The Mathematical Book in Nine Chapters, written by Qin Jiushao in 1247, is a masterpiece that is representative of Chinese mathematics at that time. Most of the previous studies have focused on its mathematical achievements, while few works have addressed the counting diagrams that Qin used as a writing system. Based on a seventeenth-century copy of Qin’s treatise, this paper systematically analyzes the writing system, which includes both a numeral system and a linear system. It argues that Qin (...) provided a new representation of mathematics in addition to textual procedures, detailed solutions, and operations carried out with counting rods. Moreover, this new representation was used to connect mathematical practices within and outside the text and should be understood in its textual context. Therefore, Qin’s writing system represents an intermediate phase in the textualization and symbolization of Chinese mathematics in thirteenth-century China. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate ‘the confessional’ as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of ‘writing the self’, tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life—for him philosophy is a way of life —and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The Investigations provides a basis and springboard for (...) understanding the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice which encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico-poetical self-constitution. (shrink)

This study was carried out to investigate the roles of epistemic beliefs and writing self-efficacy in predicting second language writing anxiety among learners of English as a foreign language. To this end, three validated scales were distributed among 240 EFL students. They were asked to complete the questionnaires during their regular courses. A structural equation modeling approach was utilized to analyze the hypothesized SEM model and the causal paths among the constructs. The direct and indirect path analyses of (...) the hypothesized model indicated that EBs and WSE accounted for 43% of the variance in L2WA. Although both constructs had a significant effect on L2WA, EBs turned out to be a robust predictor of increasing L2WA. Notably, it was revealed that learners’ EBs directly and significantly influenced their L2WA. Besides, the results indicated that WSE had a unique effect in reducing L2WA. More precisely, students who had a higher level of EBs seemed to have a greater L2WA, and those who had a higher level of WSE experienced less L2WA. The findings of this explanatory study suggest that L2 teachers and material developers should pay serious attention to the Students’ cognitive and affective variables as they were known to be significant factors in influencing L2WA. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Theodore Sider's book, Writing the Book of the World. It raises some puzzles about Sider's favoured methodology for finding out about naturalness (or 'structure').

This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

Writing philosophy well is an essential skill in our discipline. Philosophical writing must aim for clarity, precision, and rigor, but in doing so, it can often wind up dry, long-winded and boring. It can take many drafts to produce a paper that is suitable for publication in a journal, and many aspiring (and accomplished!) academic philosophers find the process of writing arduous and frustrating. Still, some people make it look easy – if you’ve read anything by Alan (...) Hájek, you’ve probably noticed his breezy style that effortlessly communicates complex ideas in simple terms. His concise and witty prose makes even formal epistemology, a notoriously complicated, math-heavy subject, accessible and engaging to readers. However, while it might look effortless, Hájek’s spirited style is in fact born out of deep and thoughtful engagement with the craft of writing. His motto is: “Work hard for your readers, so that they don’t have to.” Hájek’s approach is decidedly anti-genius: he believes that having good ideas and communicating them well can be taught, and he has devoted considerable energy to helping his graduate students improve their writing. He has written multiple articles about philosophical creativity, as well as an unpublished lengthy manuscript on the mechanics of writing. I have benefited myself from his advice – at least I believe I have, readers may judge for themselves. My aim in this article is to share a few of his insights that I have found most helpful for myself and for my students. I won’t try to summarize all of Hájek’s advice, and I also don’t claim that all of this is totally new. Rather, I will offer a small collection of greatest hits. I will cover eight aspects of philosophical writing, and for each one, I will explain the basic idea, and then discuss some ways of implementing it for oneself and one’s students. (shrink)

This volume explains how metaphors, metonymies, and other figures of thought interact cognitively and rhetorically to tell us what writing is and what it should do. Drawing on interviews with writing professionals and published commentary about writing, it argues that our everyday metaphors and metonymies for writing are part of a figurative rhetoric of writing - a pattern of discourse and thought that includes ways we categorize writers and writing; stories we tell about people (...) who write; conceptual metaphors and metonymies used both to describe and to guide writing; and familiar, yet surprisingly adaptable, conceptual blends used routinely for imagining writing situations. The book will give scholars a fresh understanding of concepts such as 'voice', 'self', 'clarity', 'power', and the most basic figure of all: 'the writer'. (shrink)

Examines the true purpose of writing history, explains how history can be understood in terms of plot, and discusses the progress of history.

In _influx & efflux_ Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book _Vibrant Matter_: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx _& _efflux”—a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts involved in that process? What kinds of “I” and “we” can (...) live well and act effectively in a world of so many other lively materialities? Drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers, Bennett links a nonanthropocentric model of self to a radically egalitarian pluralism and also to a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live. The book tries to enact the uncanny process by which we “write up” influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us. (shrink)

Argument“The Case of Ellen West” was published by the Swiss psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, in 1944–1945. The case-history depicts the illness and suicide of a young woman who was his patient twenty years earlier. It came to be considered one of the paradigmatic studies of the newly established discipline ofDaseinsanalyse, an attempt to synthesize existential philosophy and therapeutic practice. This paper analyzes the case-study, employing newly uncovered archival material to expose important details regarding the treatment of Ellen West and the posthumous (...) writing of her case-history. The richness of the archival sources and the various historiographical characteristics they exhibit raise methodological questions about the potentialities and limitations of historical representation. The new data will thus serve as a platform from which to explore and discuss more generally the problems involved in historical reconstruction – of both subjective experience and clinical knowledge – and the questions of authorship and intertextuality in the genre of the case-history. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show that the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing and, therefore, that writing transforms our cognitive abilities. I do this from the perspective of cognitive integration: completing a complex cognitive, or mental, task is enabled by a co-ordinated interaction between neural processes, bodily processes and manipulating written sentences. In section one I introduce Harris’ criticisms of ways in which writing has been said to restructure thought (Goody (...) 1968; McLuhan 1962, 1964; Ong 1982). This will give us a preliminary idea about possible pitfalls for a cognitive integrationist account. The second section outlines, firstly, how integrated cognitive systems function. Secondly, the model is applied to a hybrid mental act where writing allows us to complete complex cognitive tasks. The final section outlines the sense in which, following Harris, there is “a more realistic picture of how writing restructures thought” [Harris, R., 1989. How does writing restructure thought? Language and Communication 9 (2/3) 99–106] that is concealed by the ‘romantic fantasies’ of theorists such as the above. This picture is one of writing providing an autoglottic space in which a new form of theoretical thinking becomes prevalent. The cognitive integrationist understands this in terms of the nature of the written vehicles and how we manipulate them. (shrink)

Rumination is associated with psychological adjustment and WM capacity. Studies have shown that psychological interventions such as expressive writing can reduce negative rumination and improve WM capacity. The present study investigated the effect of positive rumination training in expressive writing on psychological adjustment and WM updating. Within an experimental design, positive rumination was manipulated for 10 participants who were maladaptive ruminators in an experiment using a five week training compared to the control group with 9 participants. Results revealed (...) significant enhancement of psychological adjustment and the response time (RT) of WM updating in the experimental group but not in the control group. The two groups did show signifcant difference of all the outcomes in pretest. But the experimental group showed significantly better oucomes than the control group in posttest. The results indicate that positive rumination training in expressive writing is effective and rumination has a causal influence on WM updating capacity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of critical thinking for improving the writing skill of undergraduate Arab students who study English Literature at Saudi universities under lockdown circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, it explores the impact of implementing Facebook as an online Constructivist tool to improve this skill. A general overview of the status of English language education in Saudi Arabia is briefly presented to shed light on the ongoing English (...) language challenges in learning writing for undergraduate students in the English language and literature departments, which got more manifested due to the current status of education mode with the emergence of the pandemic. Two-group posttest-only randomized experiment was employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, using the infusion and constructivism approaches. A total of 40 students enrolled in a literature course at a private university in Saudi Arabia participated in the experiment. The treatment was conducted through utilizing Facebook. The results demonstrated that students’ improvement in English writing was due to the combination of the infusion of a set of critical skills and the constructivist teaching and learning mode. (shrink)

In this essay I take up Plato’s critique of poetry, which has little to do with epistemology and representational imitation, but rather the powerful effects that poeticperformances can have on audiences, enthralling them with vivid image-worlds and blocking the powers of critical reflection. By focusing on the perceived psychological dangers of poetry in performance and reception, I want to suggest that Plato’s critique was caught up in the larger story of momentous shifts in the Greek world, turning on the rise (...) of literacy and its far-reaching effects in modifying the original and persisting oral character of Greek culture. The story of Plato’s Republic in certain ways suggests something essential for comprehending the development of philosophy in Greece (and in any culture, I would add): that philosophy, as we understand it, would not have been possible apart from the skills and mental transformations stemming from education in reading and writing; and that primary features of oral language and practice were a significant barrier to the development of philosophical rationality (and also a worthy competitor for cultural status and authority). Accordingly, I go on to argue that the critique of writing in the Phaedrus is neither a defense or orality per se, nor a dismissal of writing, but rather a defense of a literate soul over against orality and the indiscriminate exposure of written texts to unworthy readers. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. It argues that philosophical claims are bound to language, and yet philosophy’sclaim to objective clarity is meaningless if language is radically perspectival. The paper attempts to show the limitations and possibilities that Platonic dialectics and Derridean deconstruction share in their respective approaches to the analysis of language and the relationship between speech and writing. The paper concludes that language is ambiguous, neither reducible to the relativism of sophistry nor (...) to the essentialism of metaphysics. Against Derrida, the paper argues that without structure, voice is not language; it renders only inarticulate sounds. Yet in speaking, this structural aspect gets taken for granted and passed over. Only when language is established in writing is the possibility of voice first recognized. (shrink)

There are some risks in producing public philosophy. We don’t want to misrepresent the work of philosophy or mislead readers into thinking they have learned all they need to know from a single, short book or article. The potential benefits, though, outweigh the risks. Public philosophy can disseminate important ideas and enhance appreciation for the difficult and complex work of philosophers. Popular writing is often less precise, lacking in fine detail and elaboration, but it can still be accurate . (...) People often need a simplified account to get an initial understanding. Whatever one thinks of the role of jargon in scholarly writing, its place should be minimal in popular writing. If physicists can write books of popular science with virtually no equations, philosophers can write books for a general audience with limited jargon. (shrink)

Volume 11, Issue 1-2, January–December 2024.

An analysis of two major religiously inspired writers from a Kierkegaardian perspective. _Writing the Incommensurable_ studies how the threat posed by the absence of an immanent God is explored in the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mary Finn erects a theoretical framework in each chapter based on a pseudonymous work of Kierkegaard. In these pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard uses the discourses of philosophy, theology, and literature to plot the complicated path of a religious writer whose own (...) impulse to write complicates—if it does not compromise—the religious vision she or he wants to communicate. The book is organized according to four Kierkegaardian categories: anxiety, lyric voice, repetition, and radical choice. All four are responses to what Kierkegaard calls the incommensurable, the unnegotiable gap between subjectivity on the one hand and "actuality" on the other. This gap plagues the writer-believer while also enabling writing. In what dilemma, then, does a religious poet find herself or himself when out of the depths of personal doubt, lack of understanding, and religious inadequacy comes a literary success? Or is this dilemma avoided by paradoxically refiguring failure as a measure of success, and if so, can such a refiguring ever be fully trusted? As the notion of the subjective "self" acquires preeminence in the nineteenth century, the particularized "writing self" is the entity Kierkegaard, Hopkins, and Rossetti fight to get beyond as religious believers. The futility of such an attempt nonetheless results in a peculiar success: there is the writing itself, material evidence that the fight occurred, imbued with the pathos and beauty of all monuments erected to lost causes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth in WritingAmandaAn excerpt from my journal during a dark period in my life reads:I am a survivor of sexual mutilation, of coerced gender roles, and of perpetual lies all in the name of normalization. Sometimes I have a hard time even thinking about the true extent of what all happened. It’s like my mind doesn’t have that type of scope, like when I think about the word (...) “eternity.”I wrote this after combing through old medical records, reading comments like “her introitus has healed nicely and looks normal, but my exam suggests that her vagina is shortened,” and “reduction clitoroplasty... removal of testes.” The records go on to say that my “external genitalia is quite satisfactory,” and “on perineal exam, her neovaginal orifice is quite compliant and easily accepts my second and third digits.”My journal continues:I chose this fake hole when I was a teenager because I didn’t know there was another option. I was told from day one to be a female, to be heteronormative, to act like all the other girls, and the only way I could fully accomplish this is by looking the part. A fake hole would be necessary, I thought, to go along with the rest of the lies. Sometimes I think about how the doctors told me to lie about my surgeries and my scars. Sometimes I wonder what my parents would have told the world if I had died during one of surgeries. Maybe they would have said “we were just trying to make her fuckable.”My strength is growing from the stories and experiences I write and share. My journal started about four years ago, when I was in my early 20s, near the beginning of medical school. My initial purpose in writing the journal was to help sort through my feelings and experiences related to a newly discovered sexuality and a changing gender identity. Medical school was thousands of miles away from my previous life, my family, and my friends. Away from my old social network, I was free to self–discover on my own terms. In the first journal entry, I lay out reasons why I decided to get in contact with a therapist, something I had not done previously. Some of the reasons were fairly standard reasons one seeks out a therapist, such as moving away from home. But the fundamental reasons I sought out a therapist, and why I chose to journal, had to do with exploring feelings after my first sexual encounter with a woman, and then [End Page 98] accepting my intersexuality. My relationship with that therapist did not last, but the journaling did.In the beginning of the journal, I write:I am from a small, religious, white, non–diverse, family oriented suburb of Milwaukee. I was raised to be the picture–perfect daughter in a household that did not talk about feelings, sex, cultural or religious differences, etc. My brother and I also never talked about personal issues (and still don’t), which is quite remarkable since we are twins, and have grown up doing most everything together, from sharing birthday parties, to being locker buddies... [When my mother told me about having Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS)] knowing this little fact about my body kept me wanting to become as perfectly female in all ways possible.Growing up without being able to talk about having AIS was stifling to say the least. Closing communication implied great shame, and with the shame came even greater repression. My skate-boarding, baseball card collecting, and model car building interests disappeared after learning about my AIS, which I believe was when I was 12 years old, but I cannot remember exactly. Granted, it’s tough to say whether my interests just changed as I grew older, but I do remember having a fear of portraying any masculine tendencies that other girls in my town weren’t displaying (for example, playing soccer was okay, but I had to shave my legs). I also had crafted some pretty good covers for my AIS, including stories about when I first had my (fake) period, or how I acted fearful about a... (shrink)

A simplistic image of twentieth century French philosophy sees Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 as the line that divides two irreconcilable moments in its history: existentialism and phenomenology, on the one hand, and structuralism on the other. The structuralist generation claimed to recapture the dimension of objectivity and impersonality, which the previous generation was supposedly incapable of. As a matter of fact, in 1962, Derrida’s edition of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry was taken to be a turning point that announced the (...) structuralist revolution by introducing a reflection on the historicity and the materiality of impersonal idealities. And yet, the 1998 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from his Collège de France lecture course on the same topic make manifest that he was already taking phenomenology in another direction. His 1959 reading of The Origin of Geometry shows how unexpectedly close the early Derrida is to the late Merleau-Ponty. By identifying the tension between archaeology and teleology as the basic problem of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida each disclose the fundamental importance of history and of writing. Comparing the two readings in their specific context not only brings about a more complex picture of the intellectual debates of the time, but also shows how, with Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of The Origin of Geometry, Derrida’s “différance” predates itself and receives another genealogy. (shrink)

An approach to Derrida's différance from the perspective of analytic philosophy of language which attempts to show both how many of Derrida's insights are influenced by analytic philosophy of language and can be related to ideas found in Quine, Wittgenstein, and Dennett, but which ultimately concludes that the linguistic idealism that he promotes is incoherent.

Errors and episodes of “freezing” seen during mirror writing by adults can be incorporated into the model suggested in Thelen et al.'s target article This requires assigning an important role to internal inverse models stored in memory. The strongly anti-dualism position of Thelen et al.'s leaves little room for the Bernsteinian notion of activity.

The early 20th century a new style of Chinese women sector, is in the "revolution in the text," the social context, in Liang "new style" reality show ideas and writing demonstration, with the women's liberation movement since the commencement of the body into its . Revolution in women's Evans into the text, thus producing a unique application of magic; from the women's liberation movement of the actual needs, to break old stereotypes composition, heart open style, so that harvest unprecedented (...) in the history of Chinese literary masterpiece and a rare woman beauty of the text; the use of affinity with the woman in the language of expression, so that large group of women "do not have a magic." Women's world has become a new style of new literature written in accessible modern woman's "magic" of the bridge, it is not only acting on the Revolution of 1911 nation / state / women's liberation movement, but also for "54" period, even after the development of the modern women's writing laid the strong foundation. The new type of writing for the womenfolk in the early 20th century began with the liberation movement of the women in the social background of "Literature Revolutionary" which guided by the new type writing of Liang Qichao. There are several characteristics of the new type writing as following: Firstly, it was much attractive with the revolutionary of womenfolk; Secondly, many great literary works came out in Chinese literature history with breaking the old style of article; Thirdly, a loving and harmonious article style for women had been adopted which was attractive strongly for the womenfolk. Therefore, the new type of writing for the womenfolk just likes a bridge for the women modem new literature which not only acted on the liberation movement of the nation and women during the Xinhai Revolutionary period but also provided a stable base for the modem women literature during and afterwards May Fourth period. (shrink)

Sartre's Les Mots has given rise to widely divergent competing readings in the philosophical literature, which tend to view it either as a simple continuation of his earlier, radical libertarianism, or as part of an alleged wholesale renunciation of the position we find in his early texts. I argue that most of these readings ignore the very real tensions in Words between the freedom of consciousness and the weight of circumstances. I further argue that Les Mots is a performative text (...) whose double writing (originally composed 1954-1957; rewritten 1963) demonstrates for us that, whereas we cannot simply renounce our past and the original meanings mediated to us in childhood through our families, we do have the power to take it up in ways that skew those meanings in somewhat different directions. No matter what we do, however, the blurred outlines of those original meanings will always remain. (shrink)

This article takes a moment of intercultural exchange, first reported as "The Writing Lesson" by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques and later explored by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, as the occasion for further reflection on the role played by the aesthetic in what it terms intercultural transference. Transference occurs whenever unconscious desires, fantasies or patterns of being and relating are enacted in an interpersonal or intercultural encounter, including the indirect encounters between literary or artistic objects and their recipients. (...) It emerges as a largely unconscious operation designed to bridge, close, fill or deny the inevitable gaps in knowing another person or another culture, and to manage the affects such gaps bring forth. Intercultural transference provides a framework to read "The Writing Lesson" differently and suggests a theoretical model able to account for the complex performances of intercultural transference that enter any exchange or translation between cultures. (shrink)

Explores how violence structures language and the writing of literature and philosophy. Within the violence our societies must confront today exists a dimension proper to language. Anyone who has been through the educational system, for example, recognizes how language not only shapes and models us, but also imposes itself upon us. During the twentieth century, this system revealed how language can condemn one to a certain death. In The Vocation of Writing, philosopher Marc Crépon explores this dimension of (...) language, convinced that the node of all violence pertains first to language and how we make use of it. Crépon focuses on Kafka, Levinas, Singer, and Derrida, not only because each rose against commandeering language in order to warn against the next massacres, but also because their work affirms the vocation of writing—that which makes literature and philosophy the final weapon for unmasking the violence and hatred that language bears at its heart. To affirm the vocation of writing is to turn language against itself, to defuse its murderous potentialities by opening it toward exchange, responsibility, and humanity when the latter fixes the other and the world as its goals. (shrink)

One area of ethical concern in higher education is writing services for graduate students, which can range from simple proofreading to rewriting content for flow, coherence, and structure to extensive content creation akin to ghostwriting. There are various ways to look at the use of writing services: 1) as a clear violations of ethics, presenting the student as a more capable writer than he or she is; 2) as a “necessary evil” resulting from greater numbers of individuals with (...) inadequate writing preparation entering university graduate programs; and 3) as a routine part of professional practice utilized by published writers who uniformly benefit from editing and proofreading. Professors, research advisors, and writing center tutors must face a range of ethical questions regarding writing assistance, particularly given that many graduate students, particularly those at the doctoral level, will soon be established professionals expected to guide others in the production of scholarly work. What are the ethical differences between types of writing assistance? What is the appropriate level of writing help for those in graduate programs? How does a strict stance on the editing of student papers reflect on the common practice of professional editing for publication—which can make published writers appear perhaps more capable than they really are? This article examines the complex issues those working with graduate students can face in trying to improve the writing they produce while also maintaining strong ethical standards regarding authorship and encouraging the learning process. It provides an overview of the ethical issues involved in writing services and extensive outside writing help provided to graduate students, and offers suggestions for creating a balance between compassion, professionalism, and honesty in graduate writing. It also proposes general ideas for offering appropriate assistance based on the type of writing in question—assistance that honors the learning process, demonstrates respect for the concept of authorship, and adheres to the concepts of Respect for Persons, Beneficence, and Justice outlined in the Belmont Report. (shrink)

The following article explores the use of creative writing techniques to teach research ethics, breathe life into case study preparation, and train students to think of their settings as complex organizational environments with multiple actors and stakeholders.

"Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing" is a compact but thorough guide to critical thinking and argumentation. Comprising the text portion of the widely adopted "Current Issues and Enduring Questions," it draws on the authors' dual expertise in effective persuasive writing and rigorous critical thinking. It helps students move from critical thinking to argumentative and researched writing. With comprehensive coverage of classic and contemporary approaches to argument, including Aristotle, Toulmin, and a range of alternative views, it is an (...) extraordinarily versatile text. This affordable guide can stand alone or supplement a larger anthology of readings. "Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing" has been revised to address current student interests and trends in argument, research, and writing. (shrink)

_First English translation of Sini’s important work on the influence of writing and the alphabet on Western rationality._.

The perception that one is being forced to do wrong, or being prevented from doing the right thing, is often described in the most brutal terms, as a situation that feels like participating in the torture of another human being. The emotional force of the experience of moral distress, and the perception that one is powerless to do anything to change the situation producing moral distress, can make it hard to look at these experiences critically, and to imagine a different (...) reality. Writing about the experience of moral distress is a way to look critically at this experience. This commentary discusses how these narratives explore moral distress in relation to the formation of professional identity, as a “dirty” experience, as a potential consequence of unrelieved moral uncertainty, in the care of “difficult” patients, and as a response to systemic problems. (shrink)

… [T]o trace the problematic of writing in the Norris canon is foremost to confirm Fried’s claims about its pervasiveness. Indeed, he now intimates that the problematic pervades the fiction of “other important writers of the 1890s and early 1900s,” work by Jack London, Harold Frederic, and Henry James . On the one hand, this pervasiveness muddies an already ambivalent use of the term impressionism ;10 on the other hand, it augments Fried’s sense that the thematization of writing (...) attained particular moment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To my eye, nonetheless, the moment dissolves once its historical isolationism confronts “literary history.” 10. Fried explicitly addresses this ambivalence, explaining that “I am unpersuaded by the many attempts that have been made to define that concept either in relation to French impressionist painting or in terms of a fidelity to or evocation of the ‘impressions’ of one or more characters , but I see no comparably useful designation for the global tendency that Crane, Norris, and Conrad all instantiate” . The term, as I see it however, serves precisely to exclude the global tendency as it is instantiated elsewhere. And yet, to the degree that “impressionism” can now designate a confrontation between the sight of writing and the impressionist emphasis on sight as traditionally understood, Fried, despite all disclaimers, revivifies that tradition . Bill Brown, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, is presently completing a book on the “economy of play” in the work of Stephen Crane. (shrink)

“Racism” is the name given to a type of behavior which consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on account of physical differences between them and oneself. It should be noted that this definition does not contain the word “race,” and this observation leads us to the first surprise in this area which contains many: whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon, “race” itself does not exist! Or, to put it more clearly: there are a great (...) number of physical differences among human groups, but these differences cannot be superimposed; we obtain completely divergent subdivisions of the human species according to whether we base our description of the “races” on an analysis of their epidermis or their blood types, their genetic heritages or their bone structures. For contemporary biology, the concept of “race” is therefore useless. This fact has no influence, however, on racist behavior: to justify their contempt or aggressiveness, racists invoke not scientific analyses but the most superficial and striking of physical characteristics —namely, differences in skin color, pilosity, and body structure.Thus, it is with good cause that the word “race” was placed in quotes in the title of this issue: “races” do not exist. I am less sure, however, that all the contributors managed to avoid postulating the existence, behind this word as behind most words, of a thing. In his introduction Gates remarks that “race, in these usages, pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope,” and he goes on to describe as follows the goal of the special issue: “to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge inherent in popular and academic usages of ‘race’ ” . Up to a point, I agree with him, even if I cannot help pointing out the insistent allusions to certain contemporary critical theories —allusions which furnish proof that the author of these lines possesses a particular knowledge and thereby sets up a particular power relationship between himself and the reader. This, however, is not the problem. The problem arises on page 15, when the same author declares, “We must, I believe, analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences generate and structure literary texts by us and about us.” What bothers me about this sentence is not so much that “generate” and “structure” allude to yet another critical theory as that its author seems to be reinstating what he himself referred to as the “dangerous trope” of “race”: if “racial differences” do not exist, how can they possibly influence literary texts? Tzvetan Todorov works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. His most recent book in translation is The Conquest of America . Criticism of Criticism is forthcoming. Loulou Mack is a free-lance writer and translator living in Paris. (shrink)

A familiar image from the Roman world is a Pompeian portrait of a man and woman sometimes identified as Terentius Neo and his wife. He has a papyrus roll under his chin, while she looks out with a writing tablet in one hand, a stylus held to her lips in the other. The message of the attributes presented would seem to be: ‘ We can and do read and write’. But how should the message be interpreted? To judge from (...) the houses in which this and similar portraits were found, the couple was not of the elite decurion class, but belonged to that difficult to define group of varying social, economic and cultural statuses recently described by Keith Hopkins as ‘sub-elites’. Does the display of book and pen then reflect the social reality of the sub-elite orders of Pompeian society, or is the self-representation rather an expression of social pretension, with the couple attempting to emulate the Roman elite? If the latter is the case, what does the image say about the habits of the Roman ruling class? This question has been raised in relation to the issue of literacy, particularly women's literacy, but the image invites another question. (shrink)

By his own admission, Roland Barthes was seemingly remiss in not placing Georges Bataille within his account of ‘zero degree’ writing. This article draws inference from this fact, but specifically examines commonalities between Bataille’s heterology and Barthes’ late project on the Neutral. The article works through Barthes’ two key articles on Bataille, ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’ and ‘Outcomes of the Text’, and also considers Bataille’s statement on informe, a concept that can be said to resonate with Barthes’ use (...) of the Neutral. Neither term refers to specific ‘forms’, but rather an ‘operation’ of writing, as a means of undoing knowledge without its disavowal. An account is given of the commonalities of Bataille’s ‘general economy’ and what might be termed Barthes’ Neutral economy. Emphasis is placed upon their practice of writing as ethical responses in the ‘preparations’ of knowledge: to be judicious to what forms in and around knowledge, allowing as much for pauses as the possibilities of thought. (shrink)

Political philosophy in the last decades has turned away from universal narratives of progress, on grounds that these narratives produce exclusion and justify domination. However, the universal values that underlie emancipatory political projects seem to presuppose universal history, which explains its persistence in some contemporary political philosophers committed to such projects. In order to find a response to the paradox according to which universal history is inherently exclusionary and yet necessary to uphold universal values, I examine the contrast between Adorno’s (...) and Lyotard’s perspectives on the problem of writing history ‘after Auschwitz’. For both philosophers, Auschwitz interrupts our fundamental normative and cognitive values, because any attempt to identify the meaning of the camps by means of these values misunderstands the suffering that took place in them. Yet this interruption produces a feeling that calls for the institution of new universal normative values. For Adorno, this value is a purely negative command to act in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself. For Lyotard, by contrast, it is the demand to invent new idioms that make it possible to find meaning in Auschwitz. (shrink)