Antonio Ungar (Bogota, 1974) has published two novels: Zanahorias voladoras (Alfaguara, 2004) and Las orejas del lobo (Ediciones B, 2006). This paper aims to analyze the two literary works, based on the relationship between abjection and revolt (Kristeva 2006 (1980), 1998 (1996)) presented in the novels. This relationship will make it possible to understand, to a great extent, the author’s esthetic proposal, as well as his position in the current Colombian literary field and his answer to the social conditions (...) of his time. (shrink)

Methodological innovations have a special status in disciplinary histories, because they can be widely adopted and anonymised. In the 1950s, this occurred to Georges Laplace’s innovative use of 3-dimensional metric Cartesian coordinate system to record the positions of archaeological objects. This paper proposes a conceptual and social history of this process, with a focus on its spatial context, the Pyrenean region (Spain, Basque Country, and France). Main results of this research based on archives, publications, and bibliometric data, include: 1) a (...) critical discussion of the notions concerning authorship of such methodological innovations; 2) a presentation of the lesser-known aspects of Laplace’s method, showing its contribution to the abstraction and formalisation of archaeological observations and data recording; and 3) the identification of an international Pyrenean intellectual lineage of innovation regarding stratigraphy and excavation methods, from the late 19th century to the early 21th century. (shrink)

English summary: The compound terms formed with 'post-' - from Postmodernity through Postdemocracy to Postcrisis as the New Normal - can be seen as a symptom of theoretical helplessness. These compounds are based on a kind of dialectics which they explicitely refuse: The idea of a New Normal postulates a return to normalcy at the end of the series of crises in the early 21th century, but it states simultaneously that the old normalcy has eventually been (...) lost forever. In order to shed light on this question, theoretical effort is needed: This study proposes the concepts of normalism, interdiscourse, and collective symbolism. Taking seriously Michel Foucault's idea of a theoretical tool box, it introduces a new and operational concept of antagonism alternative to the one which originates from dialectics. Antagonism in an operational definition represents a dynamic of irriversible de-normalization (i.e. loss of normality, failure of normalism). Using these analytical instruments, categories such as Postmodernity and New Normal can be explained in a new and satisfying manner. The study hereby takes into consideration positions denying antagonism in Postmodernity (e.g. Francis Fukuyama) as well as theories which claim new kinds of antagonism (e.g. Negri and Hardt, Laclau and Mouffe, or Ranciere).These theoretical developments go together with topical analyses of the series of crises after 2001 and particularly after 2007: from the financial crisis through the Euro crisis to the refugees and populism crises. The analytical approach proposed here is particularly apt for studying the role of topical media as well as political discourses in normalization and denormalization processes. As a result, the study proposes a processual scheme of the series of crises as well as a new definition of populism based on the approach of normalism. Finally, it also considers the problems of alternative 'transnormalistic' ways out of the crisis ('flightlines').Interspersed with the study are short literary essays on novels dealing with current antagonisms: by Albert Camus, Thomas Bernhard, Sibylle Berg, Stephen King, Jean Marie Gustave Le ClEzio, Jonathan Littell, and Michel Houellebecq. German description: Die Krisenserie zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhundert, von der Finanz- und Eurokrise bis zur Fluchtlings- und Populismuskrise, hat die vorgangigen Normalitaten in vielen Dimensionen beeintrachtigt. Das lasst sich als Denormalisierung begreifen und wirft die Frage auf, wie soziokulturelle Normalitaten produziert und reproduziert werden. Darauf antwortet das hier aktualisierte, diskurstheoretische Konzept des Normalismus. Kann die Krisenserie sogar zu einem 'Ende der Normalitat' (Gabor Steingart) fuhren und was wurde das bedeuten? Das ist die Frage nach einer belastbaren Bedeutung des in den USA entstandenen Konzepts eines New Normal: Wenn es das Ende der Krisenserie meinen sollte - was unterscheidet es dann von einem 'Old Normal'? Und wie verhalt sich ein New Normal zum ebenso schillernden Begriff einer Postmoderne? Die Antwort der Studie auf solche Fragen kombiniert die Kategorien des Normalismus und des Antagonismus. Sie schlagt ein gegenuber seiner dialektischen Herkunft neues, diskurstheoretisch fundiertes und operatives (empirisch belastbares) Konzept von Antagonismus als tendenziell irreversible Denormalisierung vor. Mit diesem Instrumentarium wird zunachst die Postmoderne (einschliealich der anderen 'Postismen') als das Konzept einer vorgeblich historischen Epoche ohne Antagonismen gefasst. Anschlieaend werden die Krisenserien unter diesem Aspekt analysiert und ein vorlaufiges Prozessschema der Krisenverlaufe erstellt. Dabei wird auch die Krise der politischen Normalitat (Populismuskrise) transparent. Daraus ergibt sich ein Ausblick auf die Alternative zwischen der Gefahr eines katastrophischen Kollapses des Normalismus auf der einen und transnormalistischen Auswegen auf der anderen Seite. (shrink)

The main goal of this research which is summarized in this article is to analyze the influence of the Neoliberal discourse on the constitution of Colombian´s subjectivity, from the late 20th Century to the early 21th Century. A Foucaultian interpretative analysis method was adopted to analyze the enunciations of the television and internet advertisements, in contrast to the enunciations of the Neoliberalism. The whole of this research was developed from an interdisciplinary focus guided (...) by the Lacanian psychoanalysis framework. (shrink)

Artificial insemination was the first conceptive technology to be widely used in agriculture. Whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century all cows in England and Wales were mated to bulls, by the end of the 1950s 60% conceived through artificial insemination. By then a national network of ‘cattle breeding centres’ brought AI within the reach of every farmer. In this paper I explore how artificial insemination, which had few supporters in the 1920s and 1930s, was transformed into an (...) ‘indispensable’ method for reproducing cattle. I discuss the factors that made organised AI possible , including changes in cultures of cattle breeding, novel State involvement in bovine reproduction, the rise of new ‘animal breeding research’ centres at Cambridge, Edinburgh and Reading universities, war preparations and central planning by the Milk Marketing Board . I go on to show that the unprecedented focus on bovine reproduction set in motion by the AI centres effectively generated new networks of reproductive research, through these the ‘biopower’ of the farm was incorporated into the clinic. The example of AI shows that by combining the history of reproductive technology in agriculture and medicine we can give a richer account of modern reproduction. (shrink)

Readings in Chinese Women's Philosophical and Feminist Thought gathers 40 original writings on women by 32 authors (many of whom are women) from the Yuan dynasty to the Republics, an important 700-year historical period during which women's learning in China blossomed as a result of economic prosperity, the development of commercial printing, and the interaction between East and West. -/- Selections are made not only from canonical texts on women's virtues, but also from less orthodox literary works (...) such as plays, poetry, novels, essays, and revolutionary writings that illuminate the lived experience of women and the perception of gender. With many texts translated into English for the first time, this reader provides the context needed to understand them. It features: -/- - Chronologically organized readings in the sequence of the Yuan, Ming, Qing dynasties, and the Republics to demonstrate historical progression of thought (or the lack of) - Introductions to each section and chapter covering essential information about the authors and the cultural, historical, and philosophical background to their work - A chronology of dynasties, Republics, key events, and a map -/- Recovering discourse so often neglected in discussion of Chinese thought, this is the first collection to pay special attention to women-authored works from the late 13th to the early 21st century. By bringing these readings together in a single volume, it juxtaposes and compares female and male perspectives from the same time and creates a new narrative of Chinese philosophical thought. (shrink)

This article addresses new approaches to the novel in the twenty-first century. It begins with an affirmation that even the most avant-garde of contemporary critics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century share a commonality: a background in what was identified as “close reading” in the Anglo-American academic world and analyse de texte in French. After numerous declarations in recent decades about the death of the novel, the death of the author and the death (...) of literary criticism, it is evident that the novel as a genre has survived, authors remain a subject of study, and new approaches are possible. The study of trauma in fiction, as well as eco-criticism, are promising new points of departure. The required close reading implied by Twitter also opens up new possibilities. (shrink)

Originating from the teachings of Confucius, Confucianism became the mainstream of Chinese culture and had enormous effects on all aspects of Chinese society. Confucianism has gone through three major changes in Chinese history: the first occurred during the Han period, the second during the Song period, and the third during the Qing period, after the first Opium War. In the late Qing period, China experienced a rapid decline due to the invasion of Western forces. Progressive intellectuals attributed this to (...) the conservative nature of Confucianism at that time. Their Anti-Confucianism Movement grew especially active during the May Fourth Movement in the early twentieth century. Two prominent figures in this movement were Chen Duxiu, from the political field, and Lu Xun, from the literary field. Chen Duxiu, who was a thinker and politician, and Lu Xun, who was a thinker and novelist, were both strongly critical of the problematic social habits connected to conservative Confucian ideologies, such as humaneness, courtesy, filial piety, and so on. However, there were also important differences between these two figures: while Chen Duxiu criticized the bad habits of Confucianism across various fields of society at a rather abstract political angle through his articles, Lu Xun more specifically criticized the bad habits of Confucianism in daily life from a literary perspective through his novels. These differences derived from their respective vocations. Consequently, while Chen Duxiu’s Anti-Confucianism Movement had a huge impact on intellectuals, Lu Xun’s Anti-Confucianism Movement had a huge impact on the general public. While the former led the Anti-Confucianism Movement, the latter popularized it. The third major change in Confucianism is still ongoing. It seems likely that the Anti-Confucianism Movement of Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun will help us to anticipate what kind of changes in Confucianism may go through in future. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Contexts of Religious Tolerance: New Perspectives from Early Modern Britain and Beyond’, which contains essays on the contributions to the debates on tolerance by non-canonical philosophers and theologians, mainly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland and England. Among the studied authors are the Aberdeen Doctors, Samuel Rutherford, James Dundas, John Finch, George Keith, John Simson, Archibald Campbell, Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and John Witherspoon. The introduction draws attention (...) to several methodological points connected to the decision to look at the debates on tolerance through the prism of rarely studied authors. It then presents the essays, which offer novel perspectives by analysing and contextualising political, religious and moral treatments of tolerance. These are tied especially to debates on the articles of faith and on their status, on confessions of faith and their role in the quest for orthodoxy, on liberty of conscience, and on the relation between church and state. (shrink)

It is no coincidence that some of the great psychological novels from the eighteenth century were all published either before or round about the appearance of the term “rights of man”, which only began to take hold after 1789. By going through some of the novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially Pride and Prejudice (1813), by Jane Austen, we shall analyse more keenly in what way the key traits of the notion of gentleman that (...) prevailed over the eighteenth century were deeply intertwined with a rather conservative cultivation of the idea of dignity; and the chief argument we shall advocate is that these novels help us tell the story of the fall from grace of the Augustan conception of dignity and the provenance of its universal recognition to all men and women. The rise of individual rights that sprang therefrom would not have ensued, were it not for a thriving strong sense of autonomy and cultural wisdom among educated citizens inspired by heroes and heroines of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centry English novel. (shrink)

In the article on material of seventeen texts, the problem of world outlook strategy in the American novel of the 21th century is studied. The most influential author’s models are considered: neodecadence, post-apocalyptic humanity, personal versions of social and psychological realism and existentialist consciousness. The main attention is paid to the description and interpretation of the general for modern American novels of a national picture of the world. The family history remains the stable level of a narration. (...) At other level, there is a depressive or protest word about a condition of life, about the absolute beginnings dooming the person to suffering. In the narrative center, there is a hero, who has to solve personal problems in the context of the opened emptiness capable to get metaphysical meanings or to replace them. Reducing dynamics of a plot and formation of character, the novel becomes a form of the image of a steady state. For this state, the complex combination of two literary archetypes is characteristic: Job and Hamlet. The love to the world is not provided, the problem of finding of arguments for continuation of life is perceived by writers as main. If the classical American novel has positioned itself between dream and the tragedy, the modern novel settles down between everyday life and emptiness. The key paradox of the studied art texts is connected with it: two forms of fatigue - not only from the Absolute responsible for weight of existence, but also from its absence connect in one complex. The hero does not know with whom he does not agree: God or with essentially subjectless life depriving any God of will, power and sense. Search of new moral rituals is represented in this situation quite natural. (shrink)

The author focuses on the functioning of intertextemes with omocomplex ‘it‘ in the works of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Z. Gippius, A. Belyi. The various literary interpretation of the phrase ‘it came‘ from the novel ‘The Story of a City‘ that depend on the historical and cultural context reading of the work are given. The author contends that the nominalized pronoun it in the lyrics Z. Gippius transforms to diffuse the image of the crowd-element that helps lyrical works in (...) 1905 to convey a sense of danger and the meaninglessness of natural rebellion. Sound-letter mimetism is found in the works of A. Bely, the founder of the direction of ‘ornamental prose‘, which continues to develop the theme of the apocalypse. The authors note that omocomplex ‘it‘ can be represented by a pronoun-noun. It is immutable word, distributed segregated agreed definition. This gives the author the opportunity to speak about the terminological use of omocomplex as omocomplex unit presented in the text segment in opposition to another terminological nominalized addicting third person pronoun: ‘not me‘ and ‘it‘. (shrink)

In the early 18th Century, Daniel Defoe found it natural to write a novel whose heroine was a sexually adventurous, socially marginal property offender. Only half a century later, this would have been next to unthinkable. In this paper, the disappearance of Moll Flanders, and her supercession in the annals of literary female offenders by heroines like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, serves as a metaphor for fundamental changes in ideas of selfhood, gender and social order in (...) 18th and 19th Century England. Drawing on law, literature, philosophy and social history, I argue that these broad changes underpinned a radical shift in mechanisms of responsibility-attribution, with decisive implications for the criminalisation of women. I focus in particular on the question of how the treatment and understanding of female criminality was changing during the era which saw the construction of the main building blocks of the modern criminal process, and of how these understandings related in turn to broader ideas about gender, social order and individual agency. (shrink)

(1997). Ethnicity, citizenship, and identity in the constitution of multiethnic states: Lessons from early‐twentieth‐century Spain and Austria. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, No. 7, pp. 1146-1161.

The paper examines differences of styles of experimentation in the history of science. It presents arguments for a historization of our historial and philosophical notion of "experimentation," which question the common view that "experimental philosophy" was the only style of experimentation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues, in particular, that "experimental history" and technological inquiry were accepted styles of academic experimentation at the time. These arguments are corroborated by a careful analysis of a case study, which (...) is embedded in a comparative historical overview. (shrink)

For philosophers familiar with the traditional interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir as a literary writer and philosophical follower of Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s 1926-27 student diary is a revelation. Inviting an exploration of Beauvoir’s early philosophy foreclosed by the traditional interpretation, the student diary reveals Beauvoir’s early dedication to becoming a philosopher and her early formulation of philosophical problems and positions usually attributed to Sartre’s influence, such as the central problem of “the opposition of self and other,” years (...) before she first met Sartre in 1929.… Reading the student diary within a larger historical context, we discover that it reflects Beauvoir’s experience as one of the first generation of French women to gain full access to the academic world of philosophy, an experience that problematizes her identity as a woman. The diary shows Beauvoir struggling to accommodate herself to the male world of philosophy while striving to make philosophy her own. For Beauvoir this means following Henri Bergson in rejecting a philosophy that engages only the abstract intelligence. Defining her own unique literary philosophical methodology, Beauvoir vows to create a philosophy that is able, like literature, to encompass emotion as well as reason. This creative process begins in her diary where Beauvoir describes the concrete realities of her own lived experience. Searching for a sense of self in the “nothingness of everything human,” Beauvoir grapples with the existential problem of despair and the temptations of bad faith. Celebrating her newly found freedom and academic achievements, Beauvoir still struggles with the masochistic asceticism of her Catholic upbringing and longs for love, fearing a solitary future bereft of the comforts of woman’s traditional role. Beauvoir’s student diary thus allows us to trace the development of her early philosophy within the context of her life, while providing as well an intimate view of an academic world in transformation…. When the diary opens, with an entry dated August 6, 1926 Beauvoir is grappling with a central problem of her early life and philosophy, the conflicting moral obligations to self and others. Recounting a pilgrimage to Lourdes with an aunt, Beauvoir recalls feeling “ashamed” when faced with the physical suffering of the invalids: “[O]nly a life which was a complete gift of oneself, a total self-abnegation seemed possible to me.” But then, anticipating her critique of self-abnegation in The Second Sex, Beauvoir rejects it, describing the “absolute gift” as “moral suicide.” She vows, instead, to achieve an “equilibrium” between the duty to self and the duty to others. In the August 12, 1926 diary entry, Beauvoir frames the problem in metaphysical terms, referring to one part of herself “made to be given away,” and another “made to be kept and cultivated.” Later, in the November 5, 1926 entry, Beauvoir returns to the problem, writing that she split her “existence into two parts”: one part “for myself” and the other part “for others,” that is “the bonds that unite me with all beings.” Beauvoir’s 1926 description of existence “for myself” and “for others” lays the ground for her later philosophical work on the problem of the Other, as in her 1943 metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay, where the main female protagonist struggles to reclaim an existence for herself instead of existing solely for others, and in The Second Sex (1949) where Beauvoir argues that women are forced to assume themselves not as they exist for themselves but solely as they exist for men, thus as the absolute Other. During the course of the 1926 diary, Beauvoir’s efforts to reconcile these two “parts” of her existence are complicated by various influences, including her reading of Henri Bergson, the leading French philosopher of the early twentieth century. Beauvoir quotes at length in her 1926 diary from Bergson’s Essay on the immediate data of consciousness, which she describes, on August 16, as “a great intellectual rapture.” This diary entry may surprise those who remember the reference to Bergson in Beauvoir’s Memoirs: “I would not have been at all pleased if someone had prophesized that I would become a kind of Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed to move me” (MJFR 288). In this case as in so many others, Beauvoir’s diaries present a very different picture. In the August 16 diary entry, Beauvoir is critical of Bergson’s “impersonal” philosophical voice. But she lauds his methodological “appeal to intuition," which brings philosophy in contact with the « palpable reality » of life, as more characteristic of literature than philosophy. Beauvoir quotes Bergson’s celebration of the « bold novelist » able to tear aside « the cleverly woven web of our conventional self, » and reveal the « fundamental absurdity » of impressions underneath. « Nobody has better than he … defined the art of the modern novelist » Beauvoir writes, suggesting Bergson’s influence on Beauvoir’s developing literary philosophical method. Beauvoir writes, in the August 16 entry, that she is “thrilled” by Bergson’s “analysis of the two aspects of the self,” the authentic inner self and the external social self. For Bergson, unlike Beauvoir who is concerned with serving others as well as the self, our responsibility is wholly to the self and its freedom, which we discover only by breaking through the superficial “crust” of the social self. If his ethic of individual freedom complicated Beauvoir’s search for an ethical “equilibrium,” Bergson’s methodological turn to intuition and rejection of philosophy’s sole reliance on reason might have appealed to a young women trying to enter the male world of philosophy and make it her own…. (shrink)

For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors such as Burke, Constant, and Mill, a powerful representative assembly that freely deliberated and controlled the executive was the defining institution of a liberal state. Yet these figures also feared that representative assemblies were susceptible to usurpation, gridlock, and corruption. Parliamentarism was their answer to this dilemma: a constitutional model that enabled a nation to be truly governed by a representative assembly. Offering novel interpretations of canonical liberal authors, this history of liberal political (...) ideas suggests a new paradigm for interpreting the development of modern political thought, inspiring fresh perspectives on historical issues from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. In doing so, Selinger suggests the wider significance of parliament and the theory of parliamentarism in the development of European political thought, revealing how contemporary democratic theory, and indeed the challenges facing representative government today, are historically indebted to classical parliamentarism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 281-299 [Access article in PDF] Eighteenth-Century Anticipations of the Sociology of Conflict: The Case of Adam Ferguson Lisa Hill Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, is a most interesting figure in the history of sociological thought. Though sometimes perceived as a secondary figure, there have been some attempts to recover him as one of, if not (...) the first "sociologist." 1 Much has been written about Ferguson's contribution to modern social science; 2 this article focuses upon his highly prescient work in the area of conflict theory. It is important to note at the outset, however, that Ferguson's inspiration for these apparently novel insights is classical. His early social theory is curious because it "straddles traditions"; 3 on the one hand he owes a profound debt to classical civic humanism, [End Page 281] but on the other his work quite authentically signposts the emergence of social science proper. This bridging of traditions in Ferguson is a key theme of this paper.Ferguson relies heavily upon conflict in his explanation of historical processes and in the securing of social order. Conflict generates many positive unintended consequences; it leads to the formation of the state, formal defense institutions, and large scale communities; and it plays a pivotal role in the development of the moral personality and contributes to the maintenance of stability and social cohesion. Conflict preserves the balance of powers in government and prevents the encroachment of despotism. In this regard, then, conflict cannot be regarded as wholly unnecessary, destructive, or undesirable but as integral to progress and the march towards civilization. 4Gladys Bryson has noted that Ferguson's exposition of conflict was original with him and "set him off from the conventional position of his century." 5 Even so the benefits of conflict and dissension had been canvassed long before by Tacitus and Machiavelli, both of whom influenced Ferguson's analysis. 6 In it he challenges the false dichotomy promulgated by contractarians of tranquil society on the one hand and violent, isolated chaos on the other; rather, he argues, we are social beings with belligerent tendencies. He also confronts the Aristotelian (and later Hobbesian) premise that the key purpose of society is stability and social harmony. Instead, Ferguson lays great stress on the positive benefits of competition and conflict in our social development and in the maintenance of community. Conflict is just as natural as repose and may even be equally desirable. In this Ferguson indicates his debt to Socrates' suggestion that "some circumstances in the lot of mankind" prompt us to be social, while others prompt us "to war and dissension." 7 As a highlander, Ferguson was well acquainted with the realities of conflict. He also had a brief but lively career as chaplain to the Black Watch Regiment, 8 and it seems likely that his unique views on the positive aspects of "opposition" were reinforced by this experience.Because of this emphasis Ludwig Gumplowicz identified Ferguson as the first significant exponent of the "group struggle" theory of social development. 9 [End Page 282] Ferguson's discussion of conflict and its unintended effects is also partly responsible for his modern reputation as "father of sociology"; 10 and although it is doubtful that he deserves the title, Ferguson was probably the first thinker to place so great an emphasis upon the positive aspects of conflict. 11 The discussion also anticipates nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflict theory in positing conflict as an authentic medium, even form, of solidary association, there is an early dialectical historiography in which class conflict is shown to give rise to constitutional government. A particularly interesting aspect of the discussion is Ferguson's anticipation of Norbert Elias's work on the social function of competitive sport, particularly its role in the process of achieving "civilization."Because of Ferguson's providentialism and in particular his emphasis on the virtue of beneficence, 12 John Bernstein has suggested that "Ferguson's admiration for the qualities revealed in conflict constitute... (shrink)

Amid a devastating economic crisis, two tragic events coming from the outside – the wave of immigration and Islamic terrorism – have radically changed the profile and significance of the space we call Europe. Given a paradigm leap of this sort, philosophical reflection is in a position to exert its creative power more than other types of knowledge. But this can only happen if it is able to go beyond its own lexical boundaries, by turning its gaze outside itself. (...) Here the leading Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito looks at how various strands of German, French, and Italian thought have achieved this outward turn and successfully captured international attention by breaking with the language of early nineteenth-century crisis philosophies. When analyzed from this novel perspective, the great texts of Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, as well as works by the latest Italian thinkers, are cast in a new light. From the relationship and tension between them, reconstructed here with extraordinary theoretical sensitivity, a form of thought can arise that is equal to the challenges faced by Europe today. This erudite and wide-ranging analysis of European thought in the light of the crises facing the continent today will appeal to students and scholars of philosophy, critical theory, and beyond. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Writing and Authority in Early ChinaLothar von FalkenhausenWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95.Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority during the (...) Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations.In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes.In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13).Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of... (shrink)

The novel use of symbolism in early modern mathematics poses both philosophical and historical questions. How can we trace its development and transmission through manuscript sources? Is it intrinsically related to the emergence of symbolic algebra? How does symbolism relate to the use of diagrams? What are the consequences of symbolic reasoning on our understanding of nature? Can a symbolic language enable new forms of reasoning? Does a universal symbolic language exist which enable us to express all knowledge? (...) This book brings together a collection of papers that address all these and related questions which were initially posed at a conference held in Ghent (Belgium) in August 2009. Scholars working on philosophy of science, history of philosophy and history of mathematics provide an insight into the role and function of symbolic representations in the development of early modern mathematics. The papers cover the period from early abbaco arithmetic and algebra (14h century) up to Leibniz (early 18th century). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction by Jing JiangYingying HuangJing Jiang. Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 144 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9780924304941.One of the Association of Asian Studies’ Asia Shorts series, Jing Jiang’s monograph is a delightful 130-page read including notes and a bibliography. It contributes new and cross-cultural perspectives to the (...) Chinese SF scholarship that has recently been invigorated by a plethora of translations into English, animated discussions at conference panels and themed lectures, and book-length studies such as Nathaniel Isaacson’s Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (2017), which focuses on China’s early twentieth century, and Hua Li’s Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (2021), which deals with works published between 1978 and 1981, to name just a couple. Jiang’s book covers both periods and the time in between with a purpose to investigate “how Chinese science fiction participates and intervenes in Chinese conceptualizations of the modern at critical junctures over the last century” (1), which Jiang achieves through comparative readings of texts brought into dialogue via translation. A shared theme of the texts studied is, as the book title suggests, the creation of a “new people,” either through edification or high-tech means such as bioengineering. Therefore, the interventions by science fiction that this study is concerned with are chiefly in debates about modern citizenry, subjectivity, and humanity in China’s twentieth century, when science fiction enjoyed its first two “booms.”This book has an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction offers a brief history of Chinese science fiction and announces the author’s intention to “situate Chinese science fiction within a dynamic model of world literature” (2). Jiang makes two crucial points: first, Chinese science fiction is a product of translation and transculturation, which [End Page 591] requires an intertextual and comparative study; second, contrary to its designation as a popular genre in the West, science fiction in China has been a form of elite literature and even a part of statist thinking. While this introduction may seem a bit long for a short book with “conciseness” as one of its marketing guidelines—the account of Lu Xun’s early life and turn to literature, for example, may be a little too elaborate for its purpose (10–12)—it lays a solid foundation for discussions about science fiction’s translingual dimensions and role in China’s nation-building discourse to develop through the chapters.The expansive first chapter, “Medicine for the Mind, Panacea for the Nation: How Did the Stories of Science and Fiction Become One?” is yet another historical survey, occasionally repeating points from the introduction, but this time of the background, genesis, and early growth of science fiction in China from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century (i.e., the late Qing dynasty [1644–1911] and early Republican era [1912–49]). Jiang gives a detailed account of occurrences deemed important to the rise and confluence of fiction and science within China’s nation-building discourse, including literati intellectuals’ promotion of “new fiction” and the dissemination of scientific knowledge, highlighting the roles played by central figures like Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and John Fryer. Jiang makes the illuminating observation that Fryer’s stipulation of a “new novel” for a fiction contest he organized in Shanghai in 1895 foreshadowed China’s literary realism and the vernacular movement (30), and her remarks about translation, Chinese science fiction’s inherent hybridity, and its mission to cure the nation well echo the book’s central argument about the genre’s interventions.A shorter chapter follows, entitled “Scientifically Formed or Reformed: Bioengineering and Other Fantasies about a New Species of National Subjects,” which examines early science fiction stories about manufacturing humanity and argues that these texts “gave rise to a literary vision that believed literally in the malleability or programmability of the soul” (39). During the first boom of Chinese science fiction in the 1900s, translations of and sequels to Western stories showcase the debate about science’s power of shaping the soul... (shrink)

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (...) demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 399-400 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 810. Cloth, $45.00. Jonathan Israel's goal in this excellent book is to show that we cannot fully understand the high Enlightenment—the age of the philosophes (...) and the French Revolution—without looking at the work and influence of that "most unusual and loneliest thinker" (to borrow a phrase from a later admirer): Spinoza. Israel gives us a detailed and nuanced account of the history of ideas in early modern Europe, focusing especially on the generations before Voltaire and Rousseau. Not only does Israel describe the general struggle between Enlightenment ideas and the status quo ante, he also discusses in depth the tensions between "mainstream" Enlightenment and its "radical" wing. More precisely and importantly, Israel argues that the high Enlightenment ought to be seen as the outcome of "a four-way conflict between Newtonians, neo-Cartesians, Leibnitio-Wolffians, and radicals" (715), a conflict that took place across Europe and whose dust had essentially settled by 1740. Thus, Israel is arguing against the view that the French philosophes were the dominant force in the intellectual world that led to the Revolution, against the view that Newton and Locke played a dominant role throughout Europe, and against the view that there were several distinct enlightenments with different national characters.What is meant by the term "radical Enlightenment"? According to Israel, radical Enlightenment comprises several views and tendencies in the realms of science, theology, and politics: in scientific matters, it embraces naturalism, mechanism, and materialism; in theological matters, it denies a moral order to the universe, a providential god, the Judeo-Christian(-Islamic) account of creation, miracles, and reward and punishment in an afterlife, and is critical of the idea of the divine inspiration of religious texts; in political matters, it unequivocally supports republicanism, even democracy; and, in all matters, it argues for the necessity of toleration and the "freedom to philosophize." For those who know Spinoza's philosophy, this ought to sound familiar.Israel's book is divided into five parts. In the first, he sketches the general intellectual milieu of early seventeenth-century Western Europe. The second part describes Spinoza and his circle and the philosophy of the Ethics and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In Parts III and IV, Israel discusses the immediate reactions to Spinozism, the varieties of radical Enlightenment made possible by Spinoza, and the "intellectual counter-offensive" to naturalism, materialism, atheism, and republicanism. Part V concerns the "clandestine progress" of Spinozism and radical ideas in different countries after the banning and censorship of so many radical works, and, in a brief epilogue, Israel argues that it is Rousseau who effectively reconciled mainstream Enlightenment thought with its radical relative. This is a lot of territory to cover, and Israel covers it admirably, offering illuminating discussions of other key figures of the time: Leibniz, Malebranche, Bossuet, Locke, Bayle, Wolff, Vico, Diderot, and La Mettrie. Another strength of Israel's book is, however, the extent to which he portrays thinkers (some radicals, some reactionaries) and works that are less familiar to most working in the field today. We learn not only about such figures as Bredenburg, Fontenelle, Le Clerc, Leenhof, and Boulainvilliers, but also, in a charming but unfortunately short chapter, about Spinozistic novels from the eighteenth century.As someone trained in a philosophy department to work on the history of philosophy, I felt uneasy in one respect with this book. While Israel emphasizes the battles between philosophies and ideas, he does not concern himself so much with the process of doing philosophy. That is, if there is a failing in this book, it is that we are presented with descriptions of philosophical views without always being given an adequate account of why such views were held by individual thinkers or how the theses of the radical Enlightenment, say, are related to each... (shrink)

From its very beginning the Royal Society was regarded by many, if not most, of its founders as centrally concerned with practical improvement. How could it be otherwise? The study of nature was not only a pious act in and of itself – a reading of the book of nature – but it was also the way in which God's Providence would provide discoveries for the relief of man's estate. The early ideologues of the Society, such as Robert (...) Boyle and Thomas Sprat, continually returned to the usefulness of natural philosophy in that sense. They were no doubt stimulated in this not only by the narrow purpose of gaining support for their novel institution but also by quite genuine beliefs about the role that natural philosophy could play in creating a stable political and economic order through which prosperity might increase and the years of civil war be left behind. However, by the late seventeenth century the Society, especially after the demise of the history of trades programme, became much more a deliberative forum than a projective organization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 21-39 [Access article in PDF] Capability and Language in the Novels of Tarjei Vesaas Catherine Wilson I THOUGH RELATIVELY UNKNOWN to English-speaking readers, Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) is recognized as one of the great Scandinavian novelists and literary innovators of the last century. His oeuvre is substantial, extending to thirty-four volumes published between 1923 and 1966, many of them translated into English and European (...) languages. He was one of four nominees for the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, and he received a number of other awards and citations in the course of his life. At the same time, his work has failed almost entirely to generate a secondary literature going beyond plot summary, stylistics, and moral approval, and even that literature remains strongly regionalized. 1 Vesaas wrote in nynorsk or "New Norwegian," the minority language of the country created from south-central dialects and distinct from the official, bureaucratic bokmal. He settled permanently on a farm in the remote Telemark district of Norway and assumed no role in European culture as critic or essayist, refusing to discuss his own work in literary or philosophical terms. As a result, analytic and comparative studies have proved difficult to launch.The present essay is intended to provide one such analytical study, addressed specifically to the philosophical themes of ethical resignation, the precariousness of communication, and inwardness. These are familiar themes in twentieth-century literature. In his study of the "literary conquest of the void," R. M. Adams shows how Moravia, Musil, and Beckett amongst others make use of devices of paralysis, immobility, exhaustion, and incomprehension that have their origins in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century, notably in Baudelaire [End Page 21] and Gogol. 2 Literary modernism rejected certain nineteenth-century conventions of plot and character, but did not abandon the fascination of the preceding century with nihilistic themes. Vesaas's work demands to be read in this literary context. The novels, at once semirealistic and highly stylized, deal almost exclusively with rural people and their struggles against the elemental forces of nature. The main characters are often children and adolescents who suffer some degree of helplessness. Simple contrasts are posed: warmth and cold; loss and retrieval, childbirth and death. Agricultural cycle motifs abound. The choice of protagonists and the dominance of vitalistic and biological themes pose the threat of sentimentality and preciousness, but it is avoided by the ubiquity of devastation and destruction in the moral landscape. According to Randi Brox's note in the Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature, the early novels in particular "advocate as the highest goal in life an accepting, contented attitude toward the human condition." 3This judgment reflects what might be termed a judicial-theological picture of fiction. On this view, a novel constitutes a testing ground for discovering what sort of world we live in and what pursuits are possible and worthwhile. Various alternatives are set up as hypotheses, and novels prove and disprove them through narrative demonstrations of the causal effects of adopting them. False theories of the human world and untenable values are subject to refutation. This template is surprisingly useful, not only with respect to the nineteenth-century novel, with its apparent tendency to confident judgment, but even to modern fiction. Moravia, for example, can be seen to be awarding divergent roles to characters and allowing the qualities they represent to struggle for supremacy. 4Yet poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism have cast doubt on the notion that, to the extent that they are important, such contests can ever be decided, and it is increasingly clear that the greatest nineteenth-century novelists, Hardy and Eliot, did not regard the hierarchy of values as settled and demonstrable. Persons, we are coming to understand, are more plausibly seen as sites of conflict; thus fictional representations of persons are repositories of opposing values. Vesaas's novels reflect such an understanding of persons and values, and so the judicial-theological template is inapplicable.The critical view that Vesaas's novels are essentially instructions in adaptation is untenable, because the goal of... (shrink)

The paper studies semiotic values in advertisements appearing in German Catholic periodicals in Silesia in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study is grounded in the Tartu School of Semiotics and shows shifts and hierarchies in the semiotic valuations of particular commodities. Collected advertisements were classified into four main groups: (1) books, (2) church art, (3) church and devotional accessories, (4) everyday life commodities. We motivate the claim that the group (2) of the advertisements (...) in the Catholic press we analyzed was the driver for the introduction of the remaining two categories of ads, hence the study of this group is pivotal for our analysis. The parameters of center, periphery, and “border,” as between the sacred and the profane are also taken into account, within the structural interrelation of Sr (religious system) (cf. Zaliźniak et al. 1975 [1962]) and Sc (commercial code). Assuming the usefulness of explanatory mechanisms, in conclusion a heuristic interpretation is provided in terms of the relations of semiotic primes. (shrink)

The word “romanticism” designates in German as in other European languages a broad movement in literature that originated at the beginning of the nineteenth century and has often been characterized as an opposition to the preceding age of rationalism and Enlightenment. Situated between the classicist schools of taste of the previous century and the realistic and naturalistic trends in literature of the later nineteenth century, Romanticism or romantic literature is the product of the creative power of the (...) imagination; it appeals to the emotions, has a preference for the mysterious aspects of nature, and shows a strong predilection for the past, the Middle Ages, and mythological traditions. With its strong affinity to the novel, romantic literature departs from the classical forms and the classicist canon of literature, but when these classical forms were nevertheless used by the authors of this movement, something new was created – the romantic tale, the romantic drama, and romantic poetry. The great romantic authors in Germany were E. T. A. Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Brentano, Arnim, and Fouqué. There is both a narrower and a broader notion of Romanticism in Germany, the broader also relating to painting (Friedrich, Runge) and music (Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bartholdy, Wagner). Romanticism had a great impact on the general view of the world and was influential in the rise of the historical consciousness, the revival of a religious spirit, and the emergence of a conservative political attitude. As far as philosophy and the sciences are concerned, Romanticism is associated with figures such as Schelling and Schopenhauer, the development of a philosophy of art, of nature, and of the subconscious. On the whole, Romanticism is one of those movements that shaped an entire age and manifested itself down to the most particular features of popular belief and scientific interest. (shrink)

The present article traces the changes that took place within the Genevan church between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These changes resulted from a number of different factors, but especially from the evolution in theological and other, broader intellectual parameters. The analysis focuses on the spirited debates that surrounded the Consensus Helveticus, a formula which was adopted in Geneva in 1679 and to which all pastors were required to subscribe. When the Genevan church decided in (...) 1706 no longer to require subscription, it did so – among others – for the freedom of conscience on articles not necessary to salvation, and thus embarked on a long road of theological reflection which led it eventually to abandon, within the space of only several decades, the orthodox theology that had dominated the seventeenth century. As result of this evolution, the eighteenth century saw a slow but definite change in the image the church of Geneva held for the rest of European Calvinism. ☆ This article is an uptated English translation of «De l’exemplarité au soupçon: l’Eglise genevoise entre la fin du XVIIe siècle et le début du XVIIIe» in W. Kaiser, C. Sieber-Lehmann et C. Windler (éd.), Eidgenössische «Grenzfälle»: Mülhausen und Genf/en marge de la Confédération: Mulhouse et Genève (Basler Beiträge zur Geschichtswissenschaft 172), Bâle, Schwabe et Co, 2001, 273–92. I thank Keith Tribe for his translation and Albert Gootjes for his suggestions for updating. (shrink)

Historians often compare the relationship between humanists and scholastics in the early sixteenth century to a battle. In such accounts, the Parisian Faculty of Theology plays the role of a major combatant keeping humanists away from religious studies. This article paints a different and more harmonious picture of humanists and scholastics in the decade before the Reformation. It draws on hitherto little explored evidence from manuscripts authored by official orators at the University of Paris: their speeches (...) to graduating students at the Faculty of Theology in 1510 and 1512. It will be argued that the speakers celebrated both humanist and scholastic competences and the speeches themselves demonstrate that eloquence had a role to play within the institution. In this way, the article adds nuance to our understanding of how the Faculty of Theology viewed humanists and introduces important new sources to the history of universities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Writing and Authority in Early ChinaLothar von FalkenhausenWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95.Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority during the (...) Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations.In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes.In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13).Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of... (shrink)

In this paper I assess how Guy Vanderhaeghe’s early fiction criticizes the class-based and civil movements of post-1960s Saskatchewan through the recurring character of Ed. The protagonist of “Man Descending” and “Sam, Soren, and Ed” from Man Descending, the uncollected “He Scores! He Shoots!” and the novel My Present Age, Ed both condemns and epitomizes the contaminated and seductive gestures of the movements’ influences and enterprises. Vanderhaeghe deploys layers of social criticism: the first comments on the new (...) urban progressive generation—the BMW socialists—while another manifests a counter-criticism that comments on those who challenge social progress, questioning their motives and the credibility of their critique. But what is a BMW socialist? A sociopolitical chameleon hiding behind pretense? Ed describes such a creature as a former “nay-sayer and boycotter” who “intended to dedicate his life to eternal servitude in a legal-aid clinic,” but then “affluence did him in” and now “his ass [is] cupped lovingly in the contoured leather seats of his BMW” (Man Descending 237–38). Vanderhaeghe’s early works criticize the contemporary middle class and progressivist movements of the second half of the twentieth century through this sociopolitical rogue—who in turn becomes a post-rogue. For Ed is ironically undercut by a counter-narrative that is often sub-textual, resulting in a fascinating appraisal of social ignorance, immobility, and unproductivity rather than of any specific ideology. (shrink)

Bachelard regarded the scientific changes that took place in the early twentieth century as the beginning of a new era, not only for science, but also for philosophy. For him, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics had shown that a new philosophical ontology and a new epistemology were required. I show that the type of philosophy with which he was more closely associated, in particular that of Léon Brunschvicg, offered to him a crucial starting point. Brunschvicg never (...) considered scientific objects as independent of the mind, and as a consequence questions such as the existence of particles independently of the mind, theory or apparatus, were absent from his philosophy, which was rather aimed at analyzing the mind critically, and above all historically. Bachelard accepted the fundamental ideas of Brunschvicg’s philosophy; however, his own reading of contemporary science enabled him to go beyond it, as shown by his emphasis on the social production of knowledge, and by his removal of the distinction between ideas and technologically produced objects of knowledge. For him, modern science teaches philosophy that knowledge is not a phenomenology but rather a ‘phenomenotechnique’. I argue that Bachelard’s view that philosophy ‘should follow science’ stems from moral considerations.Keywords: Gaston Bachelard; Léon Brunschvicg; Phenomenotechnique; Chosisme; Theory of relativity; Quantum mechanics. (shrink)

신빈곤이라 지칭되는 현대의 빈곤 양상은 단순히 소득의 불평등, 생존이 불가능한 “극심한 빈곤extreme poverty ”의 상태로 국한되는 것이 아니라 심리적 무기력함, 사회적 배제, 역량의 부족, 시간의 빈곤, 위험에의 노출 등의 복합적 차원에서 드러나고 있다. 따라서 현대 빈곤에 대한 연구 역시 이와 상응하는 방식에서 다각화되어야 할 것이다. 본 논문은 일차적으로 신자유주의로 대변되는 현재의 경제적 세계화의 상황이 국가 간의, 국가 내부의 불평등을 심화시키고 있음에 주목하면서 이러한 불평등으로 야기된 한국 농업의 신빈곤의 양상을 푸코의 통치성 논의를 통해 검토할 것이다. 나아가 이러한 검토를 기반으로 한국의 농업 (...) 이주 여성 노동자를 신빈곤의 주체로 구체화시킴으로써 이들에게 가해지는 문화적, 맥락적 불평등의 현실을 지적하고 이의 빈곤한 삶을 통해 체감되는 다양한 차원의 신빈곤적 요소를 드러내고자 한다. 지금까지 한국 사회의 빈곤에 관한 연구가 소득중심, 가구주 중심, 도시지역 중심적 차원에서 주류적으로 진행되어 왔다면 본 논문은 "빈곤의 여성화 Feminization of poverty ”라는 세계적 추세를 견지하면서 이로부터 한발 더 나아가 “빈곤의 여성화 ”가 주목하지 않았던 특정한 주체-농업 이주여성 노동자-를 호명하고자 한다. 그리하여 궁극적으로 “빈곤의 여성화 ”속에서조차 보이지 않았던 ‘빈곤속의 빈곤’한 여성의 삶을 담론화시킴으로써 신빈곤에 대한 비판적 성찰의 기회를 마련하고자 한다. (shrink)

First Words, Last Words charts an intense "pamphlet war" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. The book explores this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics, or Mīmāṃsā, and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Vedānta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. At the heart of this (...) dispute lies the role of sequence in the cognitive processing of textual information, especially of a scriptural nature. Vyāsatīrtha and his grand-pupil Vijayīndratīrtha, writers belonging to the camp of Dualist Vedānta, purported to uphold the radical view of their founding father, Madhva, who believed, against a long tradition of Mīmāṃsā interpreters, that the closing portion of a scriptural passage should govern the interpretation of its opening. By contrast, the Nondualist Appayya Dikshita ostensibly defended this tradition's preference for the opening. But, as the book shows, the debaters gradually converged on a profoundly novel hermeneutic-cognitive theory in which sequence played little role, if any. In fact, they knowingly broke new ground, and only postured as traditionalists. First Words, Last Words explores the nature of theoretical innovation in this debate and sets it against the background of comparative examples from other major scriptural interpretive traditions. The book briefly surveys the use of sequence in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutics and also seeks out parallel cases of covert innovation in these traditions. (shrink)

Nobilitas is a study of the history of aristocratic philosophy from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century that aims at providing an alternative to the liberal democratic norms, which are propagated today as the only viable socio-political system for the world community. Jacob reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the social and cultural development of European civilization has, for twenty-five centuries, been based not on democratic or communist notions but, rather on aristocratic and nationalist notions. Beginning (...) with the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and continuing through Renaissance and Baroque aristocratic philosophers, the German Idealists, and English and Italian nationalists, the study ends with the transformation of aristocratic philosophy in nineteenth century Germany into racist elitism. As such, the study includes a survey of the philosophical bases of racism and anti-Semitism. These topics have been systematically excluded from academic and political debate since the end of the last Great War. This study is a pioneering work in understanding and changing political ideologies. (shrink)

Three early 20th-century attempts at unifying separate areas of biology, in particular development, genetics, physiology, and evolution, are compared in regard to their success and fruitfulness for further research: Jacques Loeb’s reductionist project of unifying approaches by physico-chemical explanations; Richard Goldschmidt’s anti-reductionist attempts to unify by integration; and Sewall Wright’s combination of reductionist research and vision of hierarchical genetic systems. Loeb’s program, demanding that all aspects of biology, including evolution, be studied by the methods of the experimental sciences, (...) proved highly successful and indispensible for higher level investigations, even though evolutionary change and properties of biological systems up to now cannot be fully explained on the molecular level alone. Goldschmidt has been appraised as pioneer of physiological and developmental genetics and of a new evolutionary synthesis which transcended neo-Darwinism. However, this study concludes that his anti-reductionist attempts to integrate genetics, development and evolution have to be regarded as failures or dead ends. His grand speculations were based on the one hand on concepts and experimental systems that were too vague in order to stimulate further research, and on the other on experiments which in their core parts turned out not to be reproducible. In contrast, Sewall Wright, apart from being one of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s, opened up new paths of testable quantitative developmental genetic investigations. He placed his research within a framework of logical reasoning, which resulted in the farsighted speculation that examinations of biological systems should be related to the regulation of hierarchical genetic subsystems, possibly providing a mechanism for development and evolution. I argue that his suggestion of basing the study of systems on clearly defined properties of the components has proved superior to Goldschmidt’s approach of studying systems as a whole, and that attempts to integrate different fields at a too early stage may prove futile or worse. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than (...) harm.—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

The article is dedicated to analyzing the nature of genius in the context of the development of fiction about artists. From the biographies of the famous Renaissance artists by G. Vasari, who made one of the first attempts at chronicling the lives of geniuses of his time, to modern fictionalized biographies of genius artists – we can trace the desire of writers to comprehend the nature of the artists and sculptors’ genius. The foundation of the concept of genius can (...) be found in Immanuel Kant’s works, which synthesized theories developed previously and influenced the understanding of genius by future generations. The paper analyses the consonance of Kant’s aesthetics with the concept of genius in fictionalized biographies of F. Goya, M. Bashkirtseva, V. van Gogh, P. Gauguin, O. Novakivskyi, K. Bilokur, P. Picasso, V. Tsymbal, S. Karaffa-Korbut and other artists, while focusing on the Ukrainian texts of the 20th–early 21st centuries. The research attempts to single out and analyze elements of conceptualizing the notion of genius in novels, including the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime in art, recognition of genius in society, the gender aspect of genius, the issues of heredity, and others. The representation of the image of genius in visual arts, iconography, and the cult of genius are discussed within an intermedial framework. The research relies on literary and art criticism methodology and comparative and intermedial studies. (shrink)

This timely, well‐written book illuminates an aspect of Brazilian science that has long been neglected, for two major reasons. The first is that it is only in the past two decades that the scientific past of Latin America, including Brazil, seemed to merit systematic academic investigation, and only with this change have scholars discovered, or rediscovered, several important, but forgotten, developments, such as the one Julyan Peard analyzes in this study. The second reason is that, although there is a substantial (...) literature on late nineteenth‐ to early twentieth‐century colonial science and medicine—which is considered almost synonymous with tropical medicine—none of it treats Brazil or any of the other Latin American countries because, even though they fall within the tropical zone, they were formally independent nations from the early 1800s onward.Peard rejects this adherence to the old criterion for defining “tropical.” Drawing on a respectable collection of both primary and secondary sources, she tells the story of the Escola Tropicalista Bahiana , which was founded before the revolution in bacteriological knowledge and the great European colonial expansion. The idea for the school originated, Peard says, with “a group of nineteenth‐century doctors in Brazil who, in attempting to adapt Western medicine to more fully engage with the problems of their tropical country, sought novel answers to the age‐old question of whether diseases of warm climates were distinct from those of temperate Europe. In their search, they used the tools of Western medicine to confront European ideas about the fatalism of the tropics and its people, and to argue in favor of Brazilian expertise.”The text is organized into five chapters, whose titles clearly describe both the structure of the narrative and Peard's main points, as well as part of her conclusions: “The Escola Tropicalista Bahiana: A Creative Response in Adversity”; “The Politics of Disease”; “Race, Climate, Medicine: Framing Tropical Disorders”; “Physicians and Women in Bahia”; and “Moving into Mainstream.” In her introduction Peard presents a useful discussion of the earlier literature on her topic, pointing out her contribution to several relevant fields. Throughout, the text is structured to highlight the tension between the Tropicalistas and European science: “although they [the Tropicalistas] resisted aspects of European cultural authority that harped on Brazilian, and Latin American, inferiority, they wanted to gain the mantle of legitimacy that they believed only European science, as the leader in universal science, could bestow on them.” Peard shows, chapter by chapter, the Tropicalistas' sometimes conscious, sometimes intuitive strategies to build up an innovative scientific field, a project that entailed issues of national identity and the regional response to the centralized imperial authority of Rio de Janeiro. Almost half the volume is devoted to supplementary material: three useful appendixes, notes to all the chapters, a list of primary sources, the bibliography, and a well‐elaborated index—all of which testify to the quality of both Peard's research and her book as a whole.It is important to stress here that Peard relies on what one could call the “new” Brazilian history and sociology of science, particularly in the fields of medicine and public health. Despite its vigorous growth, both quantitatively and qualitatively, this historiography still remains more or less confined to Latin America, its wider dissemination impeded by language barriers. In using and commenting on the bibliography of this new historiography, Peard respects the local intellectual production while helping to enrich the traditional set of references. Nevertheless, and although I warmly recommend the book, I regret that she did not fully incorporate the conclusions reached by this recent historiography, preferring instead to present essentially the same picture drawn in previous works, a picture based on the view that “in the few instances of research work being carried out in Brazil before 1900 such work was sporadic, isolated … or incapable of being self‐sustaining.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 203-221 [Access article in PDF] Taste and "the Conversible World" in the Eighteenth Century Rochelle Gurstein In the middle of the nineteenth century a series entitled "Afoot" appeared in the literary magazine Blackwood's (1857), describing an Englishman's travels through Europe. In one installment the narrator tells of meeting a Yankee, who had just come from Florence the beautiful. (...) Our friend approached him warily, and began to ask him what he had seen, what admired. Then, after a little circumlocution, he dashed at once, in medias res, by saying, "Of course, you were in raptures with the Venus de Medici?"--expecting an answer such as he would himself have given. "Well, sir, to tell you the truth, I don't care much about those stone gals," was the answer he received. Our friend collapsed. Had anyone in his presence denied the orthodoxy of St. Augustine, or abjured the Thirty-Nine Articles, there would have been more sorrow in his anger, but scarcely more indignation. The Venus de Medici--a classic chef d'oeuvre--a thing which Praxiteles might have touched with his chisel, or Pericles have looked upon, to be called a "stone gal"! Had he doubted its genuineness, or spoken of it as a specimen of secondary art, he might have been deemed critical, hypercritical; but this was a classic impiety, an irreverence, a profanity. As if that were not enough, the Yankee's words betrayed "uncivism" and "egoism." He was undoubtedly among that type who "under their home influences, and the shadow of their own nationalities... have no aptitude for general civism." 1There is of course much that is familiar in this vignette, especially the contrast between Old World sophistication and American naivete. The unflappable Yankee who is irremediably unaware and proud of it and the overly fastidious, overly aestheticized Englishman were both destined to become stock characters in novels depicting Americans abroad, and here we see an early confrontation [End Page 203] between their rival sensibilities. Even though the Venus de Medici has now completely vanished from the modern imaginary museum of masterpieces, it was once among the most beloved, celebrated, and reproduced statues of antiquity; its repute was far beyond that of the Mona Lisa today, and from the time it was unearthed at the end of sixteenth century through the nineteenth century it was the indisputable exemplar of beauty. So it is no surprise that the Englishman, who, like all cultivated people of his day, was well versed in the world of classical antiquity, was mortified by the American's obliviousness before this "classic chef d'oeuvre"; for it revealed a man so utterly lacking in taste and sensibility that he did not have the wherewithal to know that he had been "irreverent" when he called the Venus de Medici "a stone gal."Where this anecdote moves into less familiar territory, however, is the Englishman's characterization of the Yankee's taste as uncivic and egoistic, as provincial and narrow. His willingness to judge a total stranger, to hold him accountable to a single standard of judgment, could not be in sharper contrast to our contemporary attitudes. Today subjectivity is celebrated in the common saying that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion and taste; what is more, diversity of tastes is regarded as a measure of personal freedom and democracy. Thus, the Englishman's quickness to judge would be evidence of elitism, oppression, even cultural imperialism, and this response no longer belongs to naifs who cannot tell the difference between the most revered sculpture and stone gals; it now belongs to the sophisticated, educated, modern (and postmodern) person. Today the very idea of drawing distinctions--not only between practiced taste and first impressions but also between art and commercial entertainment, art and obscenity, high and popular culture, scholarship and propaganda, let alone between beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, excellence and mediocrity--is suspect. And since the capacity to make precisely these kinds of distinctions was once understood as the essence of... (shrink)

Pélops sur un cratère du début du IVe s. av. J.-C. découvert à Pella L’article se réfère à un fragment de cratère en cloche à figures rouges découvert dans la région de la nouvelle entrée du site archéologique de Pella. Le vase présente un intérêt tout particulier, en raison de la rareté du thème iconographique. Sur la face principale est représenté le char de Pélops dans lequel devait aussi se trouver Hippodamie. Des éléments de la scène évoquent un enlèvement, ainsi (...) que la course de chars entre Pélops et Oenomaos. Le vase est attribué à l’atelier du Peintre d’Athènes 12255 et daté du début du ive s. av. J.-C. Cette datation permet de relier le thème iconographique du cratère à la victoire du roi Archélaos dans une course de chars aux jeux Olympiques, ainsi qu’à la fondation des fêtes olympiques en Macédoine. Notre cratère fait partie des nombreux vases à figures rouges arrivés dans la capitale macédonienne, qui confirment les échanges commerciaux avec l’Attique. (shrink)

From mid-2020 until early 2023, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a series of essays that, when summed up, represents a valediction for English and American literary studies as practiced during the last half century. Some of the Chronicle authors, enjoying the privilege of tenure, speak for the profession as it was in healthier times. Others, representing a younger generation of scholars, hold on to unstable teaching positions. All are disconsolate.The essays, collected on the Chronicle website, look (...) back to those earlier times to seek the reasons for today's dreary situation. In dirgelike recitations, external causes are named and excoriated: the drying up of state funding, the growth of administrative personnel at the cost of faculty positions, the reluctance of debt-ridden students to concentrate on studies not leading to jobs, and the general parental and public resistance to anything considered effete. But at least one contributor to the series, Michael Clune of Case Western Reserve University, will not permit his fellow teachers to escape whipping: “Our fuzziness about what we do raises in the minds of our publics the not unreasonable assumption that we don't know what we're doing. The crisis in the humanities requires that we be open and honest about our discipline's rationales.”What does such a call to action mean? Does Clune ask for more exacting curricular control, more agreement as to pedagogical mission, a greater consensus about certifiable merit in professional advancement? About specific alterations to the system, he is not forthcoming, and this generalization applies to most of the other contributors as well: the prognosis is clear but the cure beyond anyone's reach. Why? To propose radical changes to the humane disciplines, even when most necessary, invites deep resistance. If professors are largely political liberals, they are also pedagogical archconservatives. Clune is nevertheless right in asking fellow professors for candor about what they are doing. The one strategy that cannot work is rehearsing their woes in public. Nor can a focus on the theoretical skirmishes in which they entangle themselves create the kind of consumer demand—student demand—that is needed. Unless they can collectively devise (or recover) intellectual attractions to draw in a new generation of students and fill lecture halls and seminar seats with them, humanists will be even further shunted to the sidelines.Another essayist, herself determined to get matters straightened out and thereby save the discipline, imagines her colleagues uniting to establish a stricter definition of what they collectively should do. Hannah Walser of the Harvard Society of Fellows believes that professors teaching literary works have been all too satisfied with the wasteful art of praising or derogating the performance or rhetorical brilliance of their colleagues: “In literary studies’ more affirmative modes, elaborate assurances of our colleagues’ competence—those more-a-comment-than-a-questions that praise a talk as beautiful, brilliant, powerful, and so on—end up standing in for actual arguments about the rightness or wrongness of a claim.” Literary works do not function as truth-telling “claims,” however, but as imaginative creations entertaining both truth and falsehood, the “real” as well as the “unreal.” In order to read those creations, and to share those readings with others, teachers must agree on the empirical terms, the evidentiary tools, to use. Walser rightly wants everyone to play the same game with the same rules. Only then can teachers come to terms with literary objects whose ultimate value is determined by something direct and visceral—aesthetic pleasure. But while Walser is right to call for procedural agreement, such a call will not, by itself, entice students to return to the classroom.In another essay, Katie Kadue looks back nostalgically to a time when, in its modest way, the world of literary studies had “stars,” when the English Institute featured brilliant personages at well-attended meetings, when jobs were plentiful and seminal books about theoretical issues were everywhere discussed. To Kadue, a young scholar, such moments seem all the more dazzling and attractive by virtue of their absence today. Were “stars” again to capture collective attention, a sign would be given that the humanities could recover its health and make literary study attractive to students again.Hence the Chronicle publication concludes with portraits of two humanists, Sianne Ngai and Mark McGurl, who have gained some recognition and acclaim. Perhaps, as the Chronicle suggests, with them a new constellation of stars is coming into view.Ngai is the author of three impressive and widely discussed monographs, the most recent being Theory of the Gimmick (2020), which, with a complexity uniquely its own, asks the reader to study the mixed attraction and repulsion produced by the intrusion of a “gimmick”—something in a text that draws attention to itself and exposes the inner workings of the text. When we encounter a gimmick in a text, it provokes both suspicion and pleasure: “When we say something is a gimmick, we mean it is overrated and deceptive, that you would have to be a sucker to fall for it. Yet gimmicks exert a strange hold on us. As with a magic show, we can enjoy the gimmick even while we know we are being tricked.” Other gimmicks—arousing “small” or “minor” affects—have been overlooked or dismissed in conventional literary discourse. Ngai, entranced by them, also argues that, beyond suspicion, pleasure, and annoyance, gimmicks have the power to reveal deep cultural, economic, and political forces shaped by contemporary capitalism.Ngai's strategy is ingenious and idiosyncratic. Its apparent strength is that it can explain everything—literary, economic, political, and cultural—that comes within its range. But its very originality renders it inoperable by anyone, be it student or teacher, other than its inventor. Like Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner, Leslie Fiedler, and Stanley Fish before her—each of them working with a home-grown methodology—Ngai herself is her theory. Her inimitability prevents her theoretical procedures from becoming a generally shared answer to the classroom problems of literary study.McGurl, a sociologist of textual production, readership, and consumption, is more conventional than Ngai. He is certainly more omnivorous. He is interested in everything out there for the reader or listener to acquire, high or low, bad or good, by way of book, podcast, recording, or any other means or genre. His recent book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon shows how the company “has created the psychological and temporal conditions that not only alter how fiction is bought, sold, distributed, and read, but also how it is produced.” Might it be possible—and attractive—for teachers and students to follow and extend procedures like those of McGurl? An immense panorama of verbal matter might thereby await classroom after classroom. With much to read and much to hear, professors and students could examine and evaluate data aplenty. Might classrooms and seminar rooms once again be filled, this time by sociologists of literature? Professor Clune's query—“Why should students listen to me? What claim do I have on the public?”—could then be answered: We and you hereby claim everything written as our province; we, a new generation of humanists, will thus have work enough.Alas, for universities and colleges to make such a move—to resolve that literary study should embrace all of writing—would be to forfeit the one inestimably valuable form of intellectual capital now and forever readily available to them: that unique body of works known as literature: poetry, drama, fiction. Some professors appear to believe that this capital asset is wanting, depleted as a source, and therefore impotent to generate exciting scholarly work or teaching—which is why, for the last four or so decades, “theory” in its many varieties has proved so seductive. But theoretical discourse, derivative and secondary, proves vapid without the fiction, poetry, and drama from which it derived and on which it survives. Recognizing the rare power to be found in the works themselves and nowhere else, it is to those works that teachers must somehow return. Only then will there be compelling reason to hope that students will follow. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Xenophon of Ephesus: His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the NovelGareth SchmelingJ. N. O'Sullivan. Xenophon of Ephesus: His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the Novel.Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995. xii + 215 pp. Cloth, DM 140, SFr 135, ÖS 1092. (Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, 44)To those interested in the ancient novel the name of J. N. O'Sullivan is familiar (...) from his A Lexicon to Achilles Tatius (1980), published in the same series as the book under review. We have come to expect good things from O'Sullivan, and we are not disappointed in this new book. Whole books devoted to Xenophon of Ephesus (hereafter Xenophon) are infrequent: we have earlier ones from Schissel von Fleschenberg (1909) and Schmeling (1980). The reasons for this paucity can be put simply: scholars think that as a novel it is not very interesting or revealing (but, since there are only five Greek novels and Xenophon's is short, it is always included in studies) and that the Greek is inelegant, repetitious, stereotypical, wooden, more transparent than subtle, and paratactical wherever possible. Scholars with a love for texts like pathologists for dead bodies have dissected the corpus of Xenophon (likewise that of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri) and declared it officially an epitome. A few recalcitrants (Hägg, Schmeling), however, have filed a minority opinion that the text is basically intact. Under Merkelbach's scalpel (Roman und Mysterium [1962] 91–113) the [End Page 660] Ephesiaca was discovered to have been written originally as an Isis–Roman (a thinly veiled story of the Isiac mysteries), then clumsily reworked by a devotee of the Sun–god Helios, and finally epitomized by yet another clumsy person. Thus it is not surprising that monographs on this novel are exceedingly few. It seems now, however, that many scholars might have been mistaken about the Ephesiaca, that its language, while not inspired, is not to be judged strictly on literary standards but also on those used to assess oral literature. And further, that Xenophon (or someone else by that same name) wrote the first of the Greek novels, and that Chariton, stripped of his title as "father of the novel," borrowed much from Xenophon—though it is admitted that Chariton refined what he imitated. O'Sullivan's conclusions are startling, perhaps even benign heresy, though the ancient novel mafia is rarely regarded anyway as orthodox (see Bowie and Harrison, JRS 83 [1993] 159–78).Even at the risk of committing a serious biographical fallacy I feel compelled to point out three bits of information at the start: the first is obvious and reveals only that O'Sullivan has a long background of work in the novel; the next is that he is working on a Homeric dictionary and that his comparisons between the oral nature and the formulae of Homeric epics and the language of Xenophon, though at first blush unlikely, are well researched and argued (he will conclude later in the book that there are close connections between epic and the birth of the novel); and third that his Irish heritage has brought him into contact with O'Grady's Silva Gadelica, a collection of Irish tales in prose which derive from oral tradition. He thus mixes the unlikely concoction of one part Greek oral poetry of Homer with one part Greek of Xenophon by using the Irish tales as a kind of catalyst or as an anachronistic missing link, and concludes by comparing the oral nature of Homeric epic with that of Xenophon.In his opening chapter O'Sullivan marshals strong forces to counter the received opinion which dates Xenophon after Augustus (4.2.1, reference to ) and even into the second century because of his reference to the irenarch of Cilicia, an office supposedly established after 116–117 (2.13.3 ). O'Sullivan needs to date Xenophon as early as possible because later he will try to show that Xenophon is the earliest extant Greek novelist and that Chariton (ca. A.D. 50?) borrowed from him.O'Sullivan then moves on to Xenophon's critics, who usually have little good to say about... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:INDIFFERENCE AND ENVY: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF MODERN ECONOMY Paul Dumouchel University ofQuébec-Montréal 1. Girard and economics René Girard himself has not written very much on economics, at least explicitly. Though his works are full ofinsights into and short remarks on the sacrificial origin of different economic phenomena or the way in which mimetic relations and commercial transactions are often intertwined and act upon each other.1 Unlike religion, psychology, (...) psychoanalysis, literature and anthropology, the analysis of modem and traditional economies from the point ofview ofmimetic theory has never been carried out by Girard himself, but for the most part by other people, for example, in the French speaking world, which I know best, essentially by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan in La violence de la monnaie (1982) and by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and myself in L'enfer des choses (1979) and as well as others, such as, by Mark Anspach, Andrew Feenberg, P. Lantz, A. Orléan, G-H. de Radkowsky and Lucien Scubla in various works on economy, economic anthropology, or the place and role of money in literary texts.2 In a way, this is somewhat surprising since the relationship between mimetic and economic phenomena, at least in a broad sense, was seen quite early on. For example, soon after the original publication Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961) the French Marxist Lucien Goldman wrote in his Pour une sociologie du Roman (1964) that Girard's work was the most important book to read in order to understand 1 For example, Mensonge romantique (18-23); Des choses cachées (82-88). 2 See Anspach, Feenberg, Lantz, Orléan [passim], de Radkowski. 150Paul Dumouchel the effects of economic alienation on literature since Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel (1920). Moreover in a footnote in Les origines du capitalisme (1971) Jean Baechler suggested that those wishing to understand the nature of the infinite desire for acquisition which capitalists economies have institutionalized should read Girard's book.3 Whatever the reason for Girard's relative disinterest in economic phenomena others have not been prevented from tackling this problem and it bears witness in a special way to the dynamism and intellectual power ofthe mimetic theory that its application to the field ofeconomics has essentially, ifnot entirely, been due to the work of others rather than to the efforts of René Girard himself. 2. The substantivist-formalist debate In the late 1 940's and early 1 950's a debate began that divided (and still divides) the community ofeconomists and ofanthropologists interested in economic phenomena. It concerns the nature ofeconomy and is generally referred to as the substantivist-formalist debate. It was first formulated in the works of the Austrian economist, Karl Polanyi.4 In The Great Transformation (1945), a book on the history ofthe formation and organization ofthe market economy in Europe from the late 1 8th to early 20th centuries, Polanyi already argued that the modem market economy was a rare historical accident. Furthermore Polanyi said, unlike what liberal and economic ideologies pretend, thatthere is nothingnatural aboutthe market. It does not correspond to any spontaneous human tendency to barter and exchange, and it does not arise by itself as soon as certain conditions are satisfied. Onthe contrary, modem markets have been put into place through sustained and voluntary state policies which consciously destroyed traditional solidarities, authorized the unlimited sale of land and labor and literally created the labor market, for example, in England through the Reform Bill of 1834 that repealed the existing Poor Laws which had prevented the free circulation of labor. The system formed by market economies, the balance of power among European states and the gold 3 Interestingly, 24 years later, in the second vastly enlarged edition of that work, Le capitalisme, (1995) the reference to Girard has disappeared though the text ofthe original work, which now constitutes the second part of the book, is otherwise reprinted in its integrity. 4 Actually Polanyi in The Livelihood ofMan (1977) sees the origin of the debate in Carl Mengers, Principles ofEconomics [1871]. Let us say then that it found its first modern formulation in the work of Polanyi. Indifference andEnvy... (shrink)

It is commonly thought that before the introduction of quantum mechanics, determinism was a straightforward consequence of the laws of mechanics. However, around the nineteenth century, many physicists, for various reasons, did not regard determinism as a provable feature of physics. This is not to say that physicists in this period were not committed to determinism; there were some physicists who argued for fundamental indeterminism, but most were committed to determinism in some sense. However, for them, determinism was often (...) not a provable feature of physical theory, but rather an a priori principle or a methodological presupposition. Determinism was strongly connected with principles of causality and continuity and the principle of sufficient reason; this thesis examines the relevance of these principles in the history of physics. Moreover, the history of determinism in this period shows that there were essential changes in the relation between mathematics and physics: whereas in the eighteenth century, there were metaphysical arguments which lent support to differential calculus, by the early twentieth century the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus led to concerns about its applicability in physics. The thesis consists of six papers. In the first paper, "On the origins and foundations of Laplacian determinism", I argue that Laplace, who is usually pointed out as the first major proponent of scientific determinism, did not derive his statement of determinism directly from the laws of mechanics; rather, his determinism has a background in eighteenth century Leibnizian metaphysics, and is ultimately based on the law of continuity and the principle of sufficient reason. These principles also provided a basis for the idea that one can find laws of nature in the form of differential equations which uniquely determine natural processes. In "The Norton dome and the nineteenth century foundations of determinism", I argue that an example of indeterminism in classical physics which has attracted attention in philosophy of physics in recent years, namely the Norton come, was already discussed during the nineteenth century. However, the significance which this type of indeterminism had back then is very different from the significance which the Norton dome currently has in philosophy of physics. This is explained by the fact that determinism was conceived of in an essentially different way: in particular, the nineteenth century authors who wrote about this type of indeterminism regarded determinism as an a priori principle rather than as a property of the equations of physics. In "Vital instability: life and free will in physics and physiology, 1860-1880", I show how Maxwell, Cournot, Stewart and Boussinesq used the possibility of unstable or indeterministic mechanical systems to argue that the will or a vital principle can intervene in organic processes without violating the laws of physics, so that a strictly dualist account of life and the mind is possible. Moreover, I show that their ideas can be understood as a reaction to the law of conservation of energy and to the way it was used in physiology to exclude vital and mental causes. In "The nineteenth century conflict between mechanism and irreversibility", I show that in the late nineteenth century, there was a widespread conflict between the aim of reducing physical processes to mechanics and the recognition that certain processes are irreversible. Whereas the so-called reversibility objection is known as an objection that was made to the kinetic theory of gases, it in fact appeared in a wide range of arguments, and was susceptible to very different interpretations. It was only when the project of reducing all of physics to mechanics lost favor, in the late nineteenth century, that the reversibility objection came to be used as an argument against mechanism and against the kinetic theory of gases. In "Continuity in nature and in mathematics: Boltzmann and Poincaré", I show that the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus in the nineteenth century led to concerns about its applicability in physics: through this development, differential calculus was made independent of empirical and intuitive notions of continuity and was instead based on mathematical continuity conditions, and for Boltzmann and Poincaré, the applicability of differential calculus in physics depended on whether these continuity conditions could be given a foundation in intuition or experience. In the final paper, "Determinism around 1900", I briefly discuss the implications of the developments described in the previous two papers for the history of determinism in physics, through a discussion of determinism in Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann. I show that neither of them regards determinism as a property of the laws of mechanics; rather, for them, determinism is a precondition for science, which can be verified to the extent that science is successful. (shrink)

In this paper, private gardens are portrayed as spaces and implements of aristocratic passion for plant collecting, of competition within the gentry, as well as of scientific professionalisation for botanists. This paper traces the early history of botanical collections in the Russian Empire from the 18th to the early 19th century as part of an elite culture which encouraged amateur patrons to invest in expeditions, gardens, and, consequently, in professionals to manage such projects. Young graduates of (...) European universities who began their careers working at private botanical institutions could later successfully apply for academic positions. The circulation of specimens had developed as a key element of botanical collection and an important basis for the networking of professionals and amateurs around the world. This paper argues that collecting plant specimens became an important means for engaging in “power games” and even “plant diplomacy.” These new responsibilities significantly increased botanists' status as experts. A diverse group of personalities, such as the Empress Catherine II, King George III of England, the industrialist Prokophy Demidov, aristocrat Alexei Razumovsky, Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, the academician Peter Simon Pallas—all shared a passion for botanical collecting and were engaged in power games at different levels, using botany as an instrument of influence. (shrink)