Investigates the relationship between philosophy and fiction in the 16th century, especially in French vernacular writing. The texts under consideration treat one or more branches of learning, including metaphysics and alchemy but also contain an element of fiction.

Non pas Pourquoi la fiction?, ni A quoi pense la fiction?, ni même Que fait la fiction?, mais : Comment fait la fiction? Comment la fiction fait-elle pour défendre ou illustrer une morale, alors qu'elle se définit par son indépendance à l'égard du monde dit réel? Peut-être, d'ailleurs, n'est-ce qu'en tant qu'elle est défictionnalisée que la fiction peut promouvoir ou publier une morale. Mais il est, pourtant, des morales qui contiennent une part constitutive de (...) fiction, et qui, en quelque sorte, appellent la fiction : ainsi de la morale intuitive de Victor Hugo, ou de la morale de la liberté de Sartre. La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Hugo, Tolstoï, Sartre : à première vue, les auteurs convoqués ne sont pas tous faits pour s'entendre. C'est bien pour cela qu'ils sont ici réunis. Car la fiction et la morale ne sont pas plus immuables l'une que l'autre, et c'est dans leurs intermittences, dans leurs fluctuations, dans leurs variations qu'il convient d'étudier leurs noces improbables. (shrink)

Evil remains a primary source of inquiry in contemporary literature of French expression, even among its most secular writers. In considering French-speaking authors from France, Belgium, the United States, the Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this collection delineates a rich international perspective on some of the most disturbing events of our time. Each essay testifies to the urgency expressed in works of fiction to give an account of human catastrophes, from the Shoah and the Rwandan genocide to the (...) terrorist attacks of September 11, and the ongoing oppression of women in Islamic nations. Themes underlying this volume include an investigation into the origins of evil, its representations in writing, and the ethical responsibilities of authors who write on human suffering. Contemporary fiction on evil confronts us with fundamental questions: Can evil be attributed to intentionality, is evil "subconscious," or is it the result of impersonal forces? Which styles of writing are ethically appropriate or effective for depicting evil? Can we speak of a veritable "poetics of evil" shared by contemporary authors? When does a literary text on evil become "evil"? In providing informed and nuanced answers to these important questions, the scholars engage in crucial theories of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, address a number of issues raised by trauma and genocide studies, and draw from critical frameworks in literary theory on testimony, the limits of representing the extreme, and "transgressive" writing. (shrink)

I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the (...) apologist for imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then, should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than answered. Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is University Professor of English and director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," another contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4, No. 3. (shrink)

By meshing psychology with literary analysis, this book inspires us to view the reading of fictional works as an emotional and seductive affair between reader and writer. Arguing that current teaching practices have contributed to the current decline in the study of literature, Jean-François Vernay's plea brings a refreshing perspective by seeking new directions and conceptual tools to highlight the value of literature. Interdisciplinary in focus and relevant to timely discussions of the vitality between emotion and literary studies, particularly within (...) the contexts of psychology, affect studies, and cognitive studies, this book will open up a space in which the formation of our emotions can be openly examined and discussed. Jean-François Vernay has published extensively in the field of Literary Studies both in French and in English. His books, Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch andA Brief Take on the Australian Novel, focus on Australian fiction. Carolyne Lee is a Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published four books, the latest being Our Very Own Adventure. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself—in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies—as a privileged object of study. Voluptuous Philosophy redefines what is at stake in the emergence of an enlightened secular materialism by showing how questions of figure—how should a body be represented? What should the effects of this representation be on readers?—are tellingly and consistently located at the very heart of 18th-century debates about the nature of material substance. French materialisms of the Enlightenment are crucially invested (...) not only in the development of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter but in the production of specific relationships between readers and the "matter" of the texts that they consume. How, the book asks, did the period's fascination with a markedly immaterial and ephemeral event—the reading of works of fiction—come to coincide with what appears to be a gradual materialization of human subjects: men and women who increasingly manage to envision themselves transfigured, as the century wears on, into machines, animals, and even, in the work of the Marquis de Sade, tables and chairs? In what way did the spread of new philosophies of matter depend upon the ability of readers to perceive certain figures of speech as literally and immediately true—to imagine themselves as fully material bodies even as they found themselves most deeply compelled by disembodied literary forms? More broadly, in what sense does the act of reading literature alter and transfigure our perceptions of what is, and can be, real? Voluptuous Philosophy articulates the gradual coming into being of literature as a distinct arena of textual production with the rise of an enlightened reader who remains abstracted from the bodily symptoms that any given piece of writing may induce in him. The very definition of "the literary" as an autonomous field, this book suggests, may, ironically, be dependent upon the simultaneous construction of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects. (shrink)

This article shows how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century arguments about historical evidence and elite humanist traditions of textual criticism and historical method evolved into the secular political theory of the eighteenth century. It shows how the French crown sponsored scholars who worked on empirical, source-based history as a tool for political prudence, but as this critical historical methodology became public, the crown realized it could be used against its interests, as in the case of the Affaire de Thou. In (...) the mid-seventeenth century, Colbert sought to suppress the old royal humanist historical tradition; however a number of political critics such as Amelot de La Houssaye and Pierre Bayle worked to publicize the tools of historical, political criticism, setting the stage for Enlightenment critics of absolutism such as Durey de Meinières and ultimately Montesquieu and Gibbon. (shrink)

Analyzes principal forces that determined the direction of Camus' thought on ethics and political values.

This collection of essays, on French and francophone prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt and shame in relation to structures of ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 371-373 [Access article in PDF] Book Review French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, by Colin Davis & Elizabeth Fallaize; 160pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, $24.95. Like the Mitterrand era itself, Davis and Fallaize's French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years is somewhat uneven. The election of (...) François Mitterrand in 1981 as the President of the Fifth Republic was a milestone in modern French history. After the conservative politics of the 1960s and 70s, the election of a socialist president and legislature seemed to offer the possibility of a new political and intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency brought sweeping reforms. However, several scandals, continued economic problems and later "cohabitation" with a right-wing legislative majority muted the original verve. Mired in partisan politics, the government often appeared ineffectual.As with the political arena, French fiction of the 1980s was produced under the shadow of another long-standing French institution--the nouveau roman. Again we find a new direction, a turning-away from the past during the 1980s. Yet there was no outright refusal. There were no manifestos or polemical articles written by budding novelists, no claim to Literature. As Annie Ernaux describes her work Une Femme (1987): "Mon projet est de nature littéraire [...]. Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature" (My project is of a literary nature [...]. But I wish to remain, in a certain way, beneath literature (p. 144).This lack of pretension is important, for it helps us better understand the writing of the period. As Davis and Fallaize point out, in the fiction of the Mitterrand years we find a return to history, to the subject, and to storytelling, three areas disdained by the new novelists of the 1950s and 60s (pp. 12-15). But at the same time, there is not an elegiac return to the conventions of the past. There are no didactic tales of Lucien de Rubempré's lost illusions. A good example of this is Patrick Roegiers's Beau Regard (1990), the account of a dinner during which hardly anyone speaks, told by a narrator who knows no one else at the table. Davis and Fallaize note: "In these novels the event is merely an incident, the story no more than an anecdote, and the anecdote merely a fait divers" (p. 147). Although not inconsequential, argue Davis and Fallaize, there is an unquestionable modesty to these texts.In the introduction to their work Davis and Fallaize write: "The aim of the current book is to analyze some of the most important and interesting directions in French fiction through detailed discussions of a selection of texts, all published during François Mitterrand's period as President of the Fifth Republic (1981-95)" (p. 1). This is exactly what they accomplish, selecting six novels--Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), Pennac's Au bonheur des ogres (The Scapegoat, 1985), Semprun's La Montagne blanche (1986), Echenoz's Lac (Lake, 1989), Guilbert's A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save [End Page 371] my Life, 1990), and Ernaux's Passion simple (Simple Passion, 1991)--and spending one chapter on each. They also discuss some of the important features of the era's fiction including memory, especially of World War II, contemporary culture and postmodernism, and autofiction.However, the book's limited goal also leads to some of its problems. As a whole, the work lacks cohesion. Chapters often read like individual essays. Moreover, although some chapters are well-grounded critically and contextually, others are not. Finally, the conclusion is too brief to synthesize aptly the various topics discussed in the previous chapters. The reader does not have a solid grasp of the fictional landscape of the Mitterrand years, but rather, as the introduction indicated, knowledge of "some of the [...] interesting directions in French fiction."One of the most illuminating chapters considers Daniel... (shrink)

I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking’s notion of a “poetics of abandonment.” Lipking’s article was included in an issue of Critical Inquiry entitled Canons, in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence, sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent reformulation of the canon. It (...) may be, as Viktor Shklovsky suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, that literary theory is the novel’s successor, in which case the resurrection of Ovid’s abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation, it is perhaps inevitable that some of today’s male literary critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers. Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary canons but to critical canons as well.In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: “Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth century as if into a mirror” . Thus Gilbert and Gubar—Lipking also cites the examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers—become the most recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking’s article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring. “In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right issues.” Lipking may be calling for “a poetics of abandonment” not in response to a perceived maternal deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly difficult time proving their legitimacy. Joan DeJean is professor of French at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, and she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of Sappho: Sappho’s Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937. (shrink)

This book argues for the ethical relevancy of contemporary fiction at the beginning of the 21st century. The writers discussed in Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture pay close attention to the concrete realities of the everyday world, such as the feelings of isolation created in urban environments; the roles played by sports, drugs, advertising, and the media; and the widespread use of computer, telecommunication, and entertainment technologies. Through reading novels by such writers as David Foster (...) Wallace, Richard Powers, and Irvine Welsh, this book looks at how these works seek to transform the ways that readers live in the world. This book should appeal to scholars of contemporary literature, persons interested in cultural studies, critics interested in ethics, scholars of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, students of contemporary literature, and general readers of contemporary literature. (shrink)

An original reading of fictional narratives that raise the question of what it means to be human in the face of rapidly developing bioenhancement technologies.

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions (...) of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

Over the last two decades, many philosophers have been increasingly inclined to consider science fiction films as philosophical exercises that center on the nature of human consciousness and existence. Albert Camus' philosophy of the absurd, however, has almost never been employed as a constructive perspective that can illumine unexplored aspects of these films. This is surprising, since science fiction films seem to be packed with visions and dialogues that echo the Sisyphean universe. Cosmos and Camus endeavors to set (...) foot on this uncharted terrain. Its first part aims to introduce the main components of Camus' absurdity in such a way that it can be easily applied to the analysis of the films later. Equipped with these Camusean essentials, it delves into an in-depth analysis of two first-encounter films (Contact and Arrival) and two AI films (A.I. and Her). These analyses yield more than an insightful reflection of the absurd contents in science-fiction film. Indeed, imaginative collisions with nonhumans seem to tell us a lot about the nature of the absurd in the human condition, as well as raising the question of whether absurdity is exclusively a human matter. Ultimately, the interpretation of the films illuminates the films themselves just as much as it illuminates, challenges, and expands Camus' concept of absurdity, thus contributing to our current understanding of what the absurd reality is and how we can either live with it or transcend it. (shrink)

Medicine and Ethics in Black Women's Speculative Fiction engages the complex nexus of black women's health, the fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women, and the problems with the inconsistent application of medical ethics that should concern us all through the lens of black women's literary speculation.

_Contemporary Moral and Social Issues_ is a uniquely entertaining introduction that brings ethical thought to life. It makes innovative use of engaging, topically oriented original short fiction, together with classic and influential readings and editorial discussion as a means of helping students think philosophically about ethical theory and practical ethical problems. Introduces students to ethical theory and a range of practical moral issues through a combination of key primary texts, clear editorial commentary, and engaging, original fiction Includes discussion (...) of topics such as world poverty, abortion, animals, the environment, and genetic engineering, containing “Facts and Factual Issues” for each topic to give students an up-to-date understanding of related factual issues. Uses immersive, original short works of fiction as a means to engage students to think philosophically about serious ethical issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men with Muskets, Women with Lyres: Nationality, Citizenship, and Gender in the Writings of Germaine de StaëlSusanne HillmanOn 23 May 1812 Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), Europe’s best-known enemy of Napoleon Bonaparte, set out from her estate on Lake Geneva to escape to England. In her reminiscences, she reflected on the pivotal event as follows:[A]fter ten years of ever-increasing persecutions [...] I was obliged to leave two homelands as a (...) fugitive, Switzerland and France, by order of a man less French than I. For I was born on the banks of the Seine, where his only claim to citizenship is his tyranny. He saw the light of day on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa’s savage sway. His father did not, like mine, devote his fortune and his sleepless nights to defending France from bankruptcy and famine; the air of this beautiful country is not his native air; how can he understand the pain of being exiled from it, when he considers this fertile land only as the instrument of his victories. [End Page 231] Where is his patrie? It is any country that accepts his domination. His fellow-citizens? They are whatever slaves obey his orders.1In this passage, de Staël deliberately links nationality and citizenship. In her view, citizenship status was acquired simply by being born on French soil. Her family’s tireless labors on behalf of the nation added another irrefutable proof of Frenchness. In addition, growing up in France and breathing the country’s invigorating air had created an emotional attachment that a person raised elsewhere simply could not fathom. We thus have a triad of birth/service/sentiment that connects the deserving individual to his or her nation (in this case la grande nation).In this essay I explore de Staël’s understanding of the twin concepts of nationality and citizenship through the lens of gender. Nationality and citizenship were of perennial concern to her thought, partly because of the turbulent times she lived in, partly because of her personal experience in exile. Influenced by history and literature, she early on admired the gallant men with muskets who heroically sacrificed their lives for the glory of the nation. But it was the exceptional women with lyres who were destined to act as the nation’s unifying agents by recreating the gallants’ deeds in writing. By imagining the nation these women fulfilled the supreme task of citizenship. In what follows I will argue that de Staël conceived of the ideal citizen as a woman writer or artist who served her nation by inspiring its members with enthusiasm and virtue.2 In elaborating her view of the superior woman as citoyenne and national muse she made an important contribution to the debate on the nation and the citizen.The only daughter of Louis XVI’s finance minister Jacques Necker and the salonnière Suzanne Curchod-Necker, of Genevan and Vaudois citizenship respectively, de Staël gained fame and notoriety through her brilliant conversational talents, political intrigues, and unconventional relationships with famous men. Though she considered herself a “true Frenchwoman” (véritable française),3 she was a citizen of Geneva and a Swedish subject by marriage, at least until 1803 when she took advantage of the Code Civil [End Page 232] and officially claimed French citizenship.4 Considering this multiplicity of conflicting loyalties, it is not surprising that her major writings reveal a sustained preoccupation with these issues.Despite their undeniable significance for early nineteenth-century European intellectual history, historians have so far devoted scant attention to de Staël’s writings. In fact, in the US, Staëlien studies have largely been dominated by literary criticism and theory.5 This has had the effect of prioritizing her novels over her non-fiction, downplaying the historical context of her oeuvre and, most grievously, ignoring de Staël’s historical contribution to socio-political thought.6 As a result of the complex ways in which her personal experience informed her writing, her oeuvre is best examined as a unified, though certainly inconsistent, whole. Her writings were rarely “products of intense deliberation, but rather reflections... (shrink)

For ten years, between 1903 and 1913, Gertrude Stein saw human relationships as painful mathematical puzzles in need of solutions. Again and again, she converted the predicaments of her personal life into literary material, the better to solve and to exorcise them. The revelation that relationships had a structural quality came to her during the composition of Q.E.D. , when she grasped the almost mathematical nature of her characters' emotional impasse. Stein's persona in the novel comments on their triangular affair, (...) "Why it's like a piece of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see."1 The theory encouraged her to examine such situations as if they were case histories: she continued to study the same piece of mathematics from different angles in Fernhurst , Three Lives , and The Making of Americans . But whatever the sexual arrangements in these triangles, the powerful generally managed to impose their wills upon the less powerful, and the triangles resolved themselves into oppositional structures, pitting two against one. Gradually, when the couple began to replace the triangle as her structural model, Stein composed numerous verbal portraits of couples and their relationships. In two of these, "Ada" and "Two Women," Stein applied her general theory of relationships to the particular puzzle of female friendships because, I think, she felt that women's characters were most intensely molded in same-sex involvements. Although she attempted to "prove" these theories in distanced, deliberately depersonalized prose, we as readers must examine "the complex interplay of self-discovery and writing" from which her portraits emerged.2Stein's portraits of women entangled in familial and erotic bonds seem to invite us into "the process whereby the self creates itself in the experience of creating art"; to read them, we must "join the narrator in reconstructing the other woman by whom we know ourselves."3 This task of reconstruction implies that we must also rethink the place of biography—generally dismissed by New Criticism and its subsequent post-structuralist permutations as "mere" biography—in feminist critical projects. If it is true that "in reading as in writing, it is ourselves that we remake," then feminist critics have a special stake in understanding the biographical, and autobiographical, impulses at work in these activities.4 Stein's portraits, which hover between fiction and biography, raise important questions about the ways in which biographical information can justify our suspicion that female writers may be "closer to their fictional creations than male writers are."5 Recently, feminist critics have adapted psychoanalytic theory to examine the particular closeness of female characters in women's writing or to suggest a related closeness between the female author and her characters. We find it useful to speak of the pre-Oedipal structures and permeable ego boundaries that seem to shape women's relationships. Although Stein used very different psychological paradigms, she approached these same issues in her own studies of female friendships. Realizing that she preferred to write about women, she observed, "It is clearer…I know it better, a little, not very much better."6 In spite of her qualifications, she knew that she could see the structuring principles of relationships with greater clarity when writing from her own perspective.1. Stein, "Fernhurst," "Q.E.D.," and Other Early Writings, ed. Leon Katz , p. 67.2. Elizabeth Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," Signs 6 : 444. For a very useful critical discussion of this complex issue, see Abel, "Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The es of dentity: a Response to Abel on 'Merging Identities,'" in the same issue of Signs .3. Gardiner, "The es of dentity," p. 442.4. Jonathan Morse, "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The Case of Emily Dickinson," The Georgia Review 35 : 271. See also J. Gerald Kennedy's suggestive remarks on the "tension between personal confession and implacable theory" in Barthes' later work .5. Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," p. 444.6. Stein, The Making of Americans, cited in Richard Bridgeman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces , p. 78.Carolyn Burke, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Research on Women, Stanford University, has published articles on French feminist writing and on Mina Loy, whose biography she is now completing. The theoretical implications of this essay will be explored in her related study in progress on feminist biography. (shrink)

Robert E. Myers has assembled a collection of essays which explore aspects of the relationship between science fiction and philosophy. Contributing authors focus on significant issues, questions, and ideas that penetrate to the center of our individual and social conceptions of human existence, and affect the ways in which we attempt to comprehend our world, ourselves, and others. The authors bring to this study the insights of diverse disciplines: philosophy, social science, poetry, linguistics, future studies, medical humanities, and literature. (...) Dealing exclusively with topics relating to science fiction and philosophy they offer an initial exploration of the philosophical problems within science fiction and their implications. (shrink)

This e-book written in Hungarian seeks to reconstruct “the aesthetic” in the modern sense of the word, from the mid-17th century to the 1730s, through the texts of mainly British authors such as John Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Francis Hutcheson, George Berkeley, sometimes using their Spanish and French predecessors for contextualization. It assumes that “the aesthetic” is an unprecedented type of experience that had to be discovered, or rather invented; it is therefore more than a discussion (...) of some old, always existing quality or sensibility in a new theoretical guise. If the words “(school) philosophy”, “art” and “criticism” can be associated with the mostly systematic theories of aesthetics that emerged in the wake of Alexander G. Baumgarten as a loose characterisation, then the words “(popular) theology”, “nature” and “exercise” are even more so with the earlier texts that are on the table here, which played a role in the formation of “the aesthetic”. It seems that in this period, “the aesthetic” is understood above all as a new and intimate link between the sensual and the supernatural or spiritual, in which the former is not just an apropos or disposable means to the latter, but an indispensable and ever-present component that provides a constitutive framework for experience. Its unprecedented modernity lies in its nisus to capture the divine in the sensual and to make it present as sensual. In this new experiential form, both the “nature” of the transcendence and the spiritual economics of the beholder are reconfigured. The new “aesthetic” is connected to and associated with the full experience of life, the joy of existence, the openness to the transcendent through the sensuality of the natural or everyday world, the interplay of external determination and internal spontaneity, the enchanted state of mind experienced in a waking dream, the reinterpretation of the relationship between reality and fiction, the intense existential experience of spiritual and emotional movement provided by walking, wandering, boating or cheerful imagination. (shrink)

This essay does not aim to investigate film-novel relationships per se, although the fact that the two genres now share certain generative procedures may be further evidence that fiction in print and on film lie to a great extent in a unified field not only of diegesis but also of structure. A diachronic or historical approach to the theory of fictional generators would show that, with the shifts which have occurred on present-day aesthetic thought, much of what once was (...) considered to be a static analysis of retrospective rules or established forms could now be regarded as the disguised beginning of generative theory. Aristotle's seemingly static doctrines of dramatic structure, involving such notions as peripeteia, discovery, or unity of action, to the extent that dramatists had consciously or unconsciously followed such doctrines, obviously served the production of their works, as well as their later analysis. In fact, any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of "generator," as does the deliberate adherence to outward forms as rhyme schemes, stanzas, cantos, or chapters. As we shall see, it is not always easy to distinguish between generative formulas and self-imposed forms or limits, such as the sonnet with its fourteen lines, its quatrains, and its tercets. Although the most advanced practitioners of generative theory, like Jean Ricardou, seem to view their work as a radical break with the past and the discovery of an entirely new domain of fiction, literary history would provide innumerable examples of precedents, from antiquity through the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the Gongorists and Baroque poets, and many subsequent groups of writers down to and including the pre-modern and modern periods. Bruce Morrissette has published widely on French fiction of the classical period, Rimbaud and the Symbolist movement, the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet, and on contemporary film. He is the Sunny Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He translated Alain Robbe-Grillet's "ARTISTS ON ART: Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction" for the Autumn 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures (...) the ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel. (shrink)

Immortality is a subject which has long been explored and imagined by science fiction writers. In his intriguing new study, Stephen R.L.Clark argues that the genre of science fiction writing allows investigation of philosophical questions about immortality without the constraints of academic philosophy. He reveals how fantasy accounts of issues such as resurrection, disembodied survival, reincarnation and devices or drugs for preserving life can be used as an important resource for philosophical inquiry and examines how a society of (...) immortals might function through a reading of the vampire myth. _How to Live Forever_ is a compelling study which introduces students and professional philosophers to the possibilities of using science fiction in their work. It includes extensive suggestions for further reading, both fictional and philosophical, and examines the work of such major science fiction authors as _Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, William Gibson_, and _Colin Wilson_. (shrink)

Why do people respond emotionally to works of fiction they know are make-believe? Boruah tackles this question, which is fundamental aesthetics and literary studies, from a totally new perspective. Bringing together the various answers that have been offered by philosophers from Aristotle to Roger Scruton, he shows that while some philosophers have denied any rational basis to our emotional responses to fiction, others have argued that the emotions evoked by fiction are not real emotions at all. In (...) response to this, Boruah contends that fictional emotions are rational because they are based on the same sorts of beliefs that we form about real situations and real people. He illustrates this argument with literary examples ranging from Shakespeare to Tolstoy. (shrink)

Why have theorists approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect? Mark Currie argues that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future are vital for an understanding of narrative and its effects in the world. In a series of arguments and readings, he offers an account of narrative as both anticipation and retrospection, linking fictional time experiments (in Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift) to exhilarating philosophical themes about presence and futurity. This is an argument (...) that shows that narrative lies at the heart of modern experiences of time, structuring the present, whether personal or collective, as the object of a future memory as much as it records the past. (shrink)

Using selections from writers like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree jr., and many others, this collection shows how the imagined worlds of science fiction create hold experiments for testing feminist hypotheses and for interpreting philosophical questions about humanity, gender, equality and more. Four main themes: Part 1, 'Human nature and reality', concentrates on whether there is an intrinsic difference between males and females. Part 2, 'Dystopias: the worst of (...) all possible worlds', portrays misogynistic societies uncomfortably familiar to the early 21st-century reader. Part 3, 'Separatist utopias: worlds of difference', assembles stories that scrutinize both the virtues and vices of separatism. In Part 4, 'Androgynous utopias: worlds of equality', the authors create worlds that anticipate the consequences, good and bad, of perfect sexual equality in education, intelligence, capability, and reproduction. (shrink)

This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary (...) theory and criticism, and history and philosophy of science and religion. (shrink)

Explores the embodied aspects of ownership and private property as these emerge in a range of American literary texts across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Gilles Deleuze's assertion that 'Sartre knew how to invent the New' suggests a vital aspect of the French philosopher, one that departs from the image that has often been presented of him. Criticism of the Soviet Union post 1956, together with the increasing prominence of anti-colonial struggles and a series of experiences that would find their condensation in 1968, pushed Sartre to a continuous rearticulation of his political ideas, on the basis of an intense confrontation with Marx. In Basso's (...) lucid study, here newly translated into English, the expression 'singular universal' seeks to capture the revolutionary potential of individual and collective subjects, illuminating the close but also unstable relationship between history and politics. (shrink)

Although Eddington's philosophy of physics has been subjected to critical re-evaluation in recent years, neither the exact nature of his structuralist views nor his response to criticism by the likes of Braithwaite have been made clear. In this paper I trace, in particular, the incorporation into Eddington's structuralism of the non-classical indistinguishability of quantum objects. His metaphysical view of such objects as the product of group-theoretical analysis is crucial for understanding his response to Braithwaite's criticisms of the whole structuralist endeavor. (...) These criticisms closely resemble more recent attacks on structural realism in the philosophy of science. I conclude with a brief comparison between these more modern forms of structuralism and Eddington's. (shrink)

Why do Americans, and so often, American writers, profess moral sentiments and yet write so little in the traditionally "moralistic" genres of maxim and fable? What is the relation between "moral" concerns and literary theory? Can any sort of morality survive the supposed nihilism of deconstruction? Jefferson Humphries undertakes a discussion of questions like these through a comparative reading of the ways in which moral issues surface in French and American literature. Humphries takes issue with the "amoral" view of (...) deconstruction espoused by many of its detractors, arguing that the debate between the theory's advocates and opponents comes down to two opposing literary and moral traditions. While the American tradition views morality as a rigid system capable of being enforced by injunctions along the lines of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not," the French tradition conceives of morality as a function of a relentless and unsentimental pursuit of truth, and finally, an admission that "truth" is not a static thing, but rather an ongoing process of rigorous thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How The Mule Got Its Tale: Moretti’s Darwinian BricolageGeoffrey Winthrop-Young* (bio)Franco Moretti. Atlas Of The European Novel. London: Verso, 1998. [AN]Franco Moretti. Modern Epic: The World System From Goethe To García Márquez. Trans. Quentin Hoare. London: Verso, 1996. [ME]1. Darwinian Preliminaries1805: Cousin de Grainville, Le dernier homme. A world in which humans have displaced the oceans dies from ecological exhaustion. 1836: Louis Geoffroy, Napoléon et la conquête du monde. (...) A history in which Napoleon wins at Waterloo and becomes emperor of the world. 1854: Charlemagne-Ischir Defontenay, Star ou Psi de Cassiopée. A distant planetary system filled with its own mythologies, histories and migration patterns.... A litany of lost names and titles: dead, discarded, ignored, out of print, reduced to pulp and brief entries in reference books, known only to experts specializing in early French science fiction. Cut off from each other with little sense of coherence or continuity, two generations of writers had been probing the many possibilities of a new literary form, some of them in highly imaginative ways, but nobody could have foretold the fate of what Félix Bodin had named littérature futuriste. Suddenly, the literary equivalent of a mass extinction wiped out a broad spectrum of conjectural imaginations. Did they deserve their fate? Wrong question. Who is to blame for their disappearance? Cui bono? The prime suspect, no doubt, is Jules Verne. “It was as if SF had for sixty years sought in vain for an institutional ‘landing point,’” surmises Marc Angenot, before pointing out that Verne’s success coincided with, indeed was based on, the repression of a wide array of promising alternatives [64]. Displaying that jovial bluntness which in his days passed for commendable virility, he extracted certain formal features from his environment, eliminated the rest, and engineered his selections into a highly marketable literary model. A lot began with Verne, but a lot ended with him, too.At the outset a rapidly emerging set of random and undirected variations opens up a multiplicity of future possibilities; then a choice is made, a selection that locks in one particular variant while locking out the competition. Subsequently, a winner—who need not be the best or most promising candidate, but who by virtue of his selection manages to impose definite constraints on future developments—spawns a tradition that coasts along until another crisis is heralded by yet another round of proliferation and selection. Readers familiar with Franco Moretti’s work will recognize this Darwinian scenario, which provides the theoretical backbone for his analyses. In the programmatic essay “On Literary Evolution” in the revised edition of Signs Taken for Wonders, it allows him to whittle down the development of the European novel from its experimental phase in the eighteenth century to the victory of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century and its subsequent disintegration to what must be the shortest account of the history of the novel ever written: “Novels/novel/novels” [264]. In The Way of the World it helps explain how it was possible for the Bildungsroman “to emerge victorious from that veritable ‘struggle for existence’ between various narrative forms that took place at the [End Page 18] turn of the eighteenth century” [10]. Modern Epic, in turn, uses the Darwinian model to plot the evolution of the hybrid genre announced in its title, while Atlas of the European Novel explains the morphological change novels undergo when they move from one space to another. But why Darwin? Or, since “Darwin” means many different things to many different Darwinists: why this punctuated, nongradualist, highly contingency-tolerant Gouldian Darwin? How much do we gain by applying the proliferation/lock-in sequence to the development of devices, texts, and genres? What motivates the optimism that the Darwinian paradigm may “help us to explain in a new—and better—way numerous questions that literary history has never succeeded in resolving satisfactorily”? [ME 5].But then why raise these arcane questions? Surely, Moretti’s books center on more relevant issues. Atlas is about space—and given the current critical focus on space, what more timely topic could there be? And what more obvious criticism than... (shrink)

The structure of the traditional paradigm -- Narrative fiction as philosophically interpreted in the ancient western world -- Narrative fiction as philosophically interpreted in the modern and contemporary western world -- The structure of the new paradigm -- What makes an artifact philosophy? -- Literature as philosophy -- The special logic of fictive narrative philosophy -- Constructional devices -- How do we judge fictive narrative philosophy? -- When should we use direct discourse philosophy and when fictive narrative philosophy? (...) -- How might fictive narrative philosophy change the academy? -- First order metaethical principles: my own philosophical work on ethics and personhood theory as a first step for ethics & fictive narrative philosophy -- My own work in fictive narrative philosophy. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a “psychoanalytic critic” because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, (...) I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,” and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows—or perhaps I should say playmates.The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom’s psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to show how the represented female psyche refuses and problematizes the dominant concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the “situational-thematic”: studies of Oedipal triangles in fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth. It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions, since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic study of readers’ responses willingly brackets the impossible notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may concern real readers or the reader as psychological everyman . But like the other traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic structure—a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical. Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, which has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling. (shrink)

This study represents a comparison between two radical gestures of literary self-reflexivity: romantic irony and postmodernist metafiction. It examines the impact of early German romantic theory and its central concept of irony on German and English romantic narrative fiction and relates the same to postmodernist self-reflexive novels, including its British and American variants. A primary objective of this comparison is to account for the radical skepticism that postmodernist metafiction voices with respect to the paramount philosophical question of truth and (...) reality. The immanent tension between an absolute idealistic and a radically skeptic position which romantic irony articulates and enacts is conceived of as an important and instructive link to the understanding of postmodernism. (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)