Jean-Jacques Lecercle
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638000
- eISBN:
- 9780748652648
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638000.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has read contemporary European philosophers has ...
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Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has read contemporary European philosophers has had to ask such questions. This book is an attempt to answer them, by considering the ‘strong readings’ Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze impose on the texts they read. The author demonstrates that philosophers need literature as much as literary critics need philosophy: it is an exercise not in the philosophy of literature (where literature is a mere object of analysis), but in philosophy and literature, a heady and unusual mix.Less
Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has read contemporary European philosophers has had to ask such questions. This book is an attempt to answer them, by considering the ‘strong readings’ Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze impose on the texts they read. The author demonstrates that philosophers need literature as much as literary critics need philosophy: it is an exercise not in the philosophy of literature (where literature is a mere object of analysis), but in philosophy and literature, a heady and unusual mix.
Paul hurh
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780804791144
- eISBN:
- 9780804794510
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791144.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
The afterword briefly summarizes the major conclusions of the book and gestures at how they shift wider discussions about philosophy and literature in general and American philosophy and American ...
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The afterword briefly summarizes the major conclusions of the book and gestures at how they shift wider discussions about philosophy and literature in general and American philosophy and American literature more particularly. It hypothesizes that the focus on literary terror opens up a new thread of intellectual history that parallels and contrasts with several recent studies linking American literature and pragmatism. In this possible new history, the dark strain in American literature leads, not to pragmatism, but rather to its darker cousin, poststructuralism.Less
The afterword briefly summarizes the major conclusions of the book and gestures at how they shift wider discussions about philosophy and literature in general and American philosophy and American literature more particularly. It hypothesizes that the focus on literary terror opens up a new thread of intellectual history that parallels and contrasts with several recent studies linking American literature and pragmatism. In this possible new history, the dark strain in American literature leads, not to pragmatism, but rather to its darker cousin, poststructuralism.
Raimond Gaita
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199592814
- eISBN:
- 9780191729034
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592814.003.0008
- Subject:
- Law, Criminal Law and Criminology
Most philosophers believe that art, perhaps literature especially, has something to offer moral philosophy, imaginative examples most importantly. Fewer philosophers believe that it has much to ...
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Most philosophers believe that art, perhaps literature especially, has something to offer moral philosophy, imaginative examples most importantly. Fewer philosophers believe that it has much to contribute to the philosophy of law. That is in part because writers are rooted in a natural language (not necessarily their own) with historical resonances, depth, allusions, aliveness to tone, that has shaped and is shaped by the lives of particular peoples. But the judge who rebukes a witness given to literary flourishes wants plain speech, suited to establishing facts, and the philosopher of international law, one is inclined to think, must strive for the high abstraction necessary to formulate principles and their justifications to all of human kind in a language that appeals to what we have in common rather than what divides us as natural languages and anything that is necessarily rooted in them appears to do. This chapter explores whether these are irreconcilable perspectives one necessarily local, the other necessarily universal. It argues that they are not. Taking the concept of genocide and the writings of novelist and legal philosopher, Bernhard Schlink as examples, the chapter argues that literature can provide even the philosophy of law with a richer understanding of the forms of universality and the form of philosophical thought suited to understanding some of the big categories on international law, than philosophers commonly assume.Less
Most philosophers believe that art, perhaps literature especially, has something to offer moral philosophy, imaginative examples most importantly. Fewer philosophers believe that it has much to contribute to the philosophy of law. That is in part because writers are rooted in a natural language (not necessarily their own) with historical resonances, depth, allusions, aliveness to tone, that has shaped and is shaped by the lives of particular peoples. But the judge who rebukes a witness given to literary flourishes wants plain speech, suited to establishing facts, and the philosopher of international law, one is inclined to think, must strive for the high abstraction necessary to formulate principles and their justifications to all of human kind in a language that appeals to what we have in common rather than what divides us as natural languages and anything that is necessarily rooted in them appears to do. This chapter explores whether these are irreconcilable perspectives one necessarily local, the other necessarily universal. It argues that they are not. Taking the concept of genocide and the writings of novelist and legal philosopher, Bernhard Schlink as examples, the chapter argues that literature can provide even the philosophy of law with a richer understanding of the forms of universality and the form of philosophical thought suited to understanding some of the big categories on international law, than philosophers commonly assume.
Brady Bowman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199976201
- eISBN:
- 9780199395507
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0009
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing ...
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Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.Less
Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.
Nancy Glazener
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199390137
- eISBN:
- 9780199390151
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199390137.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter examines literary studies, starting with the ways in which the constitution of literature made study an important outgrowth of literary reading. It offers a map of Shakespeare studies in ...
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This chapter examines literary studies, starting with the ways in which the constitution of literature made study an important outgrowth of literary reading. It offers a map of Shakespeare studies in U.S. literary culture and examines some of the ideological investments that the United States brought to Shakespeare. The legacies of rhetoric and philology, two other important predecessors of literature, are especially important to literary studies. Taking up the vexed question of why rhetoric, so prominent in academic culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was barely visible in the research university model at the end, the chapter argues that the cultural dependence on print and fears of cultural manipulation that had gathered around oratory had moved rhetoric out of prominence before the research university model took hold. The fears of oratorical manipulation were not really justified but point to the tremendous anxieties about autonomy at stake in both oratory and literature, which open the self to outside influences; theories of the sublime also navigated these anxieties. The chapter ends by profiling Coleridge’s and Emerson’s competing models of literary authority and literary reading, which in broad strokes count as modern and antimodern.Less
This chapter examines literary studies, starting with the ways in which the constitution of literature made study an important outgrowth of literary reading. It offers a map of Shakespeare studies in U.S. literary culture and examines some of the ideological investments that the United States brought to Shakespeare. The legacies of rhetoric and philology, two other important predecessors of literature, are especially important to literary studies. Taking up the vexed question of why rhetoric, so prominent in academic culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was barely visible in the research university model at the end, the chapter argues that the cultural dependence on print and fears of cultural manipulation that had gathered around oratory had moved rhetoric out of prominence before the research university model took hold. The fears of oratorical manipulation were not really justified but point to the tremendous anxieties about autonomy at stake in both oratory and literature, which open the self to outside influences; theories of the sublime also navigated these anxieties. The chapter ends by profiling Coleridge’s and Emerson’s competing models of literary authority and literary reading, which in broad strokes count as modern and antimodern.
Paul Hurh
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780804791144
- eISBN:
- 9780804794510
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791144.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical ...
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American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.Less
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.
Jean-Michel Rabaté
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823270859
- eISBN:
- 9780823270903
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270859.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book offers a new interpretation of the links between literature, ethics, and philosophy in Beckett’s works. It surveys the entire corpus with a focus on the post-war period, when Beckett found ...
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This book offers a new interpretation of the links between literature, ethics, and philosophy in Beckett’s works. It surveys the entire corpus with a focus on the post-war period, when Beckett found a wider audience and broke from his mentors Joyce and Proust. Beckett’s decision to write in French, and his subsequent bilingualism, were no accidents but followed a program placing him among post-war writers who rejected Sartre and developed a “writing degree zero” as offering a post-Holocaust literary expression. Two philosophers examined in this historical context are Adorno and Badiou. If they often contradict each other, they converge on many points: Adorno sees that one can be a poet after Auschwitz; Badiou grasps how one can combine beautiful forms and a reduction of life to its generic essentials. For both, Beckett offers a lesson in courage, showing that life is worth living in spite of innumerable reasons to despair. The theme of animals permits a further exploration of life reduced to survival. A red thread comes from Beckett’s friendship with Bataille and their fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Both debunk post-war humanism. Bataille’s philosophy of the Impossible, of excess and transgression, was rephrased in a muted manner by Beckett who preferred Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Kant and Freud to sketch an ethics of humility. All the while, his works are marked by an inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy that creates an infectious and enduring laughter.Less
This book offers a new interpretation of the links between literature, ethics, and philosophy in Beckett’s works. It surveys the entire corpus with a focus on the post-war period, when Beckett found a wider audience and broke from his mentors Joyce and Proust. Beckett’s decision to write in French, and his subsequent bilingualism, were no accidents but followed a program placing him among post-war writers who rejected Sartre and developed a “writing degree zero” as offering a post-Holocaust literary expression. Two philosophers examined in this historical context are Adorno and Badiou. If they often contradict each other, they converge on many points: Adorno sees that one can be a poet after Auschwitz; Badiou grasps how one can combine beautiful forms and a reduction of life to its generic essentials. For both, Beckett offers a lesson in courage, showing that life is worth living in spite of innumerable reasons to despair. The theme of animals permits a further exploration of life reduced to survival. A red thread comes from Beckett’s friendship with Bataille and their fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Both debunk post-war humanism. Bataille’s philosophy of the Impossible, of excess and transgression, was rephrased in a muted manner by Beckett who preferred Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Kant and Freud to sketch an ethics of humility. All the while, his works are marked by an inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy that creates an infectious and enduring laughter.
Thomas Trezise
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823244485
- eISBN:
- 9780823252732
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823244485.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter approaches the relation between ethics and aesthetics from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas. It examines the form of Levinas’s discourse in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than ...
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This chapter approaches the relation between ethics and aesthetics from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas. It examines the form of Levinas’s discourse in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, works that privilege the interlocutory relation that frames witnessing but whose orientation toward the other is largely articulated in a philosophical idiom indebted to sameness. The challenge to philosophy is pursued by turning to a literary “other,” Jorge Semprun’s testimonial memoir, Literature or Life, where questions of form are inseparable from ethical considerations in a witnessing focused on the addressee. This emphasis on the addressee, analogous to Levinas’s insistence on a self constituted by an appeal from the other, leads to a concluding consideration of his work as a response to victims of the Holocaust and a philosophical allegory of posttraumatic memory.Less
This chapter approaches the relation between ethics and aesthetics from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas. It examines the form of Levinas’s discourse in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, works that privilege the interlocutory relation that frames witnessing but whose orientation toward the other is largely articulated in a philosophical idiom indebted to sameness. The challenge to philosophy is pursued by turning to a literary “other,” Jorge Semprun’s testimonial memoir, Literature or Life, where questions of form are inseparable from ethical considerations in a witnessing focused on the addressee. This emphasis on the addressee, analogous to Levinas’s insistence on a self constituted by an appeal from the other, leads to a concluding consideration of his work as a response to victims of the Holocaust and a philosophical allegory of posttraumatic memory.
Edward Harcourt
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198713227
- eISBN:
- 9780191781650
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198713227.003.0011
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
This chapter is focused on three claims about literature and the moral life made by Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum, and Alice Crary. The first, ‘expansionism’, is that there’s more to moral thinking ...
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This chapter is focused on three claims about literature and the moral life made by Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum, and Alice Crary. The first, ‘expansionism’, is that there’s more to moral thinking than certain conventional conceptions allow. This the chapter simply accepts as a starting point, going on to argue with the aid of an extended literary example for the second claim, that literary texts—especially literary fiction—are instances of moral thinking. The third claim is that these same texts are (in part) instances of moral philosophy. Though this too may be true, the chapter argues that it’s a mistake to think it follows—as Nussbaum in particular has suggested—from the truth of the first two.Less
This chapter is focused on three claims about literature and the moral life made by Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum, and Alice Crary. The first, ‘expansionism’, is that there’s more to moral thinking than certain conventional conceptions allow. This the chapter simply accepts as a starting point, going on to argue with the aid of an extended literary example for the second claim, that literary texts—especially literary fiction—are instances of moral thinking. The third claim is that these same texts are (in part) instances of moral philosophy. Though this too may be true, the chapter argues that it’s a mistake to think it follows—as Nussbaum in particular has suggested—from the truth of the first two.
Rick Anthony Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, and James D. Reid
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823239306
- eISBN:
- 9780823239344
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239306.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, American Philosophy
Henry David Thoreau's best-known book, Walden, has not been widely recognized as an important philosophical text. Indeed, most academic philosophers would be reluctant to grant Thoreau a place within ...
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Henry David Thoreau's best-known book, Walden, has not been widely recognized as an important philosophical text. Indeed, most academic philosophers would be reluctant to grant Thoreau a place within the philosophical canon at all. The goal of this volume is to remedy this neglect, to explain Thoreau's philosophical significance, and to argue for the lasting value of his polemical conception of how philosophy ought to be lived, practiced, and written. Thoreau sought to establish philosophy as a way of life and to root our philosophical, conceptual affairs in more practical or existential concerns. His work provides us with a sustained meditation on the importance of leading our lives with integrity, avoiding what he calls “quiet desperation.” The contributors to this volume approach Thoreau's multifaceted writings from various angles. They explore his aesthetic views, his naturalism, his theory of self, his ethical principles, and his political stances. Most importantly, they show how Thoreau returns philosophy to its roots as the love of wisdom.Less
Henry David Thoreau's best-known book, Walden, has not been widely recognized as an important philosophical text. Indeed, most academic philosophers would be reluctant to grant Thoreau a place within the philosophical canon at all. The goal of this volume is to remedy this neglect, to explain Thoreau's philosophical significance, and to argue for the lasting value of his polemical conception of how philosophy ought to be lived, practiced, and written. Thoreau sought to establish philosophy as a way of life and to root our philosophical, conceptual affairs in more practical or existential concerns. His work provides us with a sustained meditation on the importance of leading our lives with integrity, avoiding what he calls “quiet desperation.” The contributors to this volume approach Thoreau's multifaceted writings from various angles. They explore his aesthetic views, his naturalism, his theory of self, his ethical principles, and his political stances. Most importantly, they show how Thoreau returns philosophy to its roots as the love of wisdom.
Kate Hext
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748646258
- eISBN:
- 9780748693849
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748646258.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the ...
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Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'. Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism and Decadence, it argues that Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. This study has two main aims: i) to argue that 'late-Romantic Individualism' and not art is at the heart of Paterian Aestheticism and ii) to illustrate how Aestheticism understands itself in philosophical history, engaging with Romantic, Idealist and empiricist philosophies to redefine what philosophical thought can be under the conditions of modernity and to renegotiate the relationship between philosophy and literature. The way in which these interwoven discussions are focused through Pater simultaneously serves to reposition him in literary history. This is the first book-length study of how Pater was influenced by, variously appropriated, and challenged modern philosophies in Victorian Oxford. It is also the first exploration of how late nineteenth-century individualism developed through the reappropriation of philosophical discourses. In order to makes its case it engages substantially with Pater's unpublished manuscripts, which contain some of his most daring philosophical statements, and which have been seriously neglected by scholars working to the agenda of 'Pater as stylist' or 'Pater as purveyor of male-male desire' which has defined Pater studies for some time.Less
Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'. Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism and Decadence, it argues that Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. This study has two main aims: i) to argue that 'late-Romantic Individualism' and not art is at the heart of Paterian Aestheticism and ii) to illustrate how Aestheticism understands itself in philosophical history, engaging with Romantic, Idealist and empiricist philosophies to redefine what philosophical thought can be under the conditions of modernity and to renegotiate the relationship between philosophy and literature. The way in which these interwoven discussions are focused through Pater simultaneously serves to reposition him in literary history. This is the first book-length study of how Pater was influenced by, variously appropriated, and challenged modern philosophies in Victorian Oxford. It is also the first exploration of how late nineteenth-century individualism developed through the reappropriation of philosophical discourses. In order to makes its case it engages substantially with Pater's unpublished manuscripts, which contain some of his most daring philosophical statements, and which have been seriously neglected by scholars working to the agenda of 'Pater as stylist' or 'Pater as purveyor of male-male desire' which has defined Pater studies for some time.
Tzachi Zamir
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190695088
- eISBN:
- 9780190695118
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190695088.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
The introduction sets out the book’s main themes: a philosophical reading of Paradise Lost, in which the relationships between philosophy and literature, literature and religion, and religion and ...
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The introduction sets out the book’s main themes: a philosophical reading of Paradise Lost, in which the relationships between philosophy and literature, literature and religion, and religion and philosophy are examined. The book's guiding metaphor—an ascent—is explained. The introduction explains why previous routes by which philosophy and literature have been successfully connected before are less suitable for religious poetry. The book does not follow the “compensatory” model, in which literature overcomes limitations that hamper philosophy. Instead, the reading hopes to expose episodes of misalliance between philosophy and literature. Implications for interdisciplinarity are briefly discussed. The tensions between religion and literature in relation to beauty, knowledge, and the imagination are presented. Finally, some methodological clarifications are made.Less
The introduction sets out the book’s main themes: a philosophical reading of Paradise Lost, in which the relationships between philosophy and literature, literature and religion, and religion and philosophy are examined. The book's guiding metaphor—an ascent—is explained. The introduction explains why previous routes by which philosophy and literature have been successfully connected before are less suitable for religious poetry. The book does not follow the “compensatory” model, in which literature overcomes limitations that hamper philosophy. Instead, the reading hopes to expose episodes of misalliance between philosophy and literature. Implications for interdisciplinarity are briefly discussed. The tensions between religion and literature in relation to beauty, knowledge, and the imagination are presented. Finally, some methodological clarifications are made.
Carrol Clarkson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823254156
- eISBN:
- 9780823260898
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823254156.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s ...
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This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s political priorities lie elsewhere. The chapter contributes to a larger exploration of the boundary between literature and philosophy and a questioning of the certainty with which the line between these disciplines is often drawn. The poets and the philosophers, in their different ways, have the capacity to call out to fellow humans in ways that may have positive ethical consequences for non-human creatures. Art is one way of expressing our humanity, but in its troubling of a presumed dividing line between the “human” and the “animal”, so the argument of this chapter goes, it serves as a reminder that the poets and the philosophers, too, are animals.Less
This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s political priorities lie elsewhere. The chapter contributes to a larger exploration of the boundary between literature and philosophy and a questioning of the certainty with which the line between these disciplines is often drawn. The poets and the philosophers, in their different ways, have the capacity to call out to fellow humans in ways that may have positive ethical consequences for non-human creatures. Art is one way of expressing our humanity, but in its troubling of a presumed dividing line between the “human” and the “animal”, so the argument of this chapter goes, it serves as a reminder that the poets and the philosophers, too, are animals.
James D. Reid, Rick Anthony Furtak, and Jonathan Ellsworth
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823239306
- eISBN:
- 9780823239344
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239306.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, American Philosophy
Although the writings of Henry David Thoreau are regarded around the world as classics of American literature, Thoreau is seldom taken seriously as a philosopher. Examining why Thoreau might qualify ...
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Although the writings of Henry David Thoreau are regarded around the world as classics of American literature, Thoreau is seldom taken seriously as a philosopher. Examining why Thoreau might qualify as a philosophically significant author nonetheless requires that we reconsider our assumptions about the nature of philosophy, and recognize the challenges that he poses to the discipline. This chapter introduces and defends the project of situating Thoreau more centrally within the Western philosophical canon.Less
Although the writings of Henry David Thoreau are regarded around the world as classics of American literature, Thoreau is seldom taken seriously as a philosopher. Examining why Thoreau might qualify as a philosophically significant author nonetheless requires that we reconsider our assumptions about the nature of philosophy, and recognize the challenges that he poses to the discipline. This chapter introduces and defends the project of situating Thoreau more centrally within the Western philosophical canon.
Henry S. Turner
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226363356
- eISBN:
- 9780226363493
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226363493.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter serves as an introduction to the book’s arguments about corporations, reading More’s Utopia alongside Calvin’s Case and the case of Sutton’s Hospital to argue for the importance of the ...
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This chapter serves as an introduction to the book’s arguments about corporations, reading More’s Utopia alongside Calvin’s Case and the case of Sutton’s Hospital to argue for the importance of the idea of fiction to political philosophy and the idea of a constitution. The chapter also surveys medieval and early modern definitions of corporations, describes the major arguments of pluralist political theory that guide the book, and formulates five major ontologies for corporations that were typical of the early modern period: mystical, mimetic, representational, material, and compositional. It concludes by offering a definition of the corporation that situates it among and across the domains of law, philosophy, and literature.Less
This chapter serves as an introduction to the book’s arguments about corporations, reading More’s Utopia alongside Calvin’s Case and the case of Sutton’s Hospital to argue for the importance of the idea of fiction to political philosophy and the idea of a constitution. The chapter also surveys medieval and early modern definitions of corporations, describes the major arguments of pluralist political theory that guide the book, and formulates five major ontologies for corporations that were typical of the early modern period: mystical, mimetic, representational, material, and compositional. It concludes by offering a definition of the corporation that situates it among and across the domains of law, philosophy, and literature.
Tzachi Zamir
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190695088
- eISBN:
- 9780190695118
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190695088.003.0013
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
The book concludes by specifying the ways whereby, although at some points philosophy and religious poetry must part ways, they nevertheless profit by hosting each other. Two vocations can be ...
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The book concludes by specifying the ways whereby, although at some points philosophy and religious poetry must part ways, they nevertheless profit by hosting each other. Two vocations can be mutually enriched not only by finding ways to complement each other, but by appreciating that, while overlapping in many ways, their differences are sometimes irreconcilable. Philosophy gains from enabling the poem to embody a rival paradigm of knowledge as well as a competing view of the place of knowledge in a meaningful existence. Religious poetry is deepened when it permits itself to seriously respond to philosophical questions. An argument is offered regarding why warfare (intellectual warfare) can be beneficial, and why, accordingly, a philosophical reading that preserves and even kindles this war, rather than one that hopes to pacify it, can be revealing.Less
The book concludes by specifying the ways whereby, although at some points philosophy and religious poetry must part ways, they nevertheless profit by hosting each other. Two vocations can be mutually enriched not only by finding ways to complement each other, but by appreciating that, while overlapping in many ways, their differences are sometimes irreconcilable. Philosophy gains from enabling the poem to embody a rival paradigm of knowledge as well as a competing view of the place of knowledge in a meaningful existence. Religious poetry is deepened when it permits itself to seriously respond to philosophical questions. An argument is offered regarding why warfare (intellectual warfare) can be beneficial, and why, accordingly, a philosophical reading that preserves and even kindles this war, rather than one that hopes to pacify it, can be revealing.
Robert Chodat
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190682156
- eISBN:
- 9780190682187
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190682156.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Ambitious scientific accounts of human thought and behavior have been a mainstay of American intellectual culture since World War II. But if such theories are true, what is the status of our highest ...
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Ambitious scientific accounts of human thought and behavior have been a mainstay of American intellectual culture since World War II. But if such theories are true, what is the status of our highest words, the vocabularies that orient and inspire our actions? What forms are available today for exploring and embodying such terms as “good,” “courage,” or “justice”? This book considers the rise of the “postwar sage,” a strand of post-1945 American writing that takes up these questions in distinctive and illuminating ways. Walker Percy’s clash with behaviorist and cognitivist theories; Marilynne Robinson’s encounter with evolutionary psychology; Ralph Ellison’s combat with sociology; the quarrel with analytic philosophy in Stanley Cavell and David Foster Wallace: at stake in such cases is the status of our normative concepts, and what it means to invoke them in a technological culture that divides “facts” from “values” and treats our high words with deep suspicion. Moving among literary fiction, memoir, essays, personal correspondence, moral philosophy, and contemporary theories of mind, the book examines not only what these philosophical and literary figures think about the relationship between nature and norms, but also how this thinking emerges: when they call upon art, when they call upon argument, and how these various modes can inflect, bolster, and—just as crucially—trouble one another.Less
Ambitious scientific accounts of human thought and behavior have been a mainstay of American intellectual culture since World War II. But if such theories are true, what is the status of our highest words, the vocabularies that orient and inspire our actions? What forms are available today for exploring and embodying such terms as “good,” “courage,” or “justice”? This book considers the rise of the “postwar sage,” a strand of post-1945 American writing that takes up these questions in distinctive and illuminating ways. Walker Percy’s clash with behaviorist and cognitivist theories; Marilynne Robinson’s encounter with evolutionary psychology; Ralph Ellison’s combat with sociology; the quarrel with analytic philosophy in Stanley Cavell and David Foster Wallace: at stake in such cases is the status of our normative concepts, and what it means to invoke them in a technological culture that divides “facts” from “values” and treats our high words with deep suspicion. Moving among literary fiction, memoir, essays, personal correspondence, moral philosophy, and contemporary theories of mind, the book examines not only what these philosophical and literary figures think about the relationship between nature and norms, but also how this thinking emerges: when they call upon art, when they call upon argument, and how these various modes can inflect, bolster, and—just as crucially—trouble one another.
Leonardo Lisi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245321
- eISBN:
- 9780823252541
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245321.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the ...
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This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.Less
This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.
Susanne Zepp
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804787451
- eISBN:
- 9780804793148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804787451.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
The first chapter focuses on the Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea, which has become known under the title La Celestina. This closet drama is almost invariably described as a “threshold” or as a ...
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The first chapter focuses on the Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea, which has become known under the title La Celestina. This closet drama is almost invariably described as a “threshold” or as a “work of crisis” (Manfred Tietz) at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Hitherto existing research understands the text as an example of converso skepticism, and suggests that the constraints of persecution and the adaptive measures conversos were subjected to have shaped the path of Spanish literature into the Renaissance in a specific way. This chapter suggests a different reading, understanding the literary techniques in La Celestina as a decontextualization of biblical texts followed by “oblique” recontextualization. These oblique recontextualizations create surprising perspectives for the original context and make other perspectives not articulated in the text conceivable. A direct path leads from this technique, further perfected mainly by Cervantes in Don Quijote, to modern literature.Less
The first chapter focuses on the Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea, which has become known under the title La Celestina. This closet drama is almost invariably described as a “threshold” or as a “work of crisis” (Manfred Tietz) at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Hitherto existing research understands the text as an example of converso skepticism, and suggests that the constraints of persecution and the adaptive measures conversos were subjected to have shaped the path of Spanish literature into the Renaissance in a specific way. This chapter suggests a different reading, understanding the literary techniques in La Celestina as a decontextualization of biblical texts followed by “oblique” recontextualization. These oblique recontextualizations create surprising perspectives for the original context and make other perspectives not articulated in the text conceivable. A direct path leads from this technique, further perfected mainly by Cervantes in Don Quijote, to modern literature.
Alexander Regier
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198827122
- eISBN:
- 9780191871429
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198827122.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Exorbitant Enlightenment offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It brings into focus a constellation of relatively unknown, pre-1790s ...
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Exorbitant Enlightenment offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It brings into focus a constellation of relatively unknown, pre-1790s Anglo-German relations in Britain, many of which are so radical—so exorbitant—that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the way we do literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. This polyglot book delivers two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: a set of radical figures and institutions that are exorbitant, they leave the specified tracks of literary history and present us with a literary history that explodes the difference between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These figures and institutions include the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli (1741–25), and Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), but also the two most radical, notorious, and most exorbitant figures: William Blake (1757–1827) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88). Over eight comparative chapters, the book presents a constellation of case studies that show how these figures and institutions shake up our common understanding of British literary and European intellectual history. Exorbitant Enlightenment takes seriously, and pays particular attention to, the exorbitant dimensions of Blake and Hamann and how once we take them seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and address some of our own critical orthodoxies.Less
Exorbitant Enlightenment offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It brings into focus a constellation of relatively unknown, pre-1790s Anglo-German relations in Britain, many of which are so radical—so exorbitant—that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the way we do literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. This polyglot book delivers two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: a set of radical figures and institutions that are exorbitant, they leave the specified tracks of literary history and present us with a literary history that explodes the difference between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These figures and institutions include the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli (1741–25), and Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), but also the two most radical, notorious, and most exorbitant figures: William Blake (1757–1827) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88). Over eight comparative chapters, the book presents a constellation of case studies that show how these figures and institutions shake up our common understanding of British literary and European intellectual history. Exorbitant Enlightenment takes seriously, and pays particular attention to, the exorbitant dimensions of Blake and Hamann and how once we take them seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and address some of our own critical orthodoxies.
