Marc Zvi Brettler
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199206575
- eISBN:
- 9780191709678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206575.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
This chapter pays tribute to Fishbane's extraordinary philological and literary skills. Arguing on the basis of careful textual analysis as well as inner-biblical interpretation, it urges ...
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This chapter pays tribute to Fishbane's extraordinary philological and literary skills. Arguing on the basis of careful textual analysis as well as inner-biblical interpretation, it urges reconsideration of the classification of Psalm 111. Psalm 111 is seen as a ‘riddle psalm’ within the larger category of Torah psalms rather than as a historical psalm.Less
This chapter pays tribute to Fishbane's extraordinary philological and literary skills. Arguing on the basis of careful textual analysis as well as inner-biblical interpretation, it urges reconsideration of the classification of Psalm 111. Psalm 111 is seen as a ‘riddle psalm’ within the larger category of Torah psalms rather than as a historical psalm.
Gregory W. Dobrov
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199245475
- eISBN:
- 9780191714993
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245475.003.0008
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter examines the riddling and dithyrambic language of the cook in Middle Comedy. It shows that Aristophanic paratragedy is not simply turned into paradithyramb. As a genre, dithyramb has no ...
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This chapter examines the riddling and dithyrambic language of the cook in Middle Comedy. It shows that Aristophanic paratragedy is not simply turned into paradithyramb. As a genre, dithyramb has no importance for comedy, so that it becomes difficult to speak of parody or even intertextuality. It is only the verbal art of dithyramb which is transferred into comedy and becomes a new ‘special effect’. Whereas in Old Comedy virtually every character can have a paratragic line or two, in Middle Comedy dithyrambic style becomes a prerogative of one particular type of speaker: cooks and servants. By speaking in riddles, the cook appropriates a verbal genre that ‘belongs’ to the upper classes who meet at symposia, and by using a dithyrambic medium in the formulation of these riddles he gives his social pretension or λαζονεία expression also on a linguistic level.Less
This chapter examines the riddling and dithyrambic language of the cook in Middle Comedy. It shows that Aristophanic paratragedy is not simply turned into paradithyramb. As a genre, dithyramb has no importance for comedy, so that it becomes difficult to speak of parody or even intertextuality. It is only the verbal art of dithyramb which is transferred into comedy and becomes a new ‘special effect’. Whereas in Old Comedy virtually every character can have a paratragic line or two, in Middle Comedy dithyrambic style becomes a prerogative of one particular type of speaker: cooks and servants. By speaking in riddles, the cook appropriates a verbal genre that ‘belongs’ to the upper classes who meet at symposia, and by using a dithyrambic medium in the formulation of these riddles he gives his social pretension or λαζονεία expression also on a linguistic level.
M. L. West
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199280759
- eISBN:
- 9780191712913
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199280759.003.0010
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter discusses so-called ‘Indo-European perceptions of the world, and their codification’. The first part deals with cosmology and cosmogony. The second part deals with the forms of ...
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This chapter discusses so-called ‘Indo-European perceptions of the world, and their codification’. The first part deals with cosmology and cosmogony. The second part deals with the forms of expression in which beliefs and opinions on these matters were typically encapsulated — not articulated poetic compositions but catechisms, proverbs, riddles, and the like.Less
This chapter discusses so-called ‘Indo-European perceptions of the world, and their codification’. The first part deals with cosmology and cosmogony. The second part deals with the forms of expression in which beliefs and opinions on these matters were typically encapsulated — not articulated poetic compositions but catechisms, proverbs, riddles, and the like.
Alvin Plantinga
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195078640
- eISBN:
- 9780199872213
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195078640.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Broadly taken, the term “induction” denotes our whole nondeductive procedure of acquiring, maintaining, and discarding beliefs about what is so far unobserved or undetected or unknown. In this ...
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Broadly taken, the term “induction” denotes our whole nondeductive procedure of acquiring, maintaining, and discarding beliefs about what is so far unobserved or undetected or unknown. In this chapter, I examine induction from the perspective of my account of warrant. I first take up what is now referred to as “the old riddle of induction,” rejecting David Hume's claim that inductive reasoning is not rationally justified and defending the view that beliefs formed on the basis of inductive reasoning can have warrant. I then turn to Nelson Goodman's ruminations on grue and the “new riddle of induction,” which is the question: what makes a property projectible? I reject Goodman's own solution to this problem, examine other inadequate solutions, and then suggest that an answer can be found by making reference to the proper function of the human intellect; projectible properties are just those properties that a properly functioning adult human being in our circumstances will in fact project.Less
Broadly taken, the term “induction” denotes our whole nondeductive procedure of acquiring, maintaining, and discarding beliefs about what is so far unobserved or undetected or unknown. In this chapter, I examine induction from the perspective of my account of warrant. I first take up what is now referred to as “the old riddle of induction,” rejecting David Hume's claim that inductive reasoning is not rationally justified and defending the view that beliefs formed on the basis of inductive reasoning can have warrant. I then turn to Nelson Goodman's ruminations on grue and the “new riddle of induction,” which is the question: what makes a property projectible? I reject Goodman's own solution to this problem, examine other inadequate solutions, and then suggest that an answer can be found by making reference to the proper function of the human intellect; projectible properties are just those properties that a properly functioning adult human being in our circumstances will in fact project.
Michael Fontaine
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195341447
- eISBN:
- 9780199866915
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341447.003.0004
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter continues the investigation of Plautus’ use of irony and innuendo. Jokes and riddles in Poenulus, Rudens, Amphitryo, and Stichus suggest that characters’ onstage actions occasionally ...
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This chapter continues the investigation of Plautus’ use of irony and innuendo. Jokes and riddles in Poenulus, Rudens, Amphitryo, and Stichus suggest that characters’ onstage actions occasionally betray their claims or that the jokes they make sometimes presuppose a Greek background. Discussion then turns to the composition and character of Plautus’ audience. Contrary to many prevailing views, it is concluded from archaeological, demographic, and literary evidence that Plautus’ primary audience was essentially aristocratic, alert, well educated, philhellenic, sophisticated, and reasonably well acquainted through education with Greek literature and culture, including the comedy of Menander and Greek oratory. Extended discussions include the Roman “Bacchanalia affair” of 186 bc alongside Plautus’ Truculentus and a speech of Hyperides, connections between the poetry of Sappho and Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus and Curculio (Gorgylio), and connections between the poetry of Callimachus and Plautus’ Pseudolus (Pseudylus). It is concluded that Plautus should be seen as an author in tune with the poetic currents and developments of the contemporary Hellenistic world rather than wholly divorced from them.Less
This chapter continues the investigation of Plautus’ use of irony and innuendo. Jokes and riddles in Poenulus, Rudens, Amphitryo, and Stichus suggest that characters’ onstage actions occasionally betray their claims or that the jokes they make sometimes presuppose a Greek background. Discussion then turns to the composition and character of Plautus’ audience. Contrary to many prevailing views, it is concluded from archaeological, demographic, and literary evidence that Plautus’ primary audience was essentially aristocratic, alert, well educated, philhellenic, sophisticated, and reasonably well acquainted through education with Greek literature and culture, including the comedy of Menander and Greek oratory. Extended discussions include the Roman “Bacchanalia affair” of 186 bc alongside Plautus’ Truculentus and a speech of Hyperides, connections between the poetry of Sappho and Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus and Curculio (Gorgylio), and connections between the poetry of Callimachus and Plautus’ Pseudolus (Pseudylus). It is concluded that Plautus should be seen as an author in tune with the poetic currents and developments of the contemporary Hellenistic world rather than wholly divorced from them.
David Landreth
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199773299
- eISBN:
- 9780199932665
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773299.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Everyone knows that The Merchant of Venice is all about money, but if the characters of the play know it too, they do their best to avoid saying so. This chapter examines the variety of ways in which ...
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Everyone knows that The Merchant of Venice is all about money, but if the characters of the play know it too, they do their best to avoid saying so. This chapter examines the variety of ways in which the play's characters seek to articulate extramonetary values for the objects of their desires, and so disavow the centrality of the three thousand ducats through which their desires contend. The mechanism of disavowal is that of dividing and regrouping the play's central problematic into not only different problems, but different kinds of problem: the twofold dilemma (as between justice and mercy, or Jew and Christian), the unitary mystery of the self to the self, the triplicate riddle of the three caskets. In the play's cynical assessment of the relation of its individuals to its society, self-knowledge is willfully mystified in order to validate the institution that, by its own consensual disavowal, holds the Venetian commonwealth together: its money.Less
Everyone knows that The Merchant of Venice is all about money, but if the characters of the play know it too, they do their best to avoid saying so. This chapter examines the variety of ways in which the play's characters seek to articulate extramonetary values for the objects of their desires, and so disavow the centrality of the three thousand ducats through which their desires contend. The mechanism of disavowal is that of dividing and regrouping the play's central problematic into not only different problems, but different kinds of problem: the twofold dilemma (as between justice and mercy, or Jew and Christian), the unitary mystery of the self to the self, the triplicate riddle of the three caskets. In the play's cynical assessment of the relation of its individuals to its society, self-knowledge is willfully mystified in order to validate the institution that, by its own consensual disavowal, holds the Venetian commonwealth together: its money.
Inna Naroditskaya
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195340587
- eISBN:
- 9780199918218
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195340587.003.0120
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
The first scene of the opera Queen of Spades introduces major leitmotifs associated with double passions—love and gambling—which, though contrasting, share an identical melody. Unexpected, surprising ...
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The first scene of the opera Queen of Spades introduces major leitmotifs associated with double passions—love and gambling—which, though contrasting, share an identical melody. Unexpected, surprising dualities, doubles, pairings penetrate both Pushkin’s tale and Tchaikovsky’s score. Gherman, by his very name linked to St. Germain (the original owner of the secret of three winning cards), repeats, reverses and distorts his predecessor’s story. Young Liza is paired with the countess (her grandmother in Tchaikovsky) and at the same time with her friend Polina. Liza replays the tale of the shepherdess, which unfolds in three fragments performed (in reverse time) by three female characters—the love arietta borrowed from Grétry and sung by the countess (scene 4), the shepherdess’s idyllic union enacted by Liza and Polina in a play within a play (scene 3), and Polina’s elegiac romance (scene 2). In a story collapsing times and confusing identities, a riddle between creators and spectators, the female circle is extended and empowered by one more person, a silent monarchical shadow at the falling curtain of the third scene.Less
The first scene of the opera Queen of Spades introduces major leitmotifs associated with double passions—love and gambling—which, though contrasting, share an identical melody. Unexpected, surprising dualities, doubles, pairings penetrate both Pushkin’s tale and Tchaikovsky’s score. Gherman, by his very name linked to St. Germain (the original owner of the secret of three winning cards), repeats, reverses and distorts his predecessor’s story. Young Liza is paired with the countess (her grandmother in Tchaikovsky) and at the same time with her friend Polina. Liza replays the tale of the shepherdess, which unfolds in three fragments performed (in reverse time) by three female characters—the love arietta borrowed from Grétry and sung by the countess (scene 4), the shepherdess’s idyllic union enacted by Liza and Polina in a play within a play (scene 3), and Polina’s elegiac romance (scene 2). In a story collapsing times and confusing identities, a riddle between creators and spectators, the female circle is extended and empowered by one more person, a silent monarchical shadow at the falling curtain of the third scene.
Patrick Sims‐Williams
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199588657
- eISBN:
- 9780191595431
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588657.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
With particular reference to Togail Bruidne Da Derga and Branwen this chapter discusses the narrative technique called the ‘Watchman Device’. It is illustrated from Homer, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, ...
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With particular reference to Togail Bruidne Da Derga and Branwen this chapter discusses the narrative technique called the ‘Watchman Device’. It is illustrated from Homer, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, the Shahnama, the Mahabharata, Laxdœla saga, Thithreks saga, the Bórama, Táin Bó Cúailnge, Serbian and Scottish Gaelic ballads, and even Kenneth Grahame. The Irish and Welsh examples have undergone the influence, perhaps independently, of the ‘Slavic Antithesis’ of Chapter 4 and of international landscape riddles. Riddles from around the world are compared and the relationship beween riddle, metaphor, kenning, and myth is discussed.Less
With particular reference to Togail Bruidne Da Derga and Branwen this chapter discusses the narrative technique called the ‘Watchman Device’. It is illustrated from Homer, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, the Shahnama, the Mahabharata, Laxdœla saga, Thithreks saga, the Bórama, Táin Bó Cúailnge, Serbian and Scottish Gaelic ballads, and even Kenneth Grahame. The Irish and Welsh examples have undergone the influence, perhaps independently, of the ‘Slavic Antithesis’ of Chapter 4 and of international landscape riddles. Riddles from around the world are compared and the relationship beween riddle, metaphor, kenning, and myth is discussed.
Christi A. Merrill
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823229550
- eISBN:
- 9780823241064
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823229550.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Here the paradoxical temporalities of Narayana Rao's riddling community referred to in the opening chapter assume a metaphorical locatedness in riddling framed narratives that Eagleton describes as a ...
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Here the paradoxical temporalities of Narayana Rao's riddling community referred to in the opening chapter assume a metaphorical locatedness in riddling framed narratives that Eagleton describes as a “semiotic puzzle”: such repetitions create a space for themselves that seems both very much their own world, he observes, and yet intimately connected to the world outside. To judge the effect of a story such as that of the switched heads requires we first set about solving this semiotic puzzle. Bakhtin insists that festive laughter “is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event,” but is instead “the laughter of all the people.” In a move that resonates with the logic of the riddle of belonging, Bakhtin posits an individual speaker whose words are “actually a cry, that is, a loud interjection in the midst of a crowd, coming out of the crowd and addressed to it.” This joyous expression of resistance requires us to think carefully about the ways we are defining a “you” in relation to a first-person subject position.Less
Here the paradoxical temporalities of Narayana Rao's riddling community referred to in the opening chapter assume a metaphorical locatedness in riddling framed narratives that Eagleton describes as a “semiotic puzzle”: such repetitions create a space for themselves that seems both very much their own world, he observes, and yet intimately connected to the world outside. To judge the effect of a story such as that of the switched heads requires we first set about solving this semiotic puzzle. Bakhtin insists that festive laughter “is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event,” but is instead “the laughter of all the people.” In a move that resonates with the logic of the riddle of belonging, Bakhtin posits an individual speaker whose words are “actually a cry, that is, a loud interjection in the midst of a crowd, coming out of the crowd and addressed to it.” This joyous expression of resistance requires us to think carefully about the ways we are defining a “you” in relation to a first-person subject position.
Isabelle Torrance
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199657834
- eISBN:
- 9780191745393
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.003.0007
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The Conclusion draws together the main arguments of the book through reference to an Aristophanic joke about Euripidean tone. The suggestion that Euripides implicitly invites the audience to ...
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The Conclusion draws together the main arguments of the book through reference to an Aristophanic joke about Euripidean tone. The suggestion that Euripides implicitly invites the audience to interpret his metapoetic games is framed within the context of the Athenian love of riddles and the dramatists’ hopes for intelligent spectators.Less
The Conclusion draws together the main arguments of the book through reference to an Aristophanic joke about Euripidean tone. The suggestion that Euripides implicitly invites the audience to interpret his metapoetic games is framed within the context of the Athenian love of riddles and the dramatists’ hopes for intelligent spectators.
Gilbert Harman
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198238027
- eISBN:
- 9780191597633
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198238029.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
Simplicity is used in curve‐fitting and can be illustrated by Goodman's ‘new riddle of induction.’ Taking the simplicity of a hypothesis to depend entirely on the simplicity of the way it is ...
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Simplicity is used in curve‐fitting and can be illustrated by Goodman's ‘new riddle of induction.’ Taking the simplicity of a hypothesis to depend entirely on the simplicity of the way it is represented does not work, because simplicity of representation is too dependent on the method of representation, and any hypothesis can be represented simply. An alternative ‘semantic’ theory also has problems. A ‘computational’ theory is defended that considers how easy it is to use a hypothesis to get answers to questions in which one is interested.Less
Simplicity is used in curve‐fitting and can be illustrated by Goodman's ‘new riddle of induction.’ Taking the simplicity of a hypothesis to depend entirely on the simplicity of the way it is represented does not work, because simplicity of representation is too dependent on the method of representation, and any hypothesis can be represented simply. An alternative ‘semantic’ theory also has problems. A ‘computational’ theory is defended that considers how easy it is to use a hypothesis to get answers to questions in which one is interested.
Michael Pifer
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780300250398
- eISBN:
- 9780300258653
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300250398.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Although Muslim poets accommodated linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in their compositions, they were not alone in this practice. Chapter 6 examines how Armenian poets adapted vocabulary, genres, ...
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Although Muslim poets accommodated linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in their compositions, they were not alone in this practice. Chapter 6 examines how Armenian poets adapted vocabulary, genres, themes, tropes, and styles from Islamicate literature around medieval Cilicia, the last Armenian kingdom. As it shows, such poets generally instructed their audiences to read their compositions within a distinctly Christian interpretive frame. For example, St. Nerses Shnorhali (d. 1173), the head of the Armenian church, rewrote the Bible as a series of interlocking riddles that train an audience to read scripture in a particular manner. In a complementary manner yet a different literary register, the celebrated poet Frik adapted and rewrote Persian poetry, directing his audience to interpret these poetics within a Christianizing framework. By bringing these poets into dialogue with one another, this chapter reads early Armenian vernacular poetry through the literary practices that shaped it, such as gloss and quotation in particular. As it demonstrates, it is precisely the ways in which these poets did not translate wholesale texts that enabled them to recast different literary cultures within a Christian idiom.Less
Although Muslim poets accommodated linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in their compositions, they were not alone in this practice. Chapter 6 examines how Armenian poets adapted vocabulary, genres, themes, tropes, and styles from Islamicate literature around medieval Cilicia, the last Armenian kingdom. As it shows, such poets generally instructed their audiences to read their compositions within a distinctly Christian interpretive frame. For example, St. Nerses Shnorhali (d. 1173), the head of the Armenian church, rewrote the Bible as a series of interlocking riddles that train an audience to read scripture in a particular manner. In a complementary manner yet a different literary register, the celebrated poet Frik adapted and rewrote Persian poetry, directing his audience to interpret these poetics within a Christianizing framework. By bringing these poets into dialogue with one another, this chapter reads early Armenian vernacular poetry through the literary practices that shaped it, such as gloss and quotation in particular. As it demonstrates, it is precisely the ways in which these poets did not translate wholesale texts that enabled them to recast different literary cultures within a Christian idiom.
Lindy Brady
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784994198
- eISBN:
- 9781526128386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784994198.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Medieval History
Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior ...
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Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior elite across the ostensible Anglo-Welsh divide. These riddles, which link the ‘dark Welsh’ to agricultural labour, have long been understood to depict the Welsh as slaves and thus reflect Anglo-Saxon awareness of both ethnic and social division. Drawing upon understudied Welsh legal material, this chapter argues that these riddles have a multilayered solution in which the Welsh are both slaves and slave traders, complicating readings of negative Anglo/Welsh relations. This polysemic solution reveals that the Welsh, like the Anglo-Saxons, were stratified by class into the enslaved and a warrior elite with less distance from the Anglo-Saxons than has been understood. The location of these riddles on the mearc further characterises the Welsh borderlands in the early period as a distinctive region which was notorious for cattle raiding. These riddles counter the common perception that the Welsh borderlands were defined by Offa’s Dyke, suggesting that this region is better understood as a space which both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh permeated on raids.Less
Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior elite across the ostensible Anglo-Welsh divide. These riddles, which link the ‘dark Welsh’ to agricultural labour, have long been understood to depict the Welsh as slaves and thus reflect Anglo-Saxon awareness of both ethnic and social division. Drawing upon understudied Welsh legal material, this chapter argues that these riddles have a multilayered solution in which the Welsh are both slaves and slave traders, complicating readings of negative Anglo/Welsh relations. This polysemic solution reveals that the Welsh, like the Anglo-Saxons, were stratified by class into the enslaved and a warrior elite with less distance from the Anglo-Saxons than has been understood. The location of these riddles on the mearc further characterises the Welsh borderlands in the early period as a distinctive region which was notorious for cattle raiding. These riddles counter the common perception that the Welsh borderlands were defined by Offa’s Dyke, suggesting that this region is better understood as a space which both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh permeated on raids.
Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226677019
- eISBN:
- 9780226677293
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226677293.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the “Ithaca” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses explore problems of “a different order of difficulty” through the guise of the more routinely difficult “propositions of natural ...
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Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the “Ithaca” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses explore problems of “a different order of difficulty” through the guise of the more routinely difficult “propositions of natural science.” Both are structured in a catalogue of questions and assertions that seems to progress toward a conclusion the author ultimately withholds; rely on pseudoscientific precision in their treatments of moral and existential matters; make performative use of didacticism and prophetic tones; and echo scripture alongside the language of science and logic. Joyce and Wittgenstein challenge readers to understand their respective authorial (and deauthorizing) strategies and the relationship of their faux-doctrines to their literary and philosophical aims. They gesture at a secular conversion characterized by a “vanishing” of problems that accompanies “seeing the world aright” in the way that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom does by adopting an attitude of reflective peace and resolution that grants him temporary rest from the onslaught of questions of “Ithaca’s” catechetical form. Bloom’s ethical perspective thus resembles Wittgenstein’s transformative “happy” outlook. The Tractatus seeks to steer readers toward a secular-spiritual transfiguration similar to the one Bloom achieves. Wittgenstein’s transformative impulse is galvanized by Tolstoy, but also coincides with Nietzsche’s conception of redemption as a post-Christian transfiguration.Less
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the “Ithaca” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses explore problems of “a different order of difficulty” through the guise of the more routinely difficult “propositions of natural science.” Both are structured in a catalogue of questions and assertions that seems to progress toward a conclusion the author ultimately withholds; rely on pseudoscientific precision in their treatments of moral and existential matters; make performative use of didacticism and prophetic tones; and echo scripture alongside the language of science and logic. Joyce and Wittgenstein challenge readers to understand their respective authorial (and deauthorizing) strategies and the relationship of their faux-doctrines to their literary and philosophical aims. They gesture at a secular conversion characterized by a “vanishing” of problems that accompanies “seeing the world aright” in the way that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom does by adopting an attitude of reflective peace and resolution that grants him temporary rest from the onslaught of questions of “Ithaca’s” catechetical form. Bloom’s ethical perspective thus resembles Wittgenstein’s transformative “happy” outlook. The Tractatus seeks to steer readers toward a secular-spiritual transfiguration similar to the one Bloom achieves. Wittgenstein’s transformative impulse is galvanized by Tolstoy, but also coincides with Nietzsche’s conception of redemption as a post-Christian transfiguration.
D. Vance Smith
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226640853
- eISBN:
- 9780226641041
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226641041.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter examines the relation between death and the voice in Old English poetry and pedagogical texts, especially Aelfric's Grammar and Colloquies and two versions of a debate between the body ...
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This chapter examines the relation between death and the voice in Old English poetry and pedagogical texts, especially Aelfric's Grammar and Colloquies and two versions of a debate between the body and the soul. The division of the soul from the body at death is framed in terms similar to the division of being into constituent categories, and the partition of language into its smallest component. The relation between these elements and the meaning of which they are part is like the relation of the vox to the body, a cryptic figure like the riddle.Less
This chapter examines the relation between death and the voice in Old English poetry and pedagogical texts, especially Aelfric's Grammar and Colloquies and two versions of a debate between the body and the soul. The division of the soul from the body at death is framed in terms similar to the division of being into constituent categories, and the partition of language into its smallest component. The relation between these elements and the meaning of which they are part is like the relation of the vox to the body, a cryptic figure like the riddle.
Christi A. Merrill
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823229550
- eISBN:
- 9780823241064
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823229550.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Can the subaltern joke? The author answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden — whether ...
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Can the subaltern joke? The author answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden — whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. She uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a singular material object to be carried across. She refigures translation as a performative telling in turn, from the Hindi word anuvad, to explain how a text might be multiply possessed. She thereby challenges the distinction between original and derivative, fundamental to nationalist and literary discourse, humoring our melancholic fixation on what is lost. Instead, she offers strategies for playing along with the subversive wit found in translated texts. Sly jokes and spirited double entendres, she suggests, require equally spirited double hearings. The playful lessons offered by these narratives provide insight into the networks of transnational relations connecting us across a sea of differences. Generations of multilingual audiences in India have been navigating this Ocean of the Stream of Stories since before the 11th century, arriving at a fluid sense of commonality across languages.Less
Can the subaltern joke? The author answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden — whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. She uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a singular material object to be carried across. She refigures translation as a performative telling in turn, from the Hindi word anuvad, to explain how a text might be multiply possessed. She thereby challenges the distinction between original and derivative, fundamental to nationalist and literary discourse, humoring our melancholic fixation on what is lost. Instead, she offers strategies for playing along with the subversive wit found in translated texts. Sly jokes and spirited double entendres, she suggests, require equally spirited double hearings. The playful lessons offered by these narratives provide insight into the networks of transnational relations connecting us across a sea of differences. Generations of multilingual audiences in India have been navigating this Ocean of the Stream of Stories since before the 11th century, arriving at a fluid sense of commonality across languages.
Hannah Burrows
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823257812
- eISBN:
- 9780823261598
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823257812.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Hannah Burrows discusses the riddles found in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a thirteenth-century fornaldarsaga. Little scholarly attention has been directed toward the riddles from the Old ...
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Hannah Burrows discusses the riddles found in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a thirteenth-century fornaldarsaga. Little scholarly attention has been directed toward the riddles from the Old Norse-Icelandic tradition. Hervarar saga contains thirty seven riddles in eddic meters, incorporated into the prose narrative as an exchange of wisdom between King Heiðrekr and the god Óðinn. Burrows argues that the riddles were collected by the saga author (or redactor) who then wrote this episode for the express purpose of incorporating them into the narrative. The riddles resist categorization and classification. Burrows calls them “beyond eddic.” They are composed in “eddic” meters, but they also have affinity with skaldic poetry. Burrows shows how the thematic content of the riddles situates them both within and outside the eddic tradition, and her detailed study of the ordering of the riddles in relationship to one another offers clues to the intentions of the saga author who inserted them into his prosimetrical narrative. Those interested in the wider medieval tradition of riddling will welcome her discussion of how this Nordic manifestation fits into it.Less
Hannah Burrows discusses the riddles found in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a thirteenth-century fornaldarsaga. Little scholarly attention has been directed toward the riddles from the Old Norse-Icelandic tradition. Hervarar saga contains thirty seven riddles in eddic meters, incorporated into the prose narrative as an exchange of wisdom between King Heiðrekr and the god Óðinn. Burrows argues that the riddles were collected by the saga author (or redactor) who then wrote this episode for the express purpose of incorporating them into the narrative. The riddles resist categorization and classification. Burrows calls them “beyond eddic.” They are composed in “eddic” meters, but they also have affinity with skaldic poetry. Burrows shows how the thematic content of the riddles situates them both within and outside the eddic tradition, and her detailed study of the ordering of the riddles in relationship to one another offers clues to the intentions of the saga author who inserted them into his prosimetrical narrative. Those interested in the wider medieval tradition of riddling will welcome her discussion of how this Nordic manifestation fits into it.
Elaine Treharne
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- October 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780192843814
- eISBN:
- 9780191926471
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780192843814.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most ...
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Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book’s life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization—all aspects of what can be termed ‘dynamic architextuality’. The ten chapters of this study include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts’ blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts’ heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as ‘relics of existence’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book’s wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.Less
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book’s life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization—all aspects of what can be termed ‘dynamic architextuality’. The ten chapters of this study include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts’ blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts’ heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as ‘relics of existence’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book’s wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.
John Howland
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520271036
- eISBN:
- 9780520951358
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520271036.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement ...
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From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, releasing a variety of richly orchestrated, urbane, jazz-inflected recordings, including acclaimed releases by Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. While the postwar period saw the decline of the traditional big band as a commercial force in popular culture, these jazz-pop ventures reinvented swing for the hi-fi era. Through close study of select arrangements, contemporary cultural discourse, and marketing and promotion, this essay articulates the larger aesthetic issues and cultural conditions that shaped the hybrid, middlebrow ideals of these jazz-with-strings subgenres.Less
From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, releasing a variety of richly orchestrated, urbane, jazz-inflected recordings, including acclaimed releases by Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. While the postwar period saw the decline of the traditional big band as a commercial force in popular culture, these jazz-pop ventures reinvented swing for the hi-fi era. Through close study of select arrangements, contemporary cultural discourse, and marketing and promotion, this essay articulates the larger aesthetic issues and cultural conditions that shaped the hybrid, middlebrow ideals of these jazz-with-strings subgenres.
Andrea Gadberry
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226722979
- eISBN:
- 9780226723167
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226723167.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
In the Discourse on Method, Descartes explains that everyone has an equal amount of common sense and that no one would even think of wanting more of it. Examining this famous opening, the chapter ...
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In the Discourse on Method, Descartes explains that everyone has an equal amount of common sense and that no one would even think of wanting more of it. Examining this famous opening, the chapter exposes a complicated relationship between envy and language, concealed in the form of a definition of common sense that acts as a solved riddle and provides the precondition of thought. Descartes’s early education in Jesuit-inflected Renaissance humanism exposed him to the form of the enigma, the emblem, and the riddle, forms which also appear in the Regulae, in which Descartes teaches his reader how to solve Oedipus’s riddle without the threat of mythic consequences. As envy and language intersect in the frustrations Descartes characterizes as a struggle experienced in infancy to become a subject of language, the hidden force within Descartes’ apparently egalitarian distribution of common sense is the “natural perversion” of envy, the effects of which he seeks to tame through an intellectual program that imagines a universal literacy whose first principle is universal close reading.Less
In the Discourse on Method, Descartes explains that everyone has an equal amount of common sense and that no one would even think of wanting more of it. Examining this famous opening, the chapter exposes a complicated relationship between envy and language, concealed in the form of a definition of common sense that acts as a solved riddle and provides the precondition of thought. Descartes’s early education in Jesuit-inflected Renaissance humanism exposed him to the form of the enigma, the emblem, and the riddle, forms which also appear in the Regulae, in which Descartes teaches his reader how to solve Oedipus’s riddle without the threat of mythic consequences. As envy and language intersect in the frustrations Descartes characterizes as a struggle experienced in infancy to become a subject of language, the hidden force within Descartes’ apparently egalitarian distribution of common sense is the “natural perversion” of envy, the effects of which he seeks to tame through an intellectual program that imagines a universal literacy whose first principle is universal close reading.
