Philosophy and Literature, vol. 32, no 2 (octobre 2008)

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 2 (octobre 2008)

Robin Fox
Playing by the Rules: Sound and Sense in Swinburne and the Rhyming Poets
The likeness of sound between rhyming words is arbitrary, but words have meanings. Thus rhyme schemes carry an implicit meaning over against the explicit meaning of the lines in which they occur. The use of "death" and "breath" and other rhymes in Swinburne illustrates this duality, especially in his great sonnet addressed to Death. This prompts a discussion of the role of meter and rhyme in the physiology of dreams and memory, the human propensity to make rules, translations of Dante, the comic rhymes of Noel Coward, and the real meaning of Seinfeld.

Joseph Carroll
The Cuckoo's History: Human Nature in Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights has proved exceptionally elusive to interpretation. By foregrounding the idea of human nature, Darwinian literary theory provides a framework within which we can assimilate previous insights about Wuthering Heights, delineate the norms Brontë shares with her projected audience, analyze her divided impulses, and explain the generic forms in which those impulses manifest themselves. Brontë herself presupposes a folk understanding of human nature in her audience. Evolutionary psychology converges with that folk understanding but provides explanations that are broader and deeper. In addition to its explanatory power, a Darwinian approach has a naturalistic aesthetic dimension that is particularly important for interpreting Wuthering Heights.

Joseph T. Palencik
Emotion and the Force of Fiction
Attempts to explain emotional responses to fiction such as Jenefer Robinson's use of research into the psychology of emotions. Robinson argues that triggers for emotion are much the same way whether a stimulant is real or imaginary. This does not explain the influence of our foreknowledge and continuing judgments during emotional episodes. We know beforehand and all along that the people and events we respond to in fiction are not real. Robinson's difficulty comes from her dependence on an input-output model of the emotions. Research on mental processing improves on this by revealing a relationship between at least two types of processes: data-driven processing and hypothesis-driven processing (otherwise known as schema processing). It is this relationship that accounts for the emotional response to fiction.

Ron Ben-Tovim
Robinson Crusoe, Wittgenstein, and the Return to Society
From the island of certainty that is the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus to the everyday ethics of the mainland in the Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy traces a journey similar to the one etched into Robinson Crusoe's deserted beaches. In this essay I map out points contact between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Defoe's novel, thus providing a fresh glimpse at the philosophical underpinnings of the adventures depicted in Robinson Crusoe, as well as to Wittgenstein's philosophical motivations.

Nathaniel Wolloch
Rousseau and the Love of Animals
This article examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau's views on the need for an ethical treatment of animals, placing them within the context of the early modern debate on this topic, and the tradition of "love of animals" known as "theriophily." It discusses the broad extent of Rousseau's views on this issue, and their importance, specifically because of his wide influence. However, an emphasis is put on the clear anthropocentric limits of Rousseau's sensitivity to animals, and of a similar limit discernible in the history of theriophilic attitudes toward animals in general.

Heidi Storl
Heidegger in Woolf's Clothing
What is it that we human beings are? What is it that we do? The reduction of these questions to biology doesn't do justice to how we think and act, nor do traditional philosophical approaches satisfy our intuitions. Fortunately, it's not in our nature to give up. While minds and bodies, subjects and objects, do play a role, to focus here is to miss the mark. Underlying each of these is something more fundamentally human. Martin Heidegger thinks of this as being, Virginia Woolf thinks of this as a purple triangle. Together, Heidegger and Woolf may succeed in unveiling the disguises which we, perhaps unwittingly, have imposed on our own being-in-the-world.

E. M. Dadlez
Form Affects Content: Reading Jane Austen
What does it mean to hold that the significant aspects of a literary passage cannot be captured in a paraphrase? Does a change in the description of an act "risk producing a different act" from the one described? Using Jane Austen as an example, we'll consider whether her use of metaphor and symbol really amounts to calling someone a prick, whether her narrative voice changes what it is that is expressed, and whether comedy can hold just as much significance as tragedy without all the heavy breathing.

Alan Dagovitz
Moby-Dick's Hidden Philosopher: A Second Look at Stubb
The hard-drinking, joke-cracking second-mate of Melville's Moby Dick doesn't receive much respect from critics. At best Stubb is seen as a comic foil, at worst as a cruel coward and mechanical optimist. Yet this perspective distorts the text and does him an injustice. In fact, Stubb can be read quite fruitfully as an exemplar of wisdom. Using recent scholarship to fill out Melville's conception of fine philosophy, a set of criteria emerges for the true philosopher according to which Stubb fares remarkably well.

Oliver Conolly
Bashshar Haydar
The Case Against Faction
"Faction" is a hybrid genre, aiming at the factual accuracy of journalism on the one hand and the literary form of the novel on the other. There is a fundamental tension however between those two aims, given the constraints which factual accuracy places on characterization, plot, and thematic exploration characteristic of the novel. Further, faction cannot be defended on the grounds that factual accuracy is a literary value in faction. Finally, some aspects of faction, such as its inability to refer to sources or provide an analytic framework for a narrative, hinder rather than facilitate the communication of facts.

Stewart Justman
Converts, Uncertainty, and the Novel
In its quest for converts medieval Christendom locked itself into a vicious interpretive circle, pressing unbelievers to join the Christian community and then suspecting them for doing so. Such suspicion drove the Inquisition. An Inquisition whose torture machinery grinds on century after century, as if each execution laid the ground for another, represents a closed system alien to a literary form, the novel, whose English name suggests "the new." As befits a form set in "the present day with all its inconclusiveness," the novel offers a medium in which uncertainty can flourish. In the novel uncertainty is not an intolerable anomaly introduced by converts practicing an ancestral religion in secret, but a condition of human life.

Laura Penny
The Highest of All the Arts: Kant and Poetry
For Kant, poetry is the freest, finest art of all. Music and painting depend on sensuous charms. Poetry offers the most direct presentation of "aesthetic ideas". As Kant's critique subjects reason to reason, so too does the poet try to best language via language. However, the poet's license is not absolute. The poet must create a new sense, not nonsense, lest he slide into the intractable privacy of delirium or evil. Using Hannah Arendt's reading of the Third Critique, and excerpts from one of Kant's favorite poets, Milton, I examine the extent of the free play poetry allows.