Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the main (...) focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

This book focuses on how we perceive, know and interpret culture across disciplinary boundaries. The study ranges from the Bible and classical works to those by and about men and women in Europe, the Americas and beyond of Native, African, European and different backgrounds.

Introduction: Adorno and Barthes on the question of the right (di)stance -- The pathos of distances in "a world of banished people" -- George Orwell's critique of sincerity and the obligation of tactlessness -- The inferno of saviors: notes in the margin of Elias Canetti's lifework -- A socialism of distances, or on the difficulties of wise love: Iris Murdoch's secular community -- "The world in me": the distantiality of everyday life -- In search of a whole self: Benjamin's childhood (...) fragments -- Annie Ernaux's diaries of the outside -- Gunter Grass's century -- Damon Galgut on emptying oneself for sleep -- Conclusion. (shrink)

It is important for the materialist historian, in the most rigorous way possible, to differentiate the construction of a historical state of affairs from what one customarily calls its "reconstruction." The "reconstruction" in empathy is one- dimensional. "Construction" presupposes "destruction." Almost fourteen years after the death of Jacques Derrida, the least one can say is that his inheritance is as contested and fraught with rivalries, rejections, and appropriations as at the time of the flowering of Deconstruction in American universities in (...) the seventies and eighties. A halt was observed in 1988-89 after the posthumous revelations about Paul de Man's past in Belgium and Derrida's embattled defense of his friend. Today, in France, one often hears that "Derrida a fait l'Ecole mais n'a pas fait ecole," meaning that Derrida passed the entrance examination of the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure where he taught for a long time, where he met Paul Celan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and many other luminaries, whereas he never had a real "school" in France-no real institutional backing beyond the various Parisian places at which he taught later, or those that he founded like the College de Philosophie; his following constituted of young philosophers, only a few of whom became university professors in their turn and disseminated his teachings. However, the mechanisms of power within the French university remained closed to Derrida until the end; besides, he wanted to prevent the stereotyped reproduction currently observed from master to disciple. (shrink)

Can subjective taste regulate social norms or political practices? This book argues that from the late seventeenth century to the present national cultures have sought to regulate the democratic subject through the academic form of arguments about the proper relations of aesthetics to ethics and politics. In so doing it offers a radical reconsideration of the history of modernity, tracing the emergence of criticism as a socio-cultural practice across all the major European nations, and drawing on an extensive (...) range of European literature and philosophy. (shrink)

This book examines the revival of antique philosophy in the Renaissance as a literary preoccupation informed by wit.

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

German classicist's monumental study of the origins of European thought in Greek literature and philosophy. Brilliant, widely influential. Includes "Homer's View of Man," "The Olympian Gods," "The Rise of the Individual in the Early Greek Lyric," "Pindar's Hymn to Zeus," "Myth and Reality in Greek Tragedy," and "Aristophanes and Aesthetic Criticism.".

This state of the art collection offers fresh perspectives on why intersections between literature, religion, and ethics can address the fault lines of modernity and are not necessarily the cause of modernity's 'faults.' From a diverse cohort of scholars from around the world, with appointments in comparative literature and other disciplines, the essays suggest that the imagined hegemony of a Judeo-Christian Western project is neither exclusively true nor productive. However, the essays also suggest that elements of the Western (...) religious traditions are important vectors for understanding modernity's complicated relationship to the past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:François H. Lapointe PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC SURVEY ThL· survey is limited to articles written in English that have appeared in journals published between 1 January 1974 and 31 December 1976. Abbott, Don. "Marxist Influences on the Rhetorical Theory of Kenneth Burke." Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 217-33. Abel, Lionel. "Jacques Derrida: His 'Difference' With Metaphysics." Salmagundi no. 25 (1974): 3-21. Adamowski, T. H. "Character and Consciousness: (...) D. H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, and Jean-Paul Sartre." University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 31 1-34. Adams, D. J. "Style and Social Ideas in Jacques le fataliste." Studies in Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century 124 (1974): 231-48. Adams, Hazard. "Contemporary Ideas of Literature: Terrible Beauty or Rough Beast?" Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 349-77. Adorno, Theodor W. "Lyric Poetry and Society." Telos no. 20 (1974): 56-71. Ages, Arnold. "Bonald and the Jews." Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa 44 (1974): 32-43. Allen, Diogenes. "The Experience of Existence: Jean-Paul Sartre and Iris Murdoch." International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974): 181-87. Allen, Marcus. "Character Development in the Oreste of Voltaire and Les Mouches of Jean-Paul Sartre." CLA Journal 18 (1974): 1-21. Alter, Jean. "A (Terrorist) System of the Novel." Diacritics 6 (1976): 10-15. Altieri, Charles. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." MLN 91 (1976): 1397-1423. Altieri,Charles. "Wordsworth's 'Preface' as Literary Theory." Criticism 18 (1976): 122-146. [On Wordworth and Wittgenstein.] Ames, Van Meter. "Art for Art's Sake Again?" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1975): 303-307. Appleman, Philip. "The Dread Factor: Eliot, Tennyson, and the Shaping of Science." Columbia Forum, N. S. 3 (1974): 32-38. Armstrong, Paul B. " E. M. Forster's Howard's End: The Existential Crisis of the Liberal Imagination." Mosaic 8 (1974): 183-99. Arnold, A. James. "La Condition humaine as Nietzschean Tragedy." Mélanges Malraux Miscellany 6 (1974): 15-24. 366 François H. Lapointe367 Aronson, Ronald. "L'Idiot de la famille: The Ultimate Sartre?" Telos no. 20 (1974): 90-107. Arthos, John. "Du Bartas, Petrarch and the Poetry of Deism." Rice University Studies 60 (1974): 1-17. Artz, Johannes. "Newman as Philosopher." International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976): 263-88. Ausmus, Harry J. "Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Language." The Midwest Quarterly 18 (1977): 169-86. Ayala, Francisco. "Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic." Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 395-414. Bakalar, H. Nicholas. "The Cartesian Legacy to the Eighteenth-century Grammarians." MLN 91 (1976): 698-721. Barnes, Hazel. "Apotheosis and Deification in Plato, Nietzsche and Huxley." Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976): 3-24. Baron, Dennis E. "Role Structure and the Language of Literature." Journal of Literary Semantics 4 (1975): 43-52. Barooskian, Vahan D. "The Aesthetics of the Russian Revolutionary Theatre 1917-1921." British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (1975): 99-117. Bart, B. F. "Hypercreativity in Stendhal and Balzac." Nineteenth Century French Studies 3 (1974-75): 18-39. Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6 (1975): 237-72. Bashford, Bruce. "The Rhetorical Method in Literary Criticism." Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 133-46. Bass, Alan. "Time and the Witch: Femininity, Metapsychology and the Temporality of the Unconscious." MLN 91 (1976): 871-912. Bassett, Sharon. "Towards a Critique of Romanticism: Wordsworth, Pater and the 'Anima Mundi'." Criticism 17 (1975): 262-75. Batchelor, R. "Literature, Society and the Concept of Revolt." European Studies Review 5 (1975): 395-427. Battin, M. Pabst. "Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics, Part 1." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974): 155-70, and Part II in Ibid. 33 (1975): 293-302. Bauer, George. "Sartre and the 'Sugars' of History." L'Esprit Créateur 15 (1975): 377-86. Baumgarten, Murray. "The Historical Novel: Some Postulates." Clio 4 (1975): 173-82. Beauchamp, Gorman. "Gulliver's Return to the Cave: Plato's Republic and Book IV of Gulliver's Travels." The Michigan Academician 7 (1974): 201-10. Bennett, Jonathan. "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn." Philosophy 48 (1974): 123-34. Benzon, William. "Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics." MLN 91 (1976): 952-82. Bergonzi, Bernard. "A Grid of Codes: Views of Structuralism." Encounter 45 (1975): 52-58. Berry, Wanda Warren. "The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950Eva L. CorredorA History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950, by René Wellek; xvii & 458 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, $42.50.The seventh volume of René Wellek’s history of modern criticism may well be the most interesting of his eight-volume (...) monumental oeuvre. Devoted to German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism between 1900 and 1950, it exemplifies most strikingly Wellek’s personal battles with critics who were roughly his contemporaries and closest to his own European background. “I should like to think of my History as ‘elucidatory,’ as not ‘argumentative’ or ‘polemical’” (v, xxi), Wellek writes, but he does not shrink from expressing his own critical perspective usually in a gentlemanly humorous or ironical, but occasionally also quite harsh and stubborn fashion. He insists on the importance of individual value judgments in critical analysis, particularly when they are his own: “I do not believe that... my views and those of my contemporaries will be replaced by completely different assumptions” (“Reflections on my History,” The Attack on Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 145).Since Wellek rejects the idea of a historical determinism and thinks that “an evolutionary history of criticism must fail” (The Attack, p. 144), he provides less a history than a collection of essays in which he offers succinct appraisals of writers, thinkers and critics both as individuals and as participants in the broader literary movements of the century. He presents “portraits” (p. xv), which he also calls “doxographies” (The Attack, p. 143), containing a vast amount of quotations carefully selected to support the authority of his own views or to let them speak for themselves when he would rather not comment.More than any previous work, this volume embodies Wellek’s will and determination to carry on against all odds even when he can no longer do so on his own. An accident in 1986 left him bedridden and dependent on students and secretaries to help him with his research and writing. He was able to draw on a wealth of previously published essays, some of which had been written more than three decades ago. There are some arguable inaccuracies and shortcomings (his canon includes obscure writers but not Adorno and [End Page 259] again no women writers), and problems with his bibliographies and references. Yet Wellek’s unique talent to assemble in one volume half a century of critical commentary on the literatures of half a dozen different cultures appears intact. So do his well-known critical positions.Among his most interesting essays are those on Spitzer, Auerbach, Ingarden, Bakhtin, and Benjamin, highly erudite men in whose company Wellek enjoys moving. On the other hand, some extraordinarily fertile minds and their enormous influence on the post-1950 critical discourse are often quickly dismissed or treated with unnecessary condescension. Young Roman Jakobson “should be forgotten” (p. 372). Freud’s psychoanalysis “seems forced and mistaken” (p. 79). Heidegger “often ascribes a meaning which seems to me absent in the text itself” (p. 89). Wellek’s low tolerance of any but his own interpretation of Dostoevsky appears repeatedly in this volume: Thomas Mann’s views are called “strange” and “distorted” (p. 12), Freud’s “deeply flawed” (p. 79), Bakhtin’s “simply wrong” (p. 357), and Lukács’s “simply... [those] of Communism” (p. 232). Wellek’s anti-historicism is dramatized in essays on Auerbach and his “historical perspectivism” (p. 132), vs. Spitzer who “always saw that there is a point at which historicism must fail” (p. 144). The vacuum of German criticism during the Nazi period is hauntingly demonstrated. The essays on Walter Benjamin, Bertholt Brecht, and in particular György Lukács reveal best Wellek’s notorious feuds with Marxists. Wellek indulges in a sarcastic critique of the Marxist Lukács’s “doctrinaire limitations” (p. 245) and attempts, wrongfully, to “prove” the Hungarian philosopher’s “exaltation of Socialist Realism” (p. 244). When in the mid-eighties and after much encouragement Wellek finally writes an essay on the early Lukács, he... (shrink)

How do conceptions of the literary author change throughout history, and how do they function in specific contexts? The present volume aims to investigate debates on the concept of authorship as a struggle of participants - writers, critics, and scholars - over different conceptions of interpretation. In this struggle all kinds of literary and non-literary norms appear to be at stake. The volume compares the time span around 1900 and 2000, and contrasts the French situation with conditions in other (...) cultures and 'minor literatures'. It addresses the following questions: how did the processes of group-constitution, professionalisation, and (de-)autonomisation of authorship around 1900 and 2000 offer new positionings and roles for writers, and affect conceptions of the author? To what extent can such conceptions of authorship - projected or defended by writers as well as by critics and scholars - be analysed as strategies to claim and legitimise a position in the literary field, respectively in the scholarly field? What light does the analysis of debates about authorship shed on how the social, political or moral relevance of both literature and criticism are defined and defended? (shrink)

Dr Schaffer outlines the development of the mythological school of European Biblical criticism, especially its German origins and its reception in England, and studies the influence of this movement in the work of specific writers: Coleridge Hölderlin, Browning, and George Eliot. The 'higher criticism' treated sacred scripture as literature and as history, as the product of its time, and the highest expression of a developing group consciousness; it challenged current views on the authorship and dating of the (...) Pentateuch and the Gospels, on inspiration, prophecy, and canonicity, and formulated a new apologetics closely linked with the growth of Romantic aesthetics. The importance of this study is that it shows that readings of specific literary texts can intersect with general movements of thought and action through the scrutiny of a clearly defined intellectual discipline, here the higher criticism, which developed as a particular expression of the larger trends in the history of the period. Dr Shaffer throws light on individual works of literature, the formation between England and Germany, and the bases of European Romanticism. (shrink)

This volume collects 17 case studies that characterize the various kinds of translations of the European culture of the last two and a half millennia from ancient Greece to Rome, from the medieval world to the Renaissance up to the ...

Schopenhauer, "le vieux prophete", disait Nietzsche. Paru en 1819 dans l'obscurite la plus totale, son ouvrage majeur, Le Monde comme Volonte et comme representation, lui a valu d'atteindre en 1900 a une celebrite posthume telle qu'aucun penseur n'en a jamais connue - influence que son extension meme a fini par occulter aujourd'hui. Car Schopenhauer a fait cristalliser la crise des croyances qui marque la fin du XIXe siecle, dessinant pour l'avenir la physionomie de l'homme moderne. Un homme qui sous un (...) ciel vide eprouve dans le ressentiment la condition qu'il s'est lui-meme assignee : un intellect regi secretement par des pulsions irrationnelles, une concurrence vitale qui l'isole de ses semblables et de la nature, une sexualite dominatrice mais sans joie, une irresponsabilite aveugle vis-a-vis de son propre comportement comme de l'histoire collective, bref l'enracinement de son existence entiere dans une inconscience fondamentale. Nietzsche et Freud n'ont pas ete les seuls heritiers de Schopenhauer qui a remodele ce territoire invisible sur lequel la litterature edifie son discours. Aussi est-il present, on l'ignore generalement, dans la genealogie de tant de grands ecrivains - de Tolstoi, Strindberg, Maupassant, Conrad, Proust, Pirandello, jusqu'a Kafka, Thomas Mann, Celine, Beckett, Bernhard. Ce sont les voies de ce renouvellement inventif qui sont ici tracees. (shrink)

As the essays in this book attest, in a time of specialization John McCormick chose diversification, a choice determined by a life spent in many occupations and many countries. After his five years in the U. S. Navy in the Second World War, the academy beckoned by way of the G. I. Bill, graduate training, and a career in teaching. Prosperity in the American university at the time meant setting up as a "Wordsworth man," a "Keats man," or a "Dr. (...) Johnson man": all chilling to the author. He chose self-exile in which he disguised himself as an "Americanist" saleable in Europe, and lectured happily in comparative studies: literature, history, and philosophy. Thus the broad range of this volume, both in subject matter and in the span of time it covers. The essays are divided into three sections. First are general and personal essays on a variety of topics, followed by work on individual writers, and third, writings on criticism and theory. A section on Santayana reflects his eight years of research for Santayana's biography. The writings on Spain and toreo result from another long-held interest, together with the author's attempt to alter some of the romantic nonsense about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, too often the entire substance of what the general public knows about Spain. McCormick has long been convinced that without knowledge of bullfighting, the foreigner cannot comprehend arcane and wonderful aspects of the Spanish character. The coda, "Another Music," is an old man's attempt to solve the mysterious algebra of how the world turns now, and how the young appear to the aged. While the volume is diverse in its range of writers--from Whitman in America to Santayana in Europe, taken as a collectivity, these essays provide a sense of the grandeur as well as the decadent in twentieth century politics and aesthetics alike. Written with the literary taste and political non-conformity that still characterizes McCormick, the volume is a treat for the specialist and for the generalist. John McCormick was professor of American Studies in the Free University, Berlin, and is at present professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of Bullfighting, American and European Literary Imagination, Catastrophe and Imagination, Fiction as Knowledge, George Santayana and Seagoing. (shrink)

Clandestine philosophical manuscripts, made up of forbidden works including erotic texts, political pamphlets, satires of court life, forbidden religious texts, and books about the occult, had an avid readership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming objects of historical research by the twentieth century. The purveyors of the clandestine could be found in the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and not least in Paris or London. Despite the heavy risks, including prison, the circulation of these manuscripts was a prosperous venture. (...) After Ira Wade's pioneering contribution (1938), Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment. Topics from philosophy, political and religious thought, and moral and sexual behaviour are addressed by contemporary authors working in both America and Europe. These manuscripts shed light on the birth of pornography and provide an important avenue for investigating philosophical, religious, political, and social critique. (shrink)

The book examines the discourse on attention emerging in the European Enlightenment (1650-1780) with a focus on German philosophy and literature. It argues that this discourse influenced the formation of aesthetic philosophy in the eighteenth century. Notable figures discussed include René Descartes, G.W.F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten.

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, based on a Cambridge dissertation, is a reaction to two related trends in recent writing about early modern European travel literature, both ultimately deriving from the “Orientalist” model presented in the work of Edward Said on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are the trend that views travelers' accounts as more revelatory of European concerns than of the reality of the non‐European societies they wrote about and the trend that analyzes (...) these texts using the techniques of literary criticism and scholarship rather than those of historical investigation. Joan‐Pau Rubiés argues, by contrast, that the texts were the product of a genuine, although sometimes distorted, cultural encounter between Europeans and others; the argument relies on a case study of European writing about south India, particularly the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara. The south Indian literature is less well known than that produced by early modern travelers to larger states such as China and the Ottoman Empire. Even in examining accounts of India itself, the Muslim Mughals of north India get more attention. Rubiés's task is complicated by the fact that there are so many mysteries in Vijayanagara history. The book will sometimes be heavy going for those unacquainted with south Indian history and culture.Rather than beginning with the Portuguese invasion of the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century, Rubiés starts with Marco Polo and discusses fifteenth‐century Italian accounts. This emphasizes the continuity between the late Middle Ages, when Europeans arrived as travelers or merchants, and the early modern period, when Europeans were associated with an imperial project. The bulk of Rubiés's analysis is devoted to a group of texts produced by sixteenth‐century Italian and Portuguese travelers. These travelers and missionaries in south India are less well known in the English historical literature than are their British and French equivalents, and Rubiés has unearthed some fascinating characters. Rubiés defends the accuracy, perceptiveness, and open‐mindedness of the Western observers from charges of ethnocentrism. Since so much contemporary scholarly knowledge of early modern Vijayanagara is derived from these Western travelers' accounts, lauding them for their accuracy involves an obvious problem of circularity, which Rubiés attempts to evade by asserting the accounts' consistency with recently obtained archaeological data.By contrast with the Latin Christian writers whose perceptive readings of Vijayanagara's culture Rubiés lauds, the Muslim writers of north India who wrote about Vijayanagara come off very poorly. Rubiés finds them, despite some insights, mostly unable to break from the paradigm of “holy war,” a permanent structural conflict between Muslims and idolators, to perceive Vijayanagara as it was. In this case it is the Orientals who are the Orientalists.The European writers employed two distinct sets of categories for the analysis of Vijayanagara, one historical, in which Vijayanagara was analyzed in terms of its conformation to an ideal of “civilization,” and one religious, in which it was negatively evaluated as “idolatrous.” Rubiés claims that these travelers' accounts had major effects on the culture of Europe itself, in which the historical discourse expanded and partially incorporated the religious discourse. In a way reminiscent of traditional European intellectual historians such as Paul Hazard, Rubiés finds travel literature, with its interest in human diversity, to be a root of the Enlightenment. His case against the applicability of the Orientalist paradigm is convincing.Although it is, unfortunately, priced beyond the reach of most scholars, this book will be of interest to students of the origins of ethnography and anthropology. Cambridge University Press and the author deserve praise for producing a book with proper bottom‐of‐the‐page footnotes, a full bibliography, and a fine index. (shrink)

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. -/- The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne’s criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon’s Doctrine of the Idols, (...) as well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle’s moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume’s sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin’s and Schmitt’s works on modern scepticism. -/- This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Seit jeher treibt das Lachen als anthropologische Grundkonstante Philosophen, Wissenschaftler und Kunstler um. Obwohl sich der Mensch im Lachen nonverbal verstandigt, bleibt diese soziale Geste hochst komplex, da in ihr Limitation sowie Transgression, Einschliessung wie Ausgrenzung stecken. Lachen wurde in der Geschichte teils als wahnsinnig, blasphemisch oder destruktiv, ebenso haufig aber auch als gutmutig, heilig und heilend konnotiert; Lachen ist ein paradoxes Phanomen. Im Band soll durch Interdisziplinaritat diesem Paradoxon Rechnung getragen werden. Mit Beitragen von Nina Bartsch, Peter Friedrich, Holger (...) Glinka, Niklas Hebing, Felix Huttemann, Alexander Jaklitsch, Anna-Sophie Jurgens, Nicola Kaminski, Peter Kuhlmann, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri, Lenz Prutting, Linda Simonis und Klaus Thomalla. (shrink)

The Critical Circle investigates the celebrated hermeneutic circle, especially as it manifests itself in historical inquiry and literary criticism. Formulated variously in different theories of hermeneutics, the circle generally describes how, in the process of understanding an interpretation, part and whole are related in a circular way: in order to understand the while, it is necessary to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to have some comprehension of the whole. --from the Foreword.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 541-542, July 2012.

Religioses Wissen dient in der Fruhen Neuzeit nicht nur der Bestimmung eines metaphysischen Erwartungshorizonts. Es stellt vielmehr das Fundament der Selbstthematisierung des Menschen in der religiosen Autobiographie und seiner normativen Beschreibung in der religiosen Anthropologie dar. Die Studie zeigt, dass die kulturgeschichtliche Dynamik der Sakularisierung fur das 17. und 18. Jahrhundert darin besteht, Spannungen zwischen erbaulichem und literarischem Schreiben, zwischen religioser und medizinischer Anthropologie und zwischen dem religiosen und profanen Leben zuallererst zu erzeugen. Die Autobiographie und der Bildungsroman ersetzen das (...) Religiose aus Grunden sozialer Evolution. Dies geschieht unter steter Rucksicht auf die sich wandelnden medialen Bedingungen, die die interaktiven Muster der Beobachtung durch schriftbasierte ersetzen.". (shrink)

This volume explores the influence of the Socratic legacy on philosophy and literature in the Russian, East European, and Soviet contexts, including the work of Skovoroda, Radishchev, Herzen, Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Bely, Narbut, Bulgakov, and many others.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950Eva L. CorredorA History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950, by René Wellek; xvii & 458 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, $42.50.The seventh volume of René Wellek’s history of modern criticism may well be the most interesting of his eight-volume (...) monumental oeuvre. Devoted to German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism between 1900 and 1950, it exemplifies most strikingly Wellek’s personal battles with critics who were roughly his contemporaries and closest to his own European background. “I should like to think of my History as ‘elucidatory,’ as not ‘argumentative’ or ‘polemical’” (v, xxi), Wellek writes, but he does not shrink from expressing his own critical perspective usually in a gentlemanly humorous or ironical, but occasionally also quite harsh and stubborn fashion. He insists on the importance of individual value judgments in critical analysis, particularly when they are his own: “I do not believe that... my views and those of my contemporaries will be replaced by completely different assumptions” (“Reflections on my History,” The Attack on Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 145).Since Wellek rejects the idea of a historical determinism and thinks that “an evolutionary history of criticism must fail” (The Attack, p. 144), he provides less a history than a collection of essays in which he offers succinct appraisals of writers, thinkers and critics both as individuals and as participants in the broader literary movements of the century. He presents “portraits” (p. xv), which he also calls “doxographies” (The Attack, p. 143), containing a vast amount of quotations carefully selected to support the authority of his own views or to let them speak for themselves when he would rather not comment.More than any previous work, this volume embodies Wellek’s will and determination to carry on against all odds even when he can no longer do so on his own. An accident in 1986 left him bedridden and dependent on students and secretaries to help him with his research and writing. He was able to draw on a wealth of previously published essays, some of which had been written more than three decades ago. There are some arguable inaccuracies and shortcomings (his canon includes obscure writers but not Adorno and [End Page 259] again no women writers), and problems with his bibliographies and references. Yet Wellek’s unique talent to assemble in one volume half a century of critical commentary on the literatures of half a dozen different cultures appears intact. So do his well-known critical positions.Among his most interesting essays are those on Spitzer, Auerbach, Ingarden, Bakhtin, and Benjamin, highly erudite men in whose company Wellek enjoys moving. On the other hand, some extraordinarily fertile minds and their enormous influence on the post-1950 critical discourse are often quickly dismissed or treated with unnecessary condescension. Young Roman Jakobson “should be forgotten” (p. 372). Freud’s psychoanalysis “seems forced and mistaken” (p. 79). Heidegger “often ascribes a meaning which seems to me absent in the text itself” (p. 89). Wellek’s low tolerance of any but his own interpretation of Dostoevsky appears repeatedly in this volume: Thomas Mann’s views are called “strange” and “distorted” (p. 12), Freud’s “deeply flawed” (p. 79), Bakhtin’s “simply wrong” (p. 357), and Lukács’s “simply... [those] of Communism” (p. 232). Wellek’s anti-historicism is dramatized in essays on Auerbach and his “historical perspectivism” (p. 132), vs. Spitzer who “always saw that there is a point at which historicism must fail” (p. 144). The vacuum of German criticism during the Nazi period is hauntingly demonstrated. The essays on Walter Benjamin, Bertholt Brecht, and in particular György Lukács reveal best Wellek’s notorious feuds with Marxists. Wellek indulges in a sarcastic critique of the Marxist Lukács’s “doctrinaire limitations” (p. 245) and attempts, wrongfully, to “prove” the Hungarian philosopher’s “exaltation of Socialist Realism” (p. 244). When in the mid-eighties and after much encouragement Wellek finally writes an essay on the early Lukács, he... (shrink)

本书讲述了18至19世纪俄国文学的状况。其译本以大量生动的史料深刻地揭示了两个世纪俄国文学的精神特质和发展轨迹.

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements Introduction: From Passions to Language: The Transformation of the ImaginationLocke: Metaphorical Romances Behn: Romance from the Stage to the Letter Shaftesbury: Conversation and the Psychology of Romance Hume: Reading Romances, Writing the Self Richardson: How to Read Romance NotesBibliographyIndex.

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne's criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon's Doctrine of the Idols, as (...) well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle's moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume's sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin's and Schmitt's works on modern scepticism. This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Through discussions of Locke, Behn, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Richardson, this book traces the idea of romance as, in the process of engendering resistance, it comes nonetheless to define the empiricist mind as the reading mind.

Machine generated contents note: Introduction; Part I. Theoretical Views about Pity and Fear as Aesthetic Emotions: 1. Drama and the emotions: an Indo-European connection? 2. Gorgias: a strange trio, the poetic emotions; 3. Plato: from reality to tragedy and back; 4. Aristotle: the first 'theorist' of the aesthetic emotions; Part II. Pity and Fear within Tragedies: 5. An introduction; 6. Aeschylus: Persians; 7. Prometheus Bound; 8. Sophocles: Ajax; 9. Euripides: Orestes; Appendix: catharsis and the emotions in the definition of (...) tragedy in the Poetics. (shrink)

This book explores the representations of Central and Eastern European histories in digital games. Focusing on games that examine a range of national histories and heritages from across Central and Eastern Europe, the volume looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches which can be used in examining historical games - from postcolonialism to identity politics to heritage studies. The book includes chapters on (...) Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia, Czechia, Finland, and (a Western guest with regional connections) Luxembourg. Through the lens of videogames, the authors address how nations struggle with the legacies of war, colonialism and religious strife that have been a part of nation-building - but also how victimized cultures can survive, resist, and sometimes prevail. Appealing primarily to scholars in the fields of game studies, heritage studies, postcolonial criticism, and media studies, this book will be particularly useful for the subfields of historical game studies and postcolonial game studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North AfricaHafid Gafaiti (bio)Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.—George Bernard ShawThose who fight with the pen will perish by the sword.—Slogan of the Algerian Muslim fundamentalistsIf you speak up, you die. If you don’t speak up, you die. So, speak up and die!—Tahar Djaout, the first writer assassinated in the context of the current Algerian political crisisIn the (...) West, censorship has been understood for the most part as the state’s control over cultural production. Many critics in the postwar period, however, have argued that other forms of censorship, such as market censorship, are comparable to the actions of the state. The Christian right’s attacks on art in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s together with Congressional moves to disempower and dismantle the NEA have generated a new set of debates about censorship in this country. It was understood that the extreme right sought to repress cultural productions carrying a message of ethnic and sexual difference, targeting the works by rappers, the photographer Mapplethorpe, Madonna’s music videos, and so on. The right provided rhetoric to support the privatization of public space, the control of language and public images, and the promotion of “safe” art.While many critics refer to this as the “new censorship,” structurally it is exactly the same as the “old” censorship, that is, state control intervening in the liberal subject’s absolute right to free expression. It appears that the dichotomy between the left’s claim for the absolute freedom of the artist and the right’s attempt to repress it is most often conceived in moral terms and is paradigmatic of the Western liberal oppositional categories used to describe censorship.This position views the relationship between art and censorship as either a bourgeois romantic opposition to political order or a corrupt collaboration by opportunistic apparatchiks. It leaves no room for what Michael Holquist, for example, calls “negotiation.” Moreover, it does not take into account the fact that—in Third World or socialist contexts, for example—the way certain intellectuals view their role vis-à-vis the state, society, and/or the people determines their degree of cooperation with censorship mechanisms.The problem with this Manichean vision is that it implies a notion of censorship that is ahistorical: it posits that there is an essential distinction between the censor and the [End Page 59] creator or free mind. On the one hand, as Miklos Haraszti accurately outlines, at least until very recently in the Eastern European context:Censorship is no longer a matter of simple state intervention. A new aesthetic culture has emerged in which censors and artists alike are entangled in a mutual embrace. Nor is it as distasteful as traditional critics of censorship imagine. The state is able to domesticate the artist because the artist has already made the state his home.[5]On the other hand, as Richard Burt rightly suggests:What counts as censorship is not always clear. Indeed, it is hard to see how one could call many contemporary cases censorship without either seriously distorting the traditional understanding of the term or redefining it to include so many practices—ranging from institutional regulation of free expression, market censorship, cutbacks in government funding for controversial art, boycotts, lawsuits, and marginalization and exclusion of artists based on their gender or race to “political correctness” in the university and the media—that the term is overwhelmed, even trivialized, its usefulness as a tool of cultural criticism called into question.[xiii]Recent events, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world such as Algeria, the case on which I will concentrate, show that one cannot seriously conceive the question of censorship along the lines of closed, distinct, conceptual categories expressing absolute oppositions. In other words, it is necessary to take the concept of censorship out of the realm of morality and locate it in the world of history, to displace it from the framework of philosophy and move it to the context of culture.In this essay, I will analyze the exercise of censorship in Algeria in... (shrink)