Revue
Nouvelle parution
Philosophy and Literature, vol. 32, no 1 (april 2008)

Philosophy and Literature, vol. 32, no 1 (april 2008)

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Project Muse)

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. In his regular column, editor Denis Dutton targets the fashions and inanities of contemporary intellectual life.


Vol. 32, no (avril 2008)


ARTICLES

Ihab Hassan
Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization
When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" I Forget the blackbirds for now. The question is: how many ways are there of questioning theory in our age? And if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the earth wobbles under the weight of six billion beholders, what is beauty then? Or is beauty unmentionable in academe, despite the indiscretions of some scholars�Elaine Scary, Fred Turner, Charles Jencks, among others�who have recently taken the name of beauty in vain? Again, forget beauty and the blackbirds; think of geography. Thomas Friedman went home one day and said to his wife, "Honey, I think the world is flat." He was echoing a technocrat in Bangalore who said to him, "Tom, the playing field is being... (Extrait)

Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy
Philosophy is dangerous. It is not surprising that the Athenians condemned Socrates to death, that Nero urged Seneca to be prompt in committing suicide; it's no wonder that theologians burned Abelard's book on the Trinity, that Hobbes and Locke each thought it wise to take a brief self-imposed exile; that Scottish Universities declined to appoint Hume to a Professorship, that Voltaire and Diderot were imprisoned, that Kant was censored, that Fichte, Husserl and Russell were forced to resign from their university positions. And that's not even beginning to cite the self-censorship of figures like Spinoza and Mill. Even when they aimed at consolation and consolidation, philosophers often began by unsettling the mind. Some claimed to know what was thought unknowable; others doubted what was believed to be certain. Some... (Extrait)


Brian Boyd
Art and Evolution: Spiegelman's The Narrative Corpse
Has art evolved, like opposable thumbs and the whites of our eyes? If it has, will knowing so help us understand better not just art in general but particular works, even works of avant-garde art? Over recent decades many have come to accept that not only have humans evolved from other animals but that many features of their minds and behavior can be explained by the deep past of evolution. Yet art remains a puzzle for biocultural analysis. How can we explain art in the hard-nosed terms of biological advantage, especially if it lacks analogies or precursors in other species and seems so pleasurably part of being distinctly human? Nevertheless we have good reasons to examine whether art... (Extrait)

Don Levi
Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will?
When Pharaoh was reeling from certain later plagues he agreed to free the Israelites. But each time after the plague stopped, God stiffened Pharaoh's heart, and he refused to let them go. Since it was God who did it, Pharaoh had to refuse to release the Israelites; he could not have let them go. So, he was deprived of free will by God. In this article I question this reasoning. I question whether we can conclude from the fact that God did it that Pharaoh could not release them; and from the fact that Pharaoh could not release them, that he did not have free will. I also question whether it is possible to understand what the free will is that God is supposed to have given to all of us and taken from Pharaoh. I The Exodus is the story of how the Israelites escaped from slavery and... (Extrait)


David Hillman
The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida
Stanley Cavell's luminous and influential writings about Shakespeare's works include extended essays on seven of the plays, and, scattered throughout his writings, more casual passages on many of the others. He takes these works to be significantly engaged in the conditions of skepticism as he apprehends it. These plays, according to Cavell, wrestle profoundly with questions about the origins of, and the possibilities of living with, skeptical ways of thinking. Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's most self-consciously philosophical play, and the place in the Shakespearean corpus where the relations between philosophy and literature are most openly and directly addressed. It is often... (Exrait)


Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar
Literature, Politics, and Character
What is the relationship between literature and politics? We might interpret this question in terms of causality. For example, we might ask whether literature has any effects in the world of politics and if so how. Auden famously proclaimed that poetry makes nothing happen, while it was central to Brecht's dramaturgy that theatre has certain political effects on its audience. Conversely, we might see literature as an effect of political causes and claim that certain political environments give rise to certain types of literature, and that those political backgrounds thereby explain certain aspects of literary phenomena. Both kinds of causal relationship are at the heart of Marxist literary criticism, and of the many schools of academic criticism which share the Marxist assumption that individual consciousness, and its literary... (Extrait)


Jon Adams
Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality
Ever popular among the various topics occupying non-academic conversations about literature�such as the identity of the real author of the plays attributed to "Shakespeare"�is the notion that there exists only a finite number of storylines, and that all the stories we know are only ever complications or rehearsals of these few, elementary plots. What is the status of that claim? The issue gains a renewed relevance in light of literary criticism's recent interest in the possibilities of employing evolutionary psychology as a means of naturalising literary study, but interest in plot taxonomies stretches a long way back. Why might we seek to categorise plots into a finite taxonomy? And what are the implications of the claim if true? Organising literature into any classificatory scheme is an attempt to achieve something like the coherence that the... (Extrait)


Amihud Gilead
How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have?
Of the best shortest story, we have only tales. According to one of them, Ernest Hemingway was proud of being the author of a story written in merely six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." He considered this as his best story. Interviewing Gary Paulsen, Lori Atkins Goodson heard another version: Probably the best writing ever done was by Hemingway and several other writers�I think it was in North Africa. During a drunken discussion, somebody said that they should write the best and shortest story they could write. They all had stories. Hemingway came up with six words: "For sale: Baby shoes. Never used." ... Isn't that great? That's all there is. Six words. There's a book, there's a movie, there's a short story, there's a poem�anything you want to do with those six words, you can do it. It's just amazing what you can do with your words. I... (Extrait)


Amy Olberding
"A little throat cutting in the meantime": Seneca's Violent Imagery
One of Seneca's foremost concerns is proffering a distinctively therapeutic version of Stoicism that takes as its principal charge the alleviation of anxiety about death. Indeed, while Seneca treats in his work a number of psychic afflictions, such as anger and desire, death registers as a singular preoccupation and Seneca appears to conceive reconciliation to mortality a foundational cure before which many other maladies give way. My aim is not to rehearse the elements of Seneca's proposed cure but to assay the images of death in Seneca's writings and consider what contribution they make to Seneca's therapy. While Seneca limns familiar Stoic principles regarding death, he also frequently turns his attention to particularly violent deaths and... (Extrait)


Patrick Colm Hogan
Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses
There is no such thing as human culture or human cultural difference without human universality.1 (A parallel point about understanding human cultural difference was made by Donald Davidson.2) Alternatively, cultural difference is variation on human universality.  It follows that every area of a culture manifests human universality. (Otherwise, those cultural areas would not exist.) It does not follow that all areas of culture are found in all cultures. The empirical study of literature, an area of some cultures, would not exist if it did not manifest human universality. It does not follow that the empirical study of literature exists in all cultures. The presence of verbal art in any given culture�thus the determination of whether verbal art is found in all cultures�is dependent on the... (Extrait)

NOTES AND FRAGMENTS

Brian Laetz and Joshua J. Johnston
What is Fantasy?
Wizards, elves, dragons, and trolls�this is certainly the stuff of fantasy, populating the fictions of such giants as Tolkien, no less than the juvenilia of many aspiring writers. However, it is much easier to identify typical elements of fantasy, than it is to understand the category of fantasy itself. There can be little doubt that, in practice, the genre is pretty well defined, concretely manifesting itself in the shelves reserved for it in video shops and bookstores. But stating why a work belongs on these shelves, rather than those in the near vicinity, such as horror and science fiction, or those more remote, like plain old fiction, presents a real challenge. Certainly, a mere few feet could separate fantasy from the other shelves, but the conceptual distance those feet represent appears great... (Extrait)


Ilya Bernstein
Temporal Registers in the Realist Novel
There are two ways of thinking about time: in terms of sequences of events, and in terms of time-scales. In the first case, each event is conceived of as having a "before" and an "after": it is categorized as part of a sequence and distinguished from other events by its position in that sequence. In the second case, there is no "before" and "after": events are conceived of as occupying different time-scales and distinguished from one another by being associated with durations of greater or lesser magnitude.1 Thus, the same situation may be categorized alternatively as an unfolding succession of events (event 1, event 2, event 3 ...) or as a progression of overlapping events on expanding time-scales (the second-event, the minute-event, the hour-event ...). In what follows, I will argue that this distinction can shed light on... (Extrait)


Jeffrey Gordon
The Triumph Of Sisyphus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of the mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.1 The words are, of course, Albert Camus's. They were first published in 1942. Since then, this voice�at once lyrical and austere, personal and oracular�and the ancient image he calls up in these lines have become permanent parts of our postmodern consciousness. Like all the images that capture and create the character of our age, Sisyphus is always there for each of us. In the intimate space of our imagination, we can turn to him at will, and with only the slightest effort, we will find him as before�solitary, weather beaten, resigned, without illusion. I want to make that effort... (Extrait)