However, perhaps more than the work of any other contributor to the Western philosophical tradition, these writings are so closely meshed with the background and details of the author's life that knowledge of this is indispensible to their content. Alastair Hannay solves these problems by following the chronological sequence of events and focusing on the formative stages of his career from the success of his first, pseudonymous work ^Either/Or through to The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. This book offers a powerful narrative account which will be of particular interest to philosophers, literary theorists, intellectual historians, and scholars of religious studies as well as any non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to the life and work of one of the most original and fascinating figures in Western philosophy. Alastair Hannay is Professor Emeritus in the department of philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion of Kierkegaard (1998) and is also translator of several works by Kierkegaard in Penguin Classics. (shrink)

Professor Kahn says that Plato and the Socratic Dialogue “presents a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato’s early and middle dialogues as a unified literary project, displaying an artistic plan for the expression of a unified world view”. To this end, Kahn argues that “[w]hat we can trace in these dialogues is not the development of Plato’s thought,” as Aristotle and others seem to have thought, “but the gradual unfolding of a literary plan for presenting his philosophical (...) views to the general public”. This “unfolding” begins shortly after the Gorgias. Kahn argues that Plato then “created an essentially new form, the aporetic dialogue with a pseudo-historical setting” in order to bridge the psychological distance between the ordinary conception of the world and the radically new world view he would present in the middle dialogues. Kahn calls his interpretation “the hypothesis of ingressive exposition” and says that this hypothesis is “the claim that the seven threshold dialogues [Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis, and Euthydemus] are designed to prepare the reader for the views expounded in the Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, and that they can be adequately understood only from the perspective of these middle dialogues”. (shrink)

Grotesque imagery is widely used by all genres and movements of art and literature without exception, but its historical development and theoretical aspects have not been sufficiently studied. This study seeks to define and diagnose the main aspects of the development of the grotesque as a literary problem. The leading methods of researching this problem are methods of analysis, deduction, induction, and comparison of approaches. The research covers the approaches to the study of the grotesque phenomenon; the interpretation of (...) this trope is provided, its origin is described, in whose works it is widely used; the forms of grotesque and its specific features are described; various theoretical concepts of the question are demonstrated; the codes of grotesque poetics and their levels of display in the artistic system of works are identified; the qualities and features of Poe’s literary activity are diagnosed, and the components of the grotesque aesthetics are defined. The material in this study is of practical and theoretical value to students and literary scholars who study literature and its artistic features. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary FormDavid SiderCharles H. Kahn. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi 1 431 pp. Cloth, $64.95.An enduring question in Plato studies is whether—and if so how—Plato developed as a thinker. A simple positive answer, as argued by Taylor and Burnet, has Plato starting (...) out his philosophical life as an associate of Socrates who adopted and portrayed his teacher’s ideas in the early dialogues (some few of them, in this reviewer’s opinion, perhaps antedating Socrates’ death). Then, upon further and continual reflection, of a Socratic sort no doubt, Plato slowly or quickly (some would mark the spot at Symposium 210a) began to espouse views never held by his rabbi. Or—as, e.g., Shorey and Cherniss would hold—Plato knew his own mind, if not at the very first then at least in his earliest published writings, holding to these same beliefs throughout his life.Neither position is intrinsically impossible or even unlikely. But faced with the various literary devices and philosophical ploys with which Plato shapes his dialogues, it is not surprising that developmentalists predominate over unitarians in Plato studies, each side generally content to leave the other alone in its ignorance. Now comes Charles Kahn to show how both sides may be right: while Plato the thinker behind the dialogues had firm views from which he rarely deviated throughout his life, he planned years in advance how these ideas would best be presented to the public, and in what order. It is, then, [End Page 624] only the dialogues that develop, according to a prearranged scheme that constitutes, as the subtitle has it, Plato’s “philosophical use of a literary form.” (Kahn’s review of the history of the dialogue form in chapter 1 is excellent, with especially valuable remarks on Antisthenes, but is not strictly necessary for his thesis.) This intriguing idea is worthy of Kahn, whose writings on pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and beyond always command immediate attention and frequently become standard entries in later bibliographies. It is particularly noteworthy that in an earlier attempt at a different sort of reconciliation, Kahn—when all the rest of us believed that Empedocles wrote two major works, one “scientific” and the other “religious”—showed how these apparently different works in fact complemented each other. Now, after Osborne’s argument that Empedocles wrote but one poem has been proved correct by the Strasbourg papyrus, Kahn’s paper holds up remarkably well. Kahn’s own bibliography in the present volume also contains articles written as far back as 1983 (“Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s Gorgias,” OSAP 1:75–121) that not only maintain and develop the idea he is considering but also illustrate how a thinker can space out his already fully formed thesis in well-articulated units—just as Kahn argues Plato did over a large portion of his own oeuvre, specifically the eighteen dialogues from Apology to Phaedrus.It is not that there is no Socratic period, rather that it would now be limited only to the four dialogues Apology, Crito, Ion, and Hippias Minor (93). Hard-core developmentalists and unitarians will want to see whether Kahn can convince them to alter long-held views about so important an aspect of Plato’s dialogues and thought. To convince them, however, Kahn, like the developmentalists, should ideally present a case for the chronological order of composition and publication that depends solely upon external criteria, so as not to beg the question of how, in his own view, the dialogues were made to develop. (The unitarian view would remain theoretically unaltered were it to be proved that, say, Parmenides was written before Laches.) It must be said, however, that on this most essential point, Kahn has not altogether managed to avoid circularity. In part, this is because external evidence tells us very little about Plato’s intellectual development: the Seventh Letter is fascinating but short on details, and Aristotle’s account “is not historically reliable” (41 n. 10, developed further in chapter 3, where, amazingly, an account explicitly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Biography in Antiquity by Tomas HäggDan CurleyTomas Hägg. The Art of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xv + 496 pp. Cloth, $110.We know less about the genre of ancient biography than handbooks and brief surveys would have us believe. Genres by their nature invite definition, and historiographical perspectives on this genre in particular promote tidy classifications and clear lines (...) of influence. Tomas Hägg’s Art of Biography in Antiquity, which undertakes close readings of some eight-hundred years’ worth of biographical authors and texts, not only recognizes but also embraces ancient life-writing as a vast, polymorphous, versatile, and lacunary enterprise. For those of us who, like this reviewer, prefer to read the works of ancient biographers in literary terms, this is the book we have been wanting.Hägg’s “Prolegomena” are brief but cover the critical issues surrounding ancient biography (and, by way of comparison or contrast, modern biography). Chief among these are the question of the biographical genre itself, which Hägg acknowledges “is more subject matter than form” (3), and the welcome recuperation of biography as the product of “creative imagination” from its traditional status as a “sub-branch of historiography” (3). Hägg distinguishes historiography from historicity—namely, the biographer’s evaluation of, and approaches to, his sources—and he enumerates what might be considered biographical biases, from [End Page 713] the emphasis on public rather than private life, to transference between author and subject, to the inventive bridging of gaps, to the tension between cradle-to-grave chronology and characterization in the moment. Brevity courts controversy, and Hägg cautions that “no systematic treatment of biographic theory and practice is intended” (1). Yet his prolegomena lay out clear guideposts for the case studies of later chapters, which make a more or less chronological exploration of the genre.Chapter 1, even as it postulates Xenophon as the most important (or, at least, the most prolific) proto-biographer, discusses a range of fifth-and fourth-century b.c.e. texts and the ways in which they are—and, just as often, are not— biographies: Ion of Chios, Epidemiai; Plato, Apology and Phaedo; Xenophon, Memorabilia; Isocrates, Evagoras; Xenophon, again, Agesilaus and Cyropaedia. It is no small task to trace the development of a genre given a vexed chronology, the differing purposes of these texts, and uncertainty as to how much influence their authors exerted upon one another. The Epidemiai offers a sympotic anecdote about Sophocles (preserved in Ath. 13.603e–4d) that illuminates the tragedian’s character. The Apology and the Phaedo together display and interpret the life of Socrates as “an ethical unity” (19), the former a retrospective defense of the philosopher’s career, the latter ending with a scenic description of his death. The Memorabilia, in turn, paints a “consistent, pregnant picture” (27) of Socrates’ persona with its serial anecdotes. The Evagoras confirms its own status as written encomium (graphein) and introduces what would become standard topoi, such as its subject’s genealogy, childhood, and methods of ruling. Likewise, the Agesilaus, which emphasizes writing to an even greater degree and dichotomizes the Spartan king’s deeds and their underlying virtues. The Cyropaedia, therefore, is a pinnacle of proto-biography, extending from Cyrus’ childhood to his fictional, idealized death. Although Hägg reads each work on its own terms, and avoids an overly simplistic taxonomy, his emphasis on the unbiographical qualities of his case studies is at times counterproductive. Furthermore, he tends to conclude his discussions with considerations of “the biographical,” as if the preceding analyses—frequently engaged with the aforementioned topoi—have had little bearing. This said, chapter 1 describes a genre developing along lines that later biographers, and their readers, would have recognized.Chapter 2, a survey of Hellenistic biographers, is on firmer (albeit more fragmentary) ground, perhaps because the texts of this era regularly have bios in their titles and therefore help to establish “an unmistakably biographical form” (67). Hägg considers examples from the three traditional sub-categories of Hellenistic “professional biography” (97), namely, the philosophic, the literary, and the political: Aristoxenus’ Pythagoras and Socrates; Satyrus’ Life of Euripides... (shrink)

This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues. Rejecting the usual assumption of a distinct 'Socratic' period in the development of Plato's thought, this view regards the earlier works as deliberate preparation for the exposition of Plato's mature philosophy. Differences between the dialogues do not represent different stages in Plato's own thinking but rather different aspects and moments in the presentation of a new and unfamiliar view of reality. Once the fictional character of (...) the Socratic genre is recognised, there is no reason to regard Plato's early dialogues as representing the philosophy of the historical Socrates. The result is a unified interpretation of all of the dialogues down to the Republic and the Phaedrus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 127-128 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant: A Biography Manfred Kuehn. Kant: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxii + 544. Cloth, $34.95. Kuehn's biography of Kant is an extraordinary scholarly and literary accomplishment. In nine masterful chapters (along with a prologue), Kuehn draws on an incredibly comprehensive and varied repository of historical (...) evidence in painting a detailed, yet also widely accessible picture of the successive stages of Kant's life and of how his major and minor writings emerge from them, a picture that is both more accurate and more informative than what could ever be pieced together from existing biographies, even those written in German or at a time much closer to Kant's own.What is distinctive about Kuehn's methodology--and part, but only part, of what makes his work superior to other Kant biographies--is the way in which he focuses on Kant's intellectual context. For Kuehn, to understand Kant requires understanding him not just in the global context of modern European philosophy or even German philosophy, but also in his local context of Prussia and Königsberg. Accordingly, in the first chapter Kuehn does not merely list the biographical details of Kant's family and the name of the school he attended, but rather explains what it would have meant for Kant's father to be a member of a guild in eighteenth-century Prussia, what values that guild incorporated, what consequences his parents' Pietism would have for him, and what the intellectual and social life of the Collegium Fridericianum was like. Kuehn's proper emphasis on figures and events in Königsberg runs throughout the book. Thus in the second chapter, Kuehn describes the various faculty members Kant would have encountered as a student, what philosophical [End Page 127] views they held, how Kant's own activities as a student deviated from those of the "typical" student, what religious movements became influential at what time in the university, and what political consequences they would have had on a student's intellectual life. In the third chapter (devoted to 1755-64), Kuehn reveals how Kant, forming a wide circle of friends that would include Hamann, Herder, Hippel, and the family of Count Keyserlingk, "became a person of elegance during this period, someone who shone at social events with his intelligence and wit" (115). In chapter 4 (1764-69), Kuehn describes how Kant developed a close friendship with Green that would radically change his life. In fact, Kuehn claims that it was at the age of forty and due to the influence of Green that Kant underwent a conversion or rebirth by coming to understand the centrality of character and the role that maxims play in it. Moreover, in describing the radical changes of position initiated in his inaugural dissertation and completed in the three Critiques, Kuehn connects biography and philosophy by positing that Kant saw these works as providing "his newfound character with a philosophical justification and defense" (187).While one might think that chapter 5, which covers the 1770s, would have to be very short, given Kant's sparse publications during this period, Kuehn describes at length the rich set of interactions that Kant had with Mendelssohn, Herz, Lambert, Kraus, Herder, and Hamann, exchanges that would be crucial in the final articulation of his mature view. Kuehn devotes chapters 6 and 7 to the period during which Kant published his mature theoretical and practical works, most notably the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and it is here that Kuehn's contextualism has perhaps its greatest philosophical payoff. For the close attention Kuehn has paid to Kant's interactions with his immediate contemporaries reveals that he did not understand Hume's position as we might today, namely as advocating global skepticism about knowledge of the external world. Rather, Kant saw Hume's skepticism as being local and methodological in combating rationalism and dogmatism. As a result, Kant saw Hume mainly as an ally, not an adversary. Kuehn... (shrink)

This is a new edition of "A Problem in Greek Ethics," originally published in London in 1901 for "private circulation." Part of the project Immortal Literature Series of classic literature, this is a new edition of the classic work published in 1901-not a facsimile reprint. Obvious typographical errors have been carefully corrected and the entire text has been reset and redesigned by Pen House Editions to enhance readability, while respecting the original edition."A Problem in Greek Ethics" is an account of (...) sexuality between men in all its forms, with Greek culture as a backdrop. Perhaps the best description of "A Problem in Greek Ethics" is this one in "Queer Religion" (Praeger, 2012, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson, pp. 180-181): "Published at the turn of the century, 'A Problem in Greek Ethics' is a systematic and well-documented exposition of the role of homosexuality in the different historical periods of ancient Greek society. Throughout most of his work, Symonds prefers to use the term 'paiderastia' to 'homosexuality,' the latter a term he only uses in rare instances. Nevertheless, 'paiderastia,' in Symonds's work, amounts to a broad concept of homosexuality rather than to our current concept of pederasty. Whitman and his work are never mentioned by Symonds in 'A Problem in Greek Ethics,' but the conceptual connection had already been made explicit in Walt Whitman: 'A Study' eight years earlier. In the introductory lines to 'A Problem in Greek Ethics,' the reader is alerted that ancient Greece offers a unique example in history of 'a great and highly developed race not only tolerating homosexual passions, but deeming them of spiritual value, and attempting to use them for the benefit of society.' According to Symonds, while homosexual relations were not prominent in the so-called heroic age of Greece, it was nevertheless the love of Achilles for Patroclus, as narrated by Homer, that conferred in a later age of Greek history an almost religious sanction to the martial form of paiderastia. This episode in the Iliad inspired in later generations an ideal of manly love, which he describes as 'a powerful and masculine emotion, in which effeminacy had no part, and which by no means excluded the ordinary sexual feelings.' To which he adds that the tie created by these relationships was 'both more spiritual and more energetic [than] that which bound man to woman.' While Homer knew not about homosexuality, very early in Greek history paiderastia became a national institution giving rise, according to Symonds, to a distinction between a noble, spiritual, form of masculine passion, which he calls "heroic love," and a base and sensual one, which he identifies as 'vulgar love.'"About the Author: John Addington Symonds was born in Bristol, England, in 1840. He was an English poet, an author of several works, and a literary critic. In 1873 he wrote "A Problem in Greek Ethics," which discussed homosexuality between men. He printed ten copies in 1883, before effectively publishing the book in 1901. He was also known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as for his translations and biographies. He wrote "Our Life in the Swiss Highlands" (1891), biographies of Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Jonson (1886) and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and essays, and a translation of the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini" (1887). John Addington Symonds died in Rome in 1893. In 1896, Havelock Ellis published, in German, prepared with the collaboration of Dr. Hans Kurella, "Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl" (Leipzig, by Georg H. Wigand's Verlag), later revised and published by Ellis as "Sexual Inversion"-the first medical text in English about homosexuality, which he had co-authored with Symonds, and which would become a part of Ellis's six-volume "Studies in the Psychology of Sex.". (shrink)

It is not possible to face a text and announce "I shall now talk about character" in the same way that one might say "I shall now talk about plot" or "metaphor." For several reasons—not least of which is the absence of a thoughtful critical tradition—character is much more difficult to talk about than most other literary concepts. Most of what has been written on the subject of character, whether in recent years or in the distant past, can be (...) seen to come under one of four possible headings. I do not think of these classifications as being mutually exclusive, although the emphasis upon one aspect of the problem of character probably tends to pull one towards a definite position. Briefly, these positions are: that characters are products of the author's mind—memories, encapsulations of his experience or else split-off slivers of his mind or self; that characters are functions of the text in which they appear—embodiments of theme and idea—to be considered much as tokens, pieces, or counters in a game; that characters are entirely artificial, constructs to be analyzed in terms of the compositional techniques that have gone into their making; that characters are, for the purposes of critical reading, to be considered as if they were actual persons, and the emphasis in criticism—its sole business, in fact—to discuss the response they engender in an intelligent reader. Rawdon Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of Alberta, has written widely on English and Spanish literature. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "On Character: A Reply to Martin Price," appeared in the Autumn 1975 issue. The present essay was originally presented in an earlier form at the University of Melbourne and at the University of Alberta. (shrink)

One and a half months after Victor Hugo died in 1885, Beşir Fuad published a biography of him, in which Fuad defended Emile Zola’s naturalism and realism against Hugo’s romanticism. This resulted in the most important dispute in nineteenth-century Turkish literary history, the hakikiyyûn and hayâliyyûn debate, with the former represented by Beşir Fuad and the latter represented by Menemenlizâde Mehmet Tahir. This article focuses on the form of this debate rather than its content, and this focus (...) reveals how the tension between classical and post-classical Islamic intellectual history had become deeply embedded in Ottoman Turkish literary history by the late 1800s. This particular event demonstrates two points: that dialectical disputation was viewed negatively as a return to the seemingly primitive practices of an antiquated mentality, as opposed to the relatively enlightened apodictic argumentation ; and that trajectories of Ottoman Turkish literary history can be understood within the context of general Islamic intellectual history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Last Man by Mary ShelleyJennifer A. Wagner-LawlorMary Shelley. The Last Man. 1826. Edited by Chris Washington. Norton Critical Editions. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023. xxiv + 571 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9780393887822.New critical editions of well-known literary works serve several important functions, and those designed specifically for students serve two of the most important: to introduce readers to texts that were overlooked during and since the (...) author’s time, but that might find greater favor today; and to re-introduce to a new generation of students classic texts that have lost critical favor or been neglected. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) is a novel long overshadowed by brilliance and resilient legacy of her first novel, Frankenstein (1818), written at a mere eighteen years of age. As so often happened to nineteenth-century women who published under their own names, both Frankenstein and The Last Man were hammered critically by male reviewers (and often by the few female ones) unable to believe any woman, and certainly no “good” woman, could compose these stories. And by 1826, Mary Shelley had already gained notoriety thanks to her association with the radical politics and “free-loving” Shelley-Byron circle). No wonder then that contemporaneous reviewers—even as they brought themselves to compliment the narratological and formal accomplishment the novel represents—could not countenance either its content or its author, as the novel “violated” certain forms of literary and gender propriety: indeed, the novel was deemed the product of a “diseased imagination” (The Monthly Review).Modern assessments of the novel are far more admiring of Shelley’s sophisticated examination of national and cultural mythic structuralizations, and receptive to the boldness of Shelley’s profoundly ironical assessments of them. In this new Norton Critical Edition of The Last Man, Chris Washington comes to the text with a refreshingly undeferential approach to Shelley’s Romantic forebears and immediate companions. Not because they [End Page 582] deserve being knocked off their pedestals, but because—granting all that—Shelley’s text has a lot more to give to us. This is the first time the Norton Critical Edition series has produced an annotated critical edition of The Last Man (Broadview’s appeared in 1996), and it is therefore both welcome and well overdue. For this reader, The Last Man is in some ways arguably superior to Frankenstein, certainly better written and developed. Frankenstein packs the greater punch, but The Last Man picks up and reweaves, on a much larger loom, the same thematic threads: justice and judgment; hospitality and generosity; family love and ethical obligation to community and nation; “civilized” and “wild” spaces. These themes are figured not only in terms of landscape but also in terms of geopolitical organization (i.e., the West vs. “the East,” presumed source of the virus); the bounded- vs. unbound-ness of the creative imagination (also tied to cultural notions of civilization and wilderness); solitude and loneliness; alienness and otherness; alienation and self-alienation and/as dehumanization; the human and the posthuman. While part of Frankenstein’s greatness is its narrative concision and stylistic spareness, the greatness of The Last Man, written by the more mature writer, intellectually and technically (and without the interference of Percy Shelley), is how fully Shelley “fleshes out” those entanglements in this later novel.Setting aside therefore the inclusion of “the usual suspects” (xx) of earlier editions, Washington gives space to critical approaches that are not focused so intensely on the influences of Shelley’s biography. In an excellent introduction Washington emphasizes the various ways in which this novel opens up to (still) intractable political and human rights issues: slavery, imperialism, nonheteronormative genders and sexualities, and precarious lives.Washington addresses particularly what Shelley’s text has to offer—and does offer—to today’s students. He shares his own experience of teaching this novel during COVID times, finding the students, used to speed of communication and multimedia delivery, resistant initially to the narrative’s pacing, and reintroducing them to the pleasures of the slow build-up of plot and setting, as well as the excruciating tension of watching a slow-burn approach to seemingly unavoidable catastrophe. But Washington rejects... (shrink)

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The volume (...) includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truthful Fiction: New Questions to Old Answers on Philostratus’ Life of ApolloniusJames A. FrancisWithin the past twenty years four extensive works have appeared treating Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (VA) from various literary, historical, and cultural perspectives. These include E. L. Bowie’s “Apollonius of Tyana: Tradition and Reality,” Maria Dzielska’s Apollo-nius of Tyana in Legend and History, Graham Anderson’s Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the (...) Third Century A.D., and my own lengthy chapter in Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second–Century Pagan World.1 The popularity of what has often been considered an “offbeat” text is striking—and largely explicable given concurrent interest in such subjects as the Second Sophistic, the novel, holy men, and asceticism. At this juncture it is thus appropriate to ask: how far have these studies advanced our appreciation and understanding of this text? In answer to this question, I propose first to critique the assumptions and methods of this body of work on VA and, second, to suggest that new insights into the nature of ancient fiction would provide both a resolution to old scholarly impasses and a more fruitful agenda for research.Little is known about the historical Apollonius. He must have been born early in the first century c.e. in Tyana in Cappadocia and died sometime during or after the reign of Nerva (96–98). So little remains of sources prior to VA that the most that can be said further both with certainty and without fear of “contamination” from posthumous representations is that Apollonius appears to have been a wandering ascetic/philosopher/wonderworker of a type common to the eastern part of the early empire.2 Philostratus’ work, which appeared a century after [End Page 419] the death of its hero, is usually thought to have been published sometime after the death of the empress Julia Domna in 217.3 For a biography VA is extraordinarily long, eight books requiring two Loeb volumes. The work begins with a description of the birth of a “greater than Pythagoras” (1.2) and one who would “approach the gods” (1.5), then follows Apollonius’ prodigious youth through his devotion to piety and learning, especially in regard to the god Asclepius. With his early training perfected, Apollonius sets out to discover the source of piety and wisdom among the Brahmans of India, which allows Philostratus to provide his reader with two and one–half books full of travel, adventure, and esoteric philosophy.4 It is at the very beginning of this journey, while in Nineveh (1.19), that Apollonius first meets his lifelong companion and disciple Damis. Philostratus asserts that Damis kept a record of Apollonius’ ideas, discourses, and prophecies and that a descendant of Damis’ family presented these to Julia Domna (1.3). The empress, in turn, gave these “tablets” (deltoi) to Philostratus with the command that he recast them in more appropriate literary style.5 It is these memoirs which, according to Philostratus, form the authoritative basis of his own work.Upon his return from India, Apollonius is acclaimed by the Greek cultural world and becomes actively involved in the affairs of the cities of Asia Minor and Greece (4.2–33), even journeying to Rome to confront Nero (4.35–47), in an episode which presages Apollonius’ climactic [End Page 420] confrontation with Domitian. He journeys throughout the Mediterranean world, discoursing on true philosophy and religion, preaching Greek cultural ideals, prophesying, and performing the occasional miracle. He visits the gymnosophists of Egypt, and reaches the height of his reputation when Vespasian summons him to Alexandria to solicit his advice and blessing upon accession to imperial dignity (5.27–41). In the final two books, Apollonius is arrested and imprisoned by the unworthy son of Vespasian. Brought before Domitian, he refutes the accusations made against him and, as proof of both his innocence and his superior philosophical nature, simply vanishes from sight and materializes at the coast, where the faithful Damis has booked passage back to Greece. The episode allows Philostratus to deliver a reprise of the entire work and a virtual apologia in the form of a formal defense speech... (shrink)

The love for Prophet Muhammad is one of the most frequently mentioned themes in both oral and written cultures. The love for Prophet Mohammad which is narrated in the scientific works related to the Prophet in Turkish literature also could be seen poetic and prose works by artists. Some of works include biographies (siyer) in which the Prophet’s biographies are mentioned eulogies (mevlit), miraç-name, which tells miraç event, (hilye) which describes the Prophet's physical and other attributes, and (naat) in which (...) the Prophet is praised. Through these works, the love for Prophet Muhammad who is the reason why the world is created is beautifully depicted and aimed to pass it on to future generations. This love, enduring for centuries in Islamic societies, has led to the Prophet to be as an mediator in the prayers by the humble servant to Allah. Because, in Islam, the belief that prayers addressed to Allah through the mediator of Prophet Muhammad, whom Allah has called "My Beloved" will be accepted is prevalent. This profound love for Prophet Muhammad, graved in the hearts, is considered a duty by individuals of all ages and all sections in Turkish society. The earliest examples of this emotion, expressed by poets who interpret the feelings of the people, can be found in Yûsuf Hâs Hâcib's Kutadgu Bilig. Later poets like Mevlânâ, Yunus Emre, Şeyyâd Hamza, and others continued to compose such poems. Furthermore the work known as Vesiletü’n-necât written by Süleyman Çelebî and read since the fifteenth century, commonly referred to as mevlit and seen as a top one for the love of Prophet among the public, is one of the most significant works addressing this theme. Poets such as Ahmed Paşa, Fuzûlî, Nâbî, and Şeyh Gâlib in Turkish literature have also portrayed the love for Prophet Muhammad in their works in the best style. Some of these poets, expressing their love for the Prophet from different perspectives, have been individuals who could not visit the sacred places due to financial difficulties. The desperate and intense longing for Prophet has been conveyed to writing yearning for the Prophet. The example of an arzuhâl discussed in this study illustrates this aspect of the abovementioned. Arzuhâls, written in the form of petitions describing a need or request in the sources, are texts. However, if it is taken into account spiritually, they are the texts where various wishes and prayers are asked by Allah and sometimes the prophets are used as messenger. These writings include both worldly and spiritual desires. Following to these prayer texts, they are sent to sacred partsthose going to Hajj and Umrah. These prayers sometimes are written by an expert or the needy ones sincerely. They are left at sacred places like the Kaaba, the station of Prophet Ibrahim or the burial place of Prophet Muhammad, with the belief that they will be accepted. It is still known that in some regions of Anatolia, many traditions have persisted from the past to the present day. One such region where the tradition of writing arzuhâls is still alive is the town of Palu in Elazığ. The poem presented in this study, a poetic example of arzuhâl, was written by Molla Muhammed Ali, a poet, scholar, and calligrapher living in the Beyhan town of Palu. This poem portrays the imploring and entratings of an desperate individual who wishes to visit the Prophet's grave with in the profound love for Prophet Muhammad. The poem is written in an eight-syllable meter and consists of 20 quatrains. Throughout the poem, the desire to see the Prophet's grave has been narrated and the despair over not reaching to sacred places has been discussed. Therefore the characteristics of a desperate lover are evident in the poem. This lyrical text is written in a simple and fluent style. It is noteworthy that in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the love for Prophet Muhammad is expressed in Ottoman Turkish. The poem presenting a rich appearence with various types of words and literary devices does not make the reader feel bored.In the introduction of the study brief information about Prophet Muhammad is provided. Subsequently, various examples of the love for Prophet Muhammad in Turkish literature are presented to the reader. In the first part the analysis of the poem has been carried out and the second part includes the translation of the poem. The original text of the poem has taken place at the end of the study. With the analyzed poetic arzuhâl it has been aimed not only to preserve the tradition but also to contribute to our written and oral culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 39-58 [Access article in PDF] A Life in Politics: Leonardo Bruni's Cicero Gary Ianziti Leonardo Bruni's Life of Cicero deserves to occupy an important place in the annals of early modern history-writing. 1 Completed in October 1415, the Cicero marks a turning point in Bruni's career. It represents his first major foray into the field of historiography, preceding by a few (...) months his completion of the first book of the more famous History of Florence. 2 The Cicero contains many of the features upon which Bruni's reputation as a historian was later to be based. It is written in concise, elegant Latin; it demonstrates a high degree of sophistication in its handling of a wide range of source material; it reveals the workings of a mature, critical intelligence capable of formulating judgments that often go against the grain of accumulated tradition. 3 Nor should we be surprised that Bruni's breakthrough into such territory took place within the framework of biography. Since the time of Petrarch, life-writing had been practiced by Italian humanists as the preferred form of historical composition. 4 Bruni's mentor Coluccio Salutati was a devotee of the genre, and Bruni himself served his apprenticeship [End Page 39] in history-writing by translating seven of Plutarch's Lives between 1405 and 1412. 5Bruni's Cicero was an immediate success in its own day. 6 It even supplanted its most august rival, Plutarch's ancient biography of Cicero. The latter had begun to circulate in the West as early as 1401 in the Latin version executed by another of Salutati's protégés, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia. 7 After the appearance of Bruni's Cicero, however, Plutarch's Cicero came under duress. By the 1430s Bruni's Cicero was "more widely diffused" than Plutarch's. 8 Bruni's text soon became standard, to the extent that the editio princeps of the Latinized Parallel Lives (Rome, 1470) printed Bruni's Cicero in preference to Plutarch's, setting a precedent followed by subsequent editions down to 1514. 9 The trend then suddenly reversed: Plutarch's biography (in the 1401 translation of Angeli) staged a remarkable comeback, returning to occupy its rightful place in the Latin editions of the Parallel Lives published after that date. 10 Bruni's Cicero meanwhile sank into oblivion. Its primacy had lasted almost one hundred years. [End Page 40]The first modern scholar to deal with Bruni's Cicero was Hans Baron. As early as 1928 Baron had found a place for the work within the scheme of "civic humanism," or Bürgerhumanismus as he then called his emerging concept. In his edition of Bruni's selected writings, Baron included a section from the Cicero, that dealing with the Roman statesman's literary output. 11 The decision to publish this extract rather than the whole work was in part dictated by Baron's conviction that most of Bruni's Cicero was a mere reworking of Plutarch and therefore unworthy of further attention. 12 But the choice of the section on Cicero's literary activity also depended on the fact that it contained statements which appeared to confirm Baron's view of Bruni as a "civic humanist." In particular, Baron emphasized Bruni's presentation of Cicero's literary studies as intimately connected with his political activity. In later years Baron often quoted these same passages in support of his "civic" thesis. 13This is not the place to discuss the wider implications of Baron's thesis itself. It will be enough to note that with regard to Bruni's Cicero, the "civic" focus was purchased at the expense of the work as a whole. One does not have to look very far into Bruni's Cicero to realize that it can hardly be described as subservient to Plutarch. Moreover, it contains passages in which Bruni shows himself to be much less sanguine than Baron about the supposed healthiness of the connection between letters and political life. For example, when weighing up... (shrink)

As an instrument of preserving the cultural memory of a community, the literary canon is usually a highly stable structure in its core elements. However, with the advent of the Communist regime after the Second World War, the Romanian literary canon underwent a drastic process of reconstruction. As early as the 1940s, what was euphemistically dubbed “revisiting our cultural heritage” actually equated to a radical revision—a purge of the literary canon through the fi lter of Marxism-Leninism. Not (...) only writers of literature, but literary critics themselves were subjected to this process. In this paper, I aim to discuss the role played by literary critics active during Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime in rehabilitating their predecessors. My focus will be on the press debate surrounding Titu Maiorescu’s rehabilitation in 1963. (shrink)

The most distinctive and highly valued poems of the modern era offer an image of a dramatized "I" acting in a concrete setting. The variety and importance of the poems which fall under this description are suggested simply by the mention of such names as "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," "Tintern Abbey," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ulysses," "My Last Duchess," "Dover Beach," "The Windhover," "The Darkling Thrush," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," "The Love Song of J. Alfred (...) Prufrock," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The power and beauty of such poems seems intimately connected with the fact of their dramatic integrity and autonomy, and we have all been taught, in analyzing them, to refer to a "speaker" existing independent of the poet and to avoid the "intentional" and "biographical" fallacies which spuriously link the poem to the poet and the world outside the poem. Such an approach tends to undercut any notion that a poem has a single definite meaning, the meaning the poet gave it, and to support the idea that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate and/or multiple. All this is quite in accord with the orthodox critical doctrine that poetic language is differentiated from scientific language and preserved from competition with it by the fact that it is nonreferential, making no claim upon the real world; and complex, indefinite, and alogical, where scientific language is simple, definite, and logical. Ralph W. Rader is chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" . Professor Rader's influential studies include Tennyson's "Maud": The Biography Genesis, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson," and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-century Studies.". (shrink)

Literary hermeneutics studies the problem of interpreting the meanings of an artistic text, considers it at the intersection of a number of philological fields and thus creates new criteria for philological/critical approach to an artistic text. The necessity that gave rise to literary hermeneutics as a field of philology was to reveal the depth of meanings of the artistic text. It also explains the aesthetic convergence and divergence between classical and modern literary texts, noting the points of (...) intersection of both. The modern artistic text does not arise on dry land, although it originates from the soul of the artist composing it, it is linked to tradition, it reflects a shared spiritual communion by visiting the past, specifically its past. It is clear that every poet who has traveled a certain creative path has his own definition of poetry. In forming this definition (the concept of poetry-!), the poet acts from his own experience and writes more with the intention handed down by tradition. Your own emotion can merge with, modify, or negate the thought of hundreds of years in an artistic text, and as a result, the layer of meaning in artistic texts expands to encompass the whole world. (shrink)

A formalist approach to literature, one that bears witness to the movements of distinct levels of form as they compel one another to a kind of infra-literary psychoanalysis, helps move us beyond the critical dichotomies — text vs. context, history vs. form, realism vs. the avant-garde — that have sometimes hampered recognition of the topologically complex and uneven fashion in which literature intervenes in the world. This article argues that it is the particular modes of constriction, isolation (...) and textual withdrawal that literature induces which paradoxically reveal literature’s psychoanalytic approach to its outsides. The article begins by close-reading a few short passages from Lacan, passages which when reframed offer the initial ingredients of a psychoanalytically informed materialist literary-critical formalism. It then turns to Paul de Man’s late reflections on literary form and materiality, before concluding with a reading of the poetry of Geoffrey G. O’Brien. (shrink)

The paper offers a qualified endorsement of Terry Eagleton’s striking claim that “a work’s moral outlook … may be secreted as much in its form as its content”. A number of points are raised in defence of the claim: an argument for the inseparability, under certain conditions, of form and content in a literary work; an idea of moral content, not as derived moral principle, but as inward-facing interpretation grounded in an ethical vocabulary; the possibility of internal (...) and external perspectives on fictional characters; and an emphasis on emotions expressed in, rather than caused by, narrative. Three literary examples are explored, to show how vocabulary, syntax, implicature, and tone, contribute to the emergence of moral salience. A consequence drawn is that the ethical stance readers take to a scene or incident is partially shaped by the narrative modes of its presentation. The overall perspective of the paper is that of aesthetic autonomism: the view that the aesthetic value of a work of literature is distinct from, and not reducible to, any instrumental moral values (positive or negative) attributed to the work. (shrink)

Writing about Moses Maimonides is a humbling challenge especially in the form of a very short introduction. Such a larger-than-life subject resists reductive interpretation in virtually all his works and in his person. Maimonidean scholarship abounds as do books about him written for the reading public in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and Hebrew. Until recently, academic monographs and articles tended to focus strictly on Maimonides' biography, rabbinical works, philosophical oeuvre, communal endeavors, or his medical writings separately. Comprehensive (...) studies on Maimonides are apt to follow this model by devoting chapters to each of these discreet subjects. This very short introduction to Moses Maimonides draws on Maimonidean scholarship in each of his areas of experience and literary activity. It follows current trends in research which present an integrated view of Maimonides as a rabbinic scholar without peer, a philosophically minded deep thinker, religious reformer (who thought of his life's project as restoring the authentic meaning and details of the written and oral Torah), communal leader, physician, and scientist who moved seamlessly between specialized, private and public Jewish and Muslim spheres. Indeed, his written works traverse multiple disciplines and discourses, employ several linguistic registers, voices, and literary genres, and address various audiences. Accordingly, this book organizes Maimonides' thinking and writings thematically by way of suggestive "chapter headings" to use one his catch phrases in The Guide of the Perplexed (although not in the sense of enigmas and puzzles to be deciphered) and puts his works into dialogue with one another intertextually. (shrink)

Friedrich von Hayek’s Unfinished Draft of a Sketch of a Biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein was the first attempt at the task of assembling a comprehensible picture of the life of his pre-eminent cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As the title might suggest, von Hayek never finished this task, his efforts being stymied by both Wittgenstein’s literary executors and Wittgenstein’s sister, Margaret Stonborough. Here, and for the first time, Christian Erbacher presents the first real publication of this draft, with accompanying commentary, (...) and an afterword by Allan Janik. Perhaps the best way to describe Erbacher’s work here is as a ‘biography of a biography’. His introduction to von Hayek’s manuscript details the story behind its creation, beginning with an outline of von Hayek’s own relationship with Wittgenstein, and the parallels between their academic careers. In doing so, Erbacher not only also describes the history of von Hayek’s sketch, but also the history of Wittgenstein-biography as a genre in itself. For what emerges from Erbacher’s extensive work in researching the von Hayek sketch is that, despite never coming to fruition itself, the work that von Hayek put into collecting the materials for writing a biography of Wittgenstein was hugely influential in all future endeavours of chronicling Wittgenstein’s life. (shrink)

This interview with Joseph Frank — best known as the author of a five-volume biography of Dostoevsky (published 1976 – 2002) and of Spatial Form in Modern Literature (1945) — was conducted in 2012 at Stanford and is published here, shortly after his death at age ninety-four, as a memorial to him. The conversation highlights Frank's representation of Dostoevsky as a critic and a satirist of the nihilist intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Russia — a portrayal that runs counter to (...) the understanding and use of his writings and his characters by Marxists, Nietzscheans, Freudians, Surrealists, crisis theologians, and Existentialists. Frank tells the story of how his friendship in the 1950s with Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, led to Frank's teaching himself Russian in order to read Notes from Underground and write an article on the novella that changed the face of Dostoevsky scholarship. The conversation also provides hints as to how — as director of the Christian Gauss Seminars at Princeton and as a contributor to debates about Spatial Form in Critical Inquiry — he negotiated the intellectual trends and distractions of Grand Theory, which came to dominate literary criticism in the 1970s and confirmed Frank in his counterfocus on the importance of historical context, not only in criticism but also in literary creation. Above all, the interview shows how a scholar can overcome institutional pressures and the temptations of careerism by shrugging them off and concentrating attention on scholarship alone. (shrink)

Verse is text which is divided into lines. In this paper I explore a psychological account of how verse is processed, and specifically the hypothesis that the text is processed line by line, such that each line is held as a whole sequence in the limited capacity of working memory. I will argue that because the line is processed in this way, certain low-level aesthetic effects are thereby produced, thus giving a partial explanation for why verse is often a highly (...) valued type of verbal behaviour. The general goal is to address the question of what literary form is, from a psychological perspective, and how the textual presence and psychological processing of form can contribute to particular aspects of the aesthetic experience of verse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A View of Life:Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the NovelYi-Ping OngI"My general task," Nietzsche scrawled, in the margins of his own copy of Cervantes's Don Quixote: "to show how life philosophy and art can have a deeper and affinitive relationship with each other."1 This enigmatic inscription commands a second reading not only because it seems to articulate the thread that links many of Nietzsche's philosophical projects together, but also because of (...) the very book in which it appears. The book is not a lofty tome of Schopenhauer's philosophy, as might be expected, but a mere novel: a fact which suggests that the novel itself was the art form that precipitated reflection on the relation of art to what Nietzsche calls here "life philosophy." In this essay, my aim is to deepen critical understanding of the novel's influence on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the two philosophers who are widely considered the fathers of existentialism. By means of a comprehensive overview of the novelistic reading and writing of these thinkers, I will show that both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were profoundly influenced by the literary form of the novel and by its techniques for representing consciousness, subjectivity, and worldview.My focus in the analysis that follows is on the question of why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard read novels, and not on the more specific question of what they gained from particular novels. Isolating form from theme has three main advantages. First, it elucidates an important aspect of the intellectual context for these philosophers that has received little scholarly attention, namely the issue of why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were drawn to fictional novelistic prose and how this literary form [End Page 167] affected their philosophy. Second, it allows the "deeper... affinitive" relationship between existentialist philosophy and the novel form to emerge, revealing the way in which existentialism and realism in the novel share a distinctive stylistic approach to the understanding of lived experience. Finally, it illuminates an intellectual precedent for the work of later existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, who drew increasingly on novelistic forms as both vehicle and inspiration for their philosophy.There are no previous studies devoted entirely to the novels read by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, despite the fact that Nietzsche lists Stendhal and Dostoevsky as two of the greatest influences upon his thinking and that Kierkegaard's first published work is the review of a novel. Why did Nietzsche read the works not only of "philosophical" novelists like Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, but also of Eliot, Twain, Sterne, and Flaubert? Why did Kierkegaard's interest in the "life-view" of the individual crystallize through his reflections on Hans Christian Andersen's novel Only a Fiddler? How did both of these existentialist thinkers link the task of connecting life and philosophy with their reading of novels, and how is their reading of novels related to their attempt to write philosophy in novel and increasingly novelistic ways?These questions lead us to address anew the issue of how philosophy and literature are related in a way that is not simply thematic or allegorical. Furthermore, they ask us to take into account the importance of the novel to thinkers whose work has primarily been studied in the context of other "serious" philosophical texts, despite the stylistic and formal affinity of their work to the novels they read. As Thomas Brobjer points out in his recently published work on Nietzsche's reading habits and intellectual sources, Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (2008), none of the standard works on Nietzsche comment on his reading or library despite the fact that his private library has been more or less preserved in its entirety.2 Brobjer's work is the only large-scale study of Nietzsche's reading to date; however, it limits itself to "the philosophical influences on Nietzsche," even as it acknowledges that he "often was influenced by some who cannot conventionally be regarded as philosophers: by authors and literary critics" (NPC, p. 3). Although Brobjer mentions several of these authors and critics, even noting some of the marginalia found in these texts, he places them largely in the context of influences upon Nietzsche... (shrink)

The author studies selected fundamental literary records from Great Moravia of the 9th century (The rules of the holy fathers [Zapovědi svatych otcov], Judicial law for laymen [Zakon sudnyj ljudem], Nomocanon [Nomokanon], Adhortation to rulers [Vladykam zemle Božie slovo velit]) presumably compiled, translated or created by Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius, the Thessaloniki brothers. In the context of defining early and medieval Christian ethics, the author concluded that the texts in question contain elements of the Christian code of ethics, by (...) means of which Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius, following the model of the Byzantine Emperors Leo III and Constantine V, wished to form the social morality of Great Moravia. Based on this, the author holds the opinion that the history of Christian ethics in Moravia, Slovakia and Bohemia goes as far back as the activities of Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius and the period of Great Moravia. (shrink)

This article highlights the significance of the “Za shuo” 雜說 (Miscellaneous discourses) series for the study of Han Yu’s 韓愈 (768–824) political ideology, which proposes a three-tier system of governance that is made up of the emperor, the feudal lords, and the bureaucrats. The emperor is the pinnacle of the system; he collaborates with his ministers to devise state policies in the inner palace. The feudal lords protect the emperor in the regional areas. The bureaucrats form the machinery of (...) the government and implement its policies. Challenging current scholarship, which treats each of Han Yu’s essays independently, the article proposes a new interpretation of them as a whole It argues that the three essays “Long shuo” 龍說 (Discourse on the dragon), “Yi shuo” 醫說 (Discourse on physicians), and “Ma shuo” 馬說 (Discourse on horses) form an organic unit that provides internally consistent counsel to the ruler for his governance, and that a fourth essay, “Ti Cui Shanjun zhuan” 題崔山君傳 (Foreword to the biography of Cui Shanjun), is likely an interpolation. Through unearthing the true meaning of this series, the article also narrows down its time of composition, which has traditionally been left unspecified. This article also reveals Han Yu’s attitude toward the revived concern over the enfeoffment of princes in medieval China and toward his political ideology, which is not purely Confucian. The article thus is a contribution to the study of both political history and literary creation in the mid-Tang era. (shrink)