Philosophy and Literature, vol. 28, no.2, October 2004

For more than a quarter century, Philosophy and Literature has explored the dialogue between literary and philosophical studies. The journal offers a constant source of fresh, stimulating ideas in the aesthetics of literature, theory of criticism, philosophical interpretation of literature, and literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature challenges the cant and pretensions of academic priesthoods by publishing an assortment of lively, wide-ranging essays, notes, and reviews that are written in clear, jargon-free prose.

Volume 28, Number 2, October 2004:

CONTENTS:

Articles:

Irwin, William, 1970- :

• Against Intertextuality

Abstract: Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality in 1966, and since that time intertextuality has come to have almost as many meanings as users. No small task, I clarify what intertextuality means for Kristeva and her mentor/colleague, Roland Barthes before criticizing their concept of intertextuality and its application in interpretation. Because no rational and coherent concept of intertextuality is offered by Kristeva, Barthes, or their Epigoni, I conclude that intertextuality should be stricken from the lexicon of sincere and intelligent humanists.

Rosenstock, Bruce (Bruce Benjamin) :

• Mourning and Melancholia: Reading the Symposium

Abstract:The characters Apollodorus and Alcibiades represent the melancholic and manic poles of what Freud calls the "cyclic disease" in "Mourning and Melancholia." Plato conceives of erôs as entrapped within cycles of pleasure and pain, filling and emptying, until the self recognizes its overfullness that is, its pregnancy. Socrates embodies the "out-of-placeness" (atopia) that overfullness signifies in a world characterized by emptying and filling, the "whole tragedy and comedy of life" as the Philebus puts it. As a lure for erôs, Socrates points beyond himself; for Apollodorus and Alicibiades, however, he catalyzes their melancholic and manic positions. The reader of the dialogue is thereby cautioned not to relate to the text as containing the fullness of Socratic speech, but to see it as the occasion for the recognition of his or her own out-of-placeness in the "tragedy and comedy of life."

Benitez, E. E. :

• On Literal Translation: Robert Browning and the Agamemnon

Hillyer, Richard. :

• Hobbes's Explicated Fables and the Legacy of the Ancients

Abstract: A transitional text in other respects as well, De Cive differs from Hobbes's earlier Elements of Law and later Leviathan by claiming points of agreement between his own political philosophy and that embodied allegorically in the fables of classical antiquity (as explicated by himself). Though he did not begin with and subsequently abandoned this unconvincing approach, it reveals how late in his intellectual development he was still tempted to find some way of establishing classical precedents for his views, and thereby calls into question his frequent assessment as an arch-modern.

Oser, Lee, 1958- :

• Human Nature and Modernist Ethics

Abstract: I argue that the modernist synthesis of the higher self and dehumanized art prepares the way for the Age of Biotech. The high modernists went "out of nature" to recreate man and morality. The critical heirs of modernism, including postmodernists, inherit this ambitious effort the modernist moral project. The roads of modernism run from the City of Art in Yeats's Byzantium poems, through the dehumanized aesthetic of Woolf and others, to the postmodernist deconstruction of character, as well as to the democratic vistas of John Dewey and Freeman Dyson.

Duran, Jane. :

Virginia Woolf, Time, and the Real

Almond, Ian, 1969- :

• Experimenting with Islam: Nietzschean Reflections on Bowles's Araplaina
  

Milnes, Tim. :

• Charles Lamb: Professor of Indifference

Evans, Jan E.
Evans, C. Stephen. :

• Kierkegaard's Aesthete and Unamuno's Niebla

Abstract: What is truly beautiful? For Søren Kierkegaard the beautiful is to be found in an integrated self, one that is freely chosen. This article explores Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" stage of existence through the character of Augusto Pérez, the protagonist of Miguel de Unamuno's novel, Niebla. After establishing a solid link between Unamuno and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's "ethical" stage is used to critique the "aesthetic" stage on aesthetic grounds, on the basis of the beauty found in life's work, a calling. The conclusion is that the sphere of the "aesthetic" does not achieve Kierkegaard's "aesthetics" of an integrated, fully existing self.

SYMPOSIUM: DOSTOEVSKY RECONTEXTUALIZED:

McReynolds, Susan. :

• Dostoevsky and Schiller: National Renewal Through Aesthetic Education
  

Cherkasova, Evgenia V. :

• Kant on Free Will and Arbitrariness: A View from Dostoevsky's Underground
  

Hagberg, Garry, 1952- :

• Wittgenstein Underground

Abstract: This paper argues that Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground makes a fundamental point that runs directly counter to the received popular image of the work; i.e. the understanding that Notes describes a consciousness reflecting on itself, hermetically sealed within its own Cartesian interior. In truth, a closer reading shows that the mind depicted therein is profoundly relational and situated in a particularized context, and that this discursive mind characterizes what Wittgenstein says about mental privacy in the context of the private language argument. The upshot is that language is not secondary, not an afterthought, and thus not posterior to pure subjectivity of the kind that many who celebrate "inferiority" take as a given human experience.

NOTES AND FRAGMENTS:

Freadman, Richard, 1951- :

• Decency and its Discontents

Bicknell, Jeanette. :

• Self-Knowledge and the Limitations of Narrative

Sansom, Dennis. :

• Tolstoy and the Moral Instructions of Death

Abstract: Tolstoy critiques the assumption one can live a meaningful life merely by following social conventions. Though they may give a semblance of control, they do not prepare one to face mortality. Compassion for others enables one to transmute a preoccupation with filling one's preferences and desires to an appreciation of others and one's individuality. In telling of Ivan's death, Tolstoy shows the ineffectiveness of the practice of medicine and marriage when they are treated only as conventions.

CRITICAL DISCUSSION:

Holbo, John. :

• On iek and Trilling

Abstract: J.S. Mill declares the true liberal prays for enlightened opposition. Slavoj iek's anti-liberal Kierkegaardian-Leninist philosophy, as presented in On Belief, is sized up as an opponent but fails to measure up philosophically. iek is not clear-headed; doesn't understand Kierkegaard; doesn't understand Lenin; or is too much of a soft-hearted liberal who only wishes he weren't. iek fears liberalism may threaten freedom. But the threats he sees although real are old news to liberals. Lionel Trilling-inspired hints concerning the proper care and feedings of the liberal imagination conclude the paper.

REVIEWS:

Zalloua, Zahi Anbra, 1971- :

• Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (review)

Matuozzi, Robert N. :

• A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal (review)

Warner, Martin. :

• American Memory in Henry James: Void and Value (review)

Slocombe, Will. :

• Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism (review)

BOOKMARKS:

Dutton, Denis. :

• The Pleasures of Fiction
  

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