Estudos de estética -- Estudos sobre literatura.

Here I look at sundry aspects of the current controversy about Generative AI and, in particular, the implications of this new and rapidly evolving technology for poetry, the arts, and human creativity in general. My essay looks at earlier episodes in the history of thought, from Descartes on, that I take to have prefigured this latest debate around 'the human' in relation to its various physical, 'artificial,' or (presumptively) prosthetic means of extension and refinement. I also discuss its (...) bearing on literary-critical issues concerning the formal or structural aspects of poetry, the role (if any) of authorial intent, and the extent to which criticism enters into– and might lay claim to a stake in–what counts as human creativity. A central point of reference is William Empson's 1930 book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, where these issues are raised in a strikingly prescient way through his practice of close-focused textual analysis allied to great philosophical acuity. I conclude that a priori attitudinizing, pro or con, is not much use in this context, but that poets, critics, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers need to cooperate in the reexamination of many long-standing but now highly contestable distinctions. (shrink)

Wordsworth and Kant and the Prosaic sublime -- Fitting infinities: Browning and Hegel -- Utter limits: Hopkins and Kierkegaard -- The echo of the poetic: Hardy and Adorno.

This book features readings of over twenty key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including Homer, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau. Simon Haines argues that the history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different conceptions of the self: the "romantic" vs. the "realist".

The employment of mythological language and imagery by an Epicurean poet - an adherent of a system not only materialist, but overtly hostile to myth and poetry - is highly paradoxical. This apparent contradiction has often been ascribed to a conflict in the poet between reason and intellect, or to a desire to enliven his philosophical material with mythological digressions. This book attempts to provide a more positive assessment of Lucretius' aims and methodology by considering the poet's attitude to (...) myth, and the role which it plays in the De Rerum Natura, against the background of earlier and contemporary views. The author suggests that Lucretius was not only aware of the tension between his two roles as philosopher and poet, but attempted to resolve it by developing his own, Epicurean poetic, together with a bold and innovative theory of the origins and meaning of myth. (shrink)

This is certainly one of the most beautiful books in philosophy published in the last couple of years. It comprises eighty-four essays, carefully selected, well-translated, covering almost the full range of Croce's immense literary production. Croce is certainly one of the most important and influential thinkers of this century and in this huge anthology the English-speaking reader is given an incomparable instrument to get acquainted with him. The list of the headings which classify the eighty-four essays are: The Logic of (...) Philosophy; Philosophical Criticism; Aesthetics; The Philosophy of Art and Language; The Theory of History; Economics and Ethics; Essays in Criticism and Literary History; Moral and Political History. But first one should read the late Cecil Sprigge's excellent introduction.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Why have poets played such an important role for contemporary philosophers? How can poetry link philosophy and political theory? How do formal considerations intersect with philosophical approaches? These essays seek to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Each essay contributes to our understanding of the relationships between theory and lived experience while providing new insight into important poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Hugo, and others. The broad range of metaphysical, phenomenological, aesthetic, and ethical approaches (...) announce important new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come. (shrink)

Explores Blanchot's philosophical meditation on three poets, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, and René Char alongside his contribution to Jewish philosophy.

Benedetto Croce’s influence pervades Anglo-Saxon culture, but, ironically, before Giovanni Gullace heeded the call of his colleagues and provided this urgently needed translation of _La Poesia, _speakers of English had no access to Croce’s major work and final rendering of his esthetic theory.__ __ _Aesthetic, _published in 1902 and translated in 1909, represents most of what the English-speaking world knows about Croce’s theory. It is, asserts Gullace, “no more than a first sketch of a thought that developed, clarified, and corrected (...) itself through new literary experience and more mature reflection.” During the 34 years between _Aesthetic _and _La Poesia _, for example, Croce added a striking new element to his thought: the analysis of prose literature. Gullace’s introduction to _La Poesia _constitutes a major under­taking in its own right. It is aimed at acquainting the reader with the evolution of Croce’s thought and at explaining the relation­ship between this final work and the philosopher’s previous work in esthetic theory and literary criticism. __ _La Poesia _is divided into two parts, text and postscripts. The text consists of four chapters: Poetry and Literature; The Life of Poetry; Criticism and History of Poetry; and The Formation of the Poet and the Precepts. Croce saw the postscripts “as a re­laxed conversation after the tension of theoretical exposition. In Gullace’s translation the text and relevant postscripts appear conveniently side by side in a double column. Gullace has anno­tated both text and postscripts. (shrink)

This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton, and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of analogous (...) texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into current discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Introduction: love after Aristotle; 1. Enjoyment: a medieval history; 2. Narcissus after Aristotle: love and ethics in Le Roman de la Rose; 3. Metamorphoses of pleasure in the fourteenth century Dit Amoureux; 4. Love's knowledge: fabliau, allegory, and fourteenth-century anti-intellectualism; 5. On human happiness: Dante, Chaucer, and the felicity of friendship; Coda: Chaucer's philosophical women.

This absorbing study of Plato's criticism of poetry offers a new interpretation based upon central features of both the pre-Platonic conception of poetry and previously neglected features of Plato's various discussions of poetry and the poets. Professor Mitscherling's analysis is unique in that he concentrates on the philosophical significance of Plato's distinction between dramatic and nondramatic sorts of poetry. Mitscherling shows that this distinction proves in fact to be central to the conception of poetry (...) that Plato consistently elaborates throughout his dialogues. Mitscherling also makes a unique contribution by outlining a possible Platonic aesthetics, which draws on current work in phenomenology and hermeneutics in such a way as to promise an entirely new direction for current work in continental aesthetics. The author employs Gadamer's analyses of the ontology of the work of art, in conjunction with a phenomenological analysis of the aesthetic experience, in the construction of a foundation for aesthetics that is consistently Platonic. Mitscherling concludes with the hypothesis that Plato's criticism of poetry did not apply to poetry itself, nor was it directed to art in general or the educational system, or the Sophists. Rather, Plato was specifically against the techn? of mim'sis, that is, the technique of persuading by appearing to be what one is not, or by merely appearing to speak the truth. (shrink)

The arts of poetry and the arts of criticism are uncovered and studied in their products, in poems and in judgments. Poetry and criticism, however, the making and judging of poems, are processes. The study of literature as a product - existing poems and existing interpretations and appreciations of poetry - develops a body of knowledge which is sometimes called "poetic sciences." The recognition and use of poetic and critical processes - producing and judging poems (...) which did not previously exist, and uncovering and analyzing aspects of existing poems which were not previously discerned or appreciated - develop things and values by use of arts which are sometimes called "heuristic arts." Knowledge or science is used in the processes of deliberate or artful making; art or criticism is used in the production of things or knowledge of things, natural or artificial. Knowledge is a product of inquiry; criticism is a process of judgment; the two are joined - knowledge of things and use of knowledge - in critical inquiries or critiques of judgment. Richard McKeon is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Greek at the University of Chicago; he was a member of the U.S. delegations to the first three General Conferences of UNESCO and served as U.S. counselor to UNESCO. His numerous publications include The Philosophy of Spinoza, Freedom and History, and Thought, Action, and Passion; he also has edited The Basic Works of Aristotle and coedited the forthcoming critical edition of Abailard's Sic et Non. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religion and Culture" and Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot". (shrink)

If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in principle impossible that we might choose to set going an initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of (...) the predispositions for or against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety, evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form, threatens to remain merely gestural and generic. “History” promises thus to function as legitimating any reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived, whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist reconstructions. David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 and Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement. (shrink)

Dilemma one, Between the theoretical concepts and authorial intention -- Dilemma two, Good manners and eristic -- Dilemma three, Between strangeness and familiarity -- Dilemma four, Between scholarly research and faith.

The Epicurean teacher and poet Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110-c. 40/35 BC) exercised significant literary and philosophical influence on Roman writers of the Augustan Age, most notably the poets Vergil and Horace. Yet a modern appreciation for Philodemus' place in Roman intellectual history has had to wait on the decipherment of the charred remains of Philodemus' library, which was buried in Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. As improved texts and translations of Philodemus' writings have become (...) available since the 1970s, scholars have taken a keen interest in his relations with leading Latin poets. The essays in this book, derived from papers presented at the First International Symposium on Philodemus, Vergil, and the Augustans held in 2000, offer a new baseline for understanding the effect of Philodemus and Epicureanism on both the thought and poetic practices of Vergil, Horace, and other Augustan writers. Sixteen leading scholars trace his influence on Vergil's early writings, the Eclogues and the Georgics, and on the Aeneid, as well as on the writings of Horace and others. The volume editors also provide a substantial introduction to Philodemus' philosophical ideas for all classicists seeking a fuller understanding of this pivotal figure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 59-74 [Access article in PDF] Francesco Patrizi in the "Time-Sack": History and Rhetorical Philosophy * Paul Richard Blum Contemporary theory of history is much concerned with the narrative structure of history, its nature, and its epistemic status. 1 The problem is not only that sources present events mostly wrapped in narrative language but also that temporality is (...) an inherent feature both of the events told and of storytelling. 2 Narrativity and temporality touch upon basic metaphysical and anthropological questions, as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, if narration is to be understood as self-explanation of a human being in whom "time" occurs as "being-in-time." 3 The following paper cannot claim to contribute to the current debate but presents Francesco Patrizi (1529-97) 4 as a Renaissance philosopher who addressed several of these problems. In discussing his conceptions of history and time, however, it is the aim of this paper only to locate these within his own philosophy. [End Page 59]One of the unresolved problems in the writings of Francesco Patrizi is the difference between his earlier contributions to the humanistic canon and his late philosophical main treatise, Nova de universis Philosophia. The earlier writings conform to the usual humanist literary topics: the political program of a città felice, the treatises on honor, the poetic fury, Petrarch (1553), and then his two dialogues on history (1560) and rhetoric (1562). The two works which followed, the Discussiones peripateticae (1571) and the Poetics (1586), show a characteristic development of humanist thinking, namely, the differentiation of purely philological from essentially philosophical literature.Patrizi's Discussiones peripateticae 5 is a polemic against Aristotle, written from a Platonic viewpoint, but his own philosophy is concealed under a mass of philological material. In an attempt that seeks to be virtually definitive, he cites passages from Aristotle and the Peripatetic tradition in order to point out mistakes and contradictions. It was on this account that Giordano Bruno heaped ridicule on him, calling him "sterco di pedanti." Simply put, he tells us, Patrizi demonstrates "how like he is to an ox or an ass." One cannot say that he has understood Aristotle either well or ill, but merely that he has read him and reread him, cut him up and stitched him together, compared him with a thousand other Greek writers, friends and foes alike, and altogether gone to an immense deal of trouble, not only to no purpose whatsoever but also to our infinite disappointment. Anyone who wishes to see into just what folly and self-regarding vanity pedantic drudgery can plunge and sink should read this book. 6This was one contemporary reaction to Patrizi's attempt to explore all the possibilities of a humanistic style of literary criticism, via the comparison between Plato and Aristotle. 7The Poetics 8 is essentially divided into two quite distinct halves: Della poetica la deca istoriale and Della poetica la deca disputata. The first is a lexicon of [End Page 60] the ancient authors, categories, styles, etc., and the second a series of dissertations on the theory of poetry but these, too, with abundant reference to both ancient and contemporary literature.Finally, and entirely different in style, there is his principal work, the Nova de universis Philosophia (1591). 9 Here the philosopher systematically departs from his accustomed field, ranging from a theory of light (Panaugia), via a discussion on theological principles (Panarchia) and a theory of the soul (Pampsychia) to the Pancosmia, a treatise on cosmology and physics. Even to this work he appends a number of documentary excerpts, and there is no lack of excursions into literary history, but the main part of the work is entirely axiomatic--"methodical"--in approach and argumentative in style.These works of Patrizi represent the development of philosophical humanism in the sixteenth century, a development away from a unified presentation of the problems of the human sciences by the explicit use of the tools of literary rhetoric, and towards the research of philological sources on the one hand and... (shrink)

LUCRETIUS AND THE LATE REPUBLIC . Roman Intellectual History The history of human values is the history of changing notions about truth and reality, ...

Nasir-i Khusraw is a major literary figure in medieval Persian culture. He was a Muslim philosopher, poet, travel writer, and Ismaili da'i who lived a thousand years ago in the lands known today as Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan. Although known in the West mainly for his Safarnama, or travelogue, which describes his seven-year journey from Khurasan, in the eastern Islamic lands, to Cairo, the city of the Fatimid imam-caliphs, his poetry and ideas are less familiar. Yet, over the centuries, (...) Persian-speaking lands have consistently ranked him as one of the finest poets of all time. But today, even among those who know Nasir-i Khusraw's poetry, few understand the philosophical and Ismaili concepts the poet expounds. And while mystical and epic genres of Persian poetry are memorized and studied, the genre of philosophical poetry in Persian remains basically unexplored. This collection of studies seeks to redress the balance. Originally presented at a conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2005 to commemorate the millenary of Nasir-i Khusraw's birth, the papers published here examine his poetry both for philosophical meaning and poetic method. They address a variety of topics, ranging from metaphysics, cosmology, and ontology to prophecy, as well as rhythm and structure, and analysis of individual poems and authorship. (shrink)

This book presents an innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism. Dee Reynolds brings this approach to bear on works by Rimbaud, Mallarme;, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. It allows her to redefine the relationship between Symbolism and abstract art, and to contribute new methodological perspectives to comparative studies of poetry and painting. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a crucial period in the emergence of new modes of (...) representation, and is currently at the forefront of critical enquiry. This is the first book to examine Symbolism and abstraction in this way, and the first to treat these poets and painters together. It is an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in art history, literary history, and comparative aesthetics. (shrink)

This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a significant, and continuing, influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. This volume presents Dilthey's principal (...) writings on aesthetics and the philosophical understanding of poetry, as well as representative essays of literary criticism. The essay "The Imagination of the Poet" (also known as his Poetics) is his most sustained attempt to examine the philosophical bearings of literature in relation to psychological and historical theory. Also included are "The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task," "Fragments for a Poetics," and two final essays discussing Goethe and Hölderlin. The latter are drawn from Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, a volume that was acclaimed on publication as a classic of literary criticism and that continues to be a model for the geistesgeschichtliche approach to literary history. (shrink)

Frontiers of Consciousness is a study of the problem of consciousness in a historic period of revolutionary change, and an authentic example of “interdisciplinary studies.” The book contains a wealth of insight into the conceptual interrelationships between the work of the American philosophers who have been called the Builders (William James, Josiah Royce, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey) and the work of three great modernist poets (T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams).

Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art. As William Carlos Williams says, “A poem can be made of anything,” even newspaper clippings.At this point, art turns into philosophy, all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the distinctive genre (...) of modernism. This book takes seriously this transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas.As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and what sort of communitydefines the work of art—or, for that matter, the work of philosophy.In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience—or, indeed, an alternative form of life—as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how. (shrink)

Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Hölderlin are central to Heidegger's later philosophy and have determined the mainstream reception of Hölderlin's poetry. Gosetti-Ferencei argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hölderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, she argues, resist the more politically distressing aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including Heidegger's nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood, or Heimat.In the context of Hölderlin's poetics (...) of alienation, exile, and wandering, Gosetti-Ferencei draws a different model of poetic subjectivity, which engages Heidegger's later philosophy of Gelassenheit, calmness, or letting be. In so doing, she is able to pose a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a "new poetics of Dasein," or being there. (shrink)

In "A Serpentine Gesture": John Ashbery's Poetry and Phenomenology Elisabeth W. Joyce examines John Ashbery's poetry through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a process through which people reach outside of themselves for sensory information, map that experiential information against what they have previously encountered and what is culturally inculcated in them, and articulate shifts in their internal repositories through encounters with new material. Joyce argues that this process reflects Ashbery's classic statement (...) of poetry being the "experience of experience." Through incisive close readings of Ashbery's poems, Joyce examines how he explores this process of continual reverberation between what is sensed and what is considered about that sensation and, ultimately, how he renders these perceptions into the 'serpentine gesture' of language. (shrink)

This book is designed to appeal both to those interested in Roman poetry and to specialists in ancient philosophy. In it David Sedley explores Lucretius ' complex relationship with Greek culture, in particular with Empedocles, whose poetry was the model for his own, with Epicurus, the source of his philosophical inspiration, and with the Greek language itself. He includes a detailed reconstruction of Epicurus' great treatise On Nature, and seeks to show how Lucretius worked with this as his (...) sole philosophical source, but gradually emancipated himself from its structure, transforming its raw contents into something radically new. By pursuing these themes, the book uncovers many unrecognised aspects of Lucretius ' methods and achievements as a poetic craftsman. (shrink)

There are two main discussions of poetry in Plato's Republic: the first one is in Books II and III, the other in Book X. Their conclusions are not entirely coherent. In Books II and III, only some poetry is considered imitative, and certain forms of it are allowed in the ideal city. In Book X all poetry is considered imitative, and all of it is banned from the city. Jeff Mitscherling's book deals with Plato's criticism of (...) poetry and art. It (i) reviews and discusses the main interpretations of the topic, paying special attention to those of Havelock (who argues that under attack is the Athenian educational system) and Gadamer (who argues the real target are the Sophists and their influence); (ii) discusses .. (shrink)

In Beyond Enchantment, Mark Kipperman attempts to define the dialectic in philosophical idealism between the actively creative mind and the horizon of the world. Through an analysis of the texts of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling and then an examination of works by Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, he shows that this dialectic operates not only explicitly in philosophical texts but also implicitly in the structure of Romantic long poems.

Summary This article opens with a brief introduction to Giuseppe Mazzini, with particular reference to his commitment to republicanism, an ideal that would be fulfilled in Italy only after considerable time and with great difficulty. It then focuses on Mazzini's critical reception of Byron. Although Giuseppe Mazzini and Percy Bysshe Shelley would have allowed a more obvious comparison, it was Byron who really attracted Mazzini's attention and criticism. Mazzini uses Byron, on the one hand, as a means to demonstrate (...) that Italians could discuss European poetry without putting at risk their national identity, or, as the classicists maintained, that fragile and fragmented profile of a nation that contemporary Italy offered to the minds and hearts of thousands of young people. On the other hand, however, Mazzini questions Byron's authority by subverting and converting his value, in a very personal way: he gradually substitutes Byron's with a different authority and credits him with new values. Mazzini could not accept Byron as the emblem of elitism and isolation: Byron's solipsism needed to be purified, and his renowned cynical attitude tempered; eventually Byron's myth needed to be connected to the destiny of peoples and nations. (shrink)

A pioneering study that illuminates the connection of music, poetry, mystical praxis and social history underlying the ceremony of the Mevlevi Dervishes. Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, whose life and mystical poetry provided the inspiration for the Mevlevi Sufi order, is one of the world's best-known poets, yet the centuries-long musical tradition cultivated by the Mevleviye remains much less known. In this deeply researched book, renowned scholar Walter Feldman traces the historical development of Mevlevi music and brings to light (...) the remarkable musical and mystical aesthetics of the Mevlevi ayin - the instrumental and vocal accompaniment to the sublime ceremony of the 'Whirling' Dervishes. (shrink)

Self-discipline, ethics, character, and philosophy in Hindu poetry; criticism to Bhagavad Gita, Nītīśāstra, Sāra-samuccaya, etc.

This volume brings together Seth Benardete's studies of Hesiod's Theogony, Homer's Iliad, and Greek tragedy, of eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle's Metaphysics. These essays, some never before published, others difficult to find, span four decades of his work and document its impressive range. Benardete's philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground that makes this collection a whole. The key, suggested by his reflections on Leo Strauss in the last piece, lies in (...) the question of how to read Plato. Benardete's way is characterized not just by careful attention to the literary form that separates doctrine from dialogue, and speeches from deed rather, by following the dynamic of these differences, he uncovers the argument that belongs to the dialogue as a whole. The "turnaround" such an argument undergoes bears consequences for understanding the dialogue as radical as the conversion of the philosopher in Plato's image of the cave. Benardete's original interpretations are the fruits of this discovery of the "argument of the action.". (shrink)

Among the central meanings in Büchner's Woyzeck, there is one that comes clear only when we read the play in the context of the history of ideas—specifically in the light of certain currents of thought about human history and eschatology. Aspects of the play's expression are thereby elucidated, that are forcefully brought forward through the organization and compositional procedures of Berg's Wozzeck. Near the end of the long third scene of the opera, Wozzeck appears suddenly at Marie's window (...) and alludes cryptically to the mysterious signs that had come to him in the field the scene before, confiding to her that he is "on the track of something big." As those signs had first been presented through Wozzeck's eyes, they seemed like the imaginings and fears of a simple man about Freemasons and who knows what other objects of superstition, But now in the third scene he gives them a scriptural context, as though through a sudden insight: "Isn't it written, 'And behold, the smoke went up from the land, as the smoke from a furnace'?" What Wozzeck has recalled here is a passage in the Book of Genesis, chapter 19: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. . . . and, behold, the smoke went up from the Land as the smoke from a furnace." The image is repeated in the New Testament Book of Revelation , chapter 9: "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of the great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit." Both passages are about a holocaust visited by a wrathful God upon a corrupt and debauched people, and that is the idea that begins to form in Wozzeck's mind as he stands for the first time on the stage before his mistress. And he asks, "What will it all come to?" The answer to this thematic question lies in the strange unfolding of the drama, pressed forward by forces that lie, as Büchner had once put it, "Outside of ourselves"1 and by Wozzeck, who guarantees the outcome as he imagines himself becoming aware of what it must be. · 1. Letter to his family, February 1834: "I scorn no one, least of all because of his understanding or his education, for it lies in no one's power not to become a dumbbell or a criminal—because we have all become alike through like circumstances, and because the circumstances lie outside of ourselves . . ." Werner Lehmann, George Büchner: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe , 2:422. Leo Treitler, professor and chairman of the department of music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of, among other works, "Dufay the Progressive" and "Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant.". (shrink)

Literary criticism is neither more nor less important today than it has been since the becoming an accepted activity in the Renaissance. The humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the institution of criticism as we know it: the recovery and analysis of works of art. They printed, edited, and interpreted texts that dated from antiquity and which had been lost or disheveled. Evangelical in their fervor, avid in their search for lost or buried riches, they also (...) put into circulation certain influential ideas. Perhaps the most important of these was that the authoritative version of a book is the original version, freed from interpolation and accretion. A correlative idea was that, similarly, one could rely on an original or natural light in the interpreter, an intuitive good sense that helped him to a true understanding of a text if it was a genuine text. . . . There are signs that we are now nearing the end of this Renaissance humanism. Not because of a determinist or providential march of history, but ideas eventually exhaust what influence they may have. Today, after all, there is no dearth of ancient texts, or of new ones. Editing, moreover, has become only too conscious of the difficulty of recovering an "original" version or edition: in Wordsworth scholarship, for example, the authority of the 1850 Prelude, the text approved by the poet shortly before his death, was challenged by the 1805-6 Prelude printed by de Sélincourt in the 1920s; and the authority of this is in turn being eroded by antecedent manuscripts, the so-called "Five-Books Prelude" and "Two-Part Prelude." It is equally precarious to establish the text of Emily Dickinson's poems—which of the variants are to be chosen as definitive? Or, from another angle, Melville's Billy Budd has become a mine for genetic speculation. Even when no editorial problem exists, a philosophical issue arises as to the concept of originality itself.1 · 1. For the time being, it is enough to quote Hegel's provocative attack on all "Ur-Metaphysics": "What comes later is more concrete and richer; the first is abstract, and least differentiated." Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of The Unmediated Vision, Andre Malraux, Wordsworth's Poetry, Beyond Formalism, and most recently The Fate of Reading. He is currently working on a book to be published in late 1977, Criticism in the Wilderness. (shrink)

Prof Dr. Vaman Mahadev Kulkarni is a well-known Scholar, Teacher and Researcher in the field of Sanskrit and Prakrit Studies, especially, Poetics, Jainism and Manuscript-studies. This publicity-shy gentleman-scholar contributed his mite to the research fields from various angles. A Felicitation Volume in his honours was a long felt desideratum, in view of his solid and outstanding contributions, distinguishing him from other scholars in ways more than one.