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.
Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2004
CONTENTS:
- Boyd, Brian, 1952- : Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humor
Abstract: Humor seems uniquely human, but it has deep biological roots. Laughter, the best evidence suggests, derives from the ritualized breathing and open-mouth display common in animal play. Play evolved as training for the unexpected, in creatures putting themselves at risk of losing balance or dominance so that they learn to recover. Humor in turn involves play with the expectations we share-whether innate or acquired-in order to catch one another off guard in ways that simulate risk and stimulate recovery. An evolutionary approach to three great literary humorists, Shakespeare, Nabokov and Beckett, shows that a species-wide explanation not only cuts deeper but in no way diminishes individual difference.
- Jollimore, Troy A., 1971- and Barrios, Sharon : Beauty, Evil, and The English Patient
Abstract: Can literature provide moral insight? Or can literary works do nothing more than reflect the moral views that readers bring to them? We argue that literary works can provide genuine moral insight by discussing one that does. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient challenges two key assumptions about moral evil: that evil necessarily involves active malevolence, and that evil and aesthetic beauty are mutually exclusive. These assumptions play foundational roles both in everyday moral thinking, and in the interpretive practices of many critics and readers. Thus, The English Patient provides genuine insights that are both aesthetic and moral.
- Solomon, Robert C. : Pathologies of Pride in Camus's The Fall
Abstract: What is Hell? Here is one answer: five straight days of conversation with a garrulous, narcissistic, rather depraved lawyer. This is the text, in fact the entire content, of Camus's brilliant quasi-religious novel, The Fall. The book has been read as a meditation on the "deadly" sin of pride, introducing a host of ethical and theological questions. I interpret the book as the story of a virtuous, contented, vulnerable man who is struck down by his own mistaken self-reflection and then forced to re-establish his superiority by way of the resentment that replaces his pride.
- Deming, Richard. : Strategies for Overcoming: Nietzsche and the Will to Metaphor
Abstract: Believing that philosophy had become a single-minded pursuit of a dead metaphor, Nietzsche constructs his authorial self as a "strong poet," a writer who attempts a new vocabulary and increases flexibility for available discourses. Building on observations by Gilles Deleuze, Sarah Kofman, and others, this article maps the literary register of Nietzsche's thinking, particularly in Beyond Good and Evil, to see the ways that tropes and rhetorical devices drive Nietzsche's textual negotiations. Such literary self-interrogation into how a text might enact its own will to power gives risefor Nietzsche, the reader, and for philosophy itselfto methods of self-overcoming.
- Delehanty, Ann T. : Morality and Method in Pascal's Pensées
Abstract: This essay argues that Pascal's work both questions the accuracy of perspective in an infinite universe, and describes a model for moral truth that escapes the limitations of perspective. This model, rooted in Christianity, requires a total reorientation of approach towards moral truth. By asserting the limits of rational method, making use of recent scientific developments, and constructing a new model for moral truth, Pascal's work sought to update the role of Christianity to be not only consonant with the secular thinking of his day but also as the only solution to the implications of that thinking.
- Simon, Linda, 1946- : William James's Lost Souls in Ursula Le Guin's Utopia
Abstract: Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), a staple of short fiction anthologies, was inspired by James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." In Le Guin's moral tale, a devastating bargain causes some citizens of Omelas to reject their apparently utopian community. Although critics have seen this rejection as a Jamesian act of pragmatism and free will, this essay examines the story in the context of "The Moral Philosopher" and other writings by James on pragmatism, its moral consequences, free will, and faith to refute that conclusion. I argue, instead, that James's work suggests responses that reflect his thinking about the limits and meaning of possibility and about sustaining belief in a transcendent force.
- Kawashima, Robert S. : Verbal Medium and Narrative Art in Homer and the Bible
Abstract: Erich Auerbach's famous comparative study of Homer and the Bible, "Odysseus' Scar," argues that their contrastive styles derive from the different possibilities available to oral tradition and literature. In support of this thesis, I invoke two theories of verbal art: Walter Benjamin's description of the storyteller's craft, and Victor Shklovsky's definition of art as "defamiliarization." Through a comparative analysis of the use of type-scenes in Homer and in biblical narrative, I demonstrate how Homer is a traditional storyteller, practicing an "art of the familiar," whereas biblical narrative "defamiliarizes" traditional forms.
- La Farge, Benjamin. : Comedy's Intention
Abstract: I begin by asking, What is the underlying dynamic of comedy, its generic intention? I answer by testing each of several classic theories (plus two popular cliches) against a single, brief scene in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Each of the first six sections subjects that scene to one of seven theories, in each case singling out an idea that seems convincing and discarding other ideas that do not. Illogical Logic explains the various means by which the structure of a comedy reduces the characters to absurdity, thereby generating a Catharsis of wish and fear, analogous to Aristotle's tragic catharsis of pity and fear.
Notes and Fragments:
- Saler, Michael T., 1960- : Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Ironic Imagination
Abstract: Western "modernity" has often been identified with the "disenchantment of the world." But if this is true, how do we account for the millions of sober adults who nevertheless delight in Elvish grammar or Elvis sightings? Perhaps these are manifestations of the dialectic of Enlightenment, an alternate view that perceives modernity's faith in reason as itself a myth, and mass culture the exemplification of how the irrational has come to dominate everyday life. This essay, however, locates in mass culture an attempt to reconcile the rational and secular tenets of modernity with the wonders and marvels that modernity was thought to supercede: a specifically modern enchantment.
- Diamond, James Arthur. : Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish: Mourning as a "Delirium of Study"
Abstract: What does one do when the death of a parent demands reentry into an abandoned religious formalism? Raised in an orthodox Jewish home, schooled in the intricate discourse of rabbinic texts and yet long estranged from the ritualism of Jewish law, the prospect is maddening. Filial love compels a yearlong daily synagogue attendance where one recites a mourning prayer laden with myth and superstition. Kaddish is an exquisitely maneuvered headlong plunge into Judaism's expansive intellectual tradition. Thereby the current literary editor of the New Republic fulfils his duty both as a Jew and a son, while never turning his back on another imperative he so cherishes "the moral obligation to be intelligent."
- Clegg, Jerry S. : Mann Contra Nietzsche
Abstract: The purpose of this article is two fold: to correct a frequent misinterpretation of Nietzsche's account of the relationship between the gods Dionysos and Apollo, and to then clarify the position adopted by Thomas Mann in his novella Death in Venice. The argument is that far from simply borrowing a theme from The Birth of Tragedy, Mann takes issue with Nietzsche's call for the abandonment of modernity in favor of a return to the "tragic age" of the Greeks.
- Trigg, Dylan. È Schopenhauer and the Sublime Pleasure of Tragedy
Critical Discussions:
- Bauerlein, Mark. : Bad Writing's Back
Abstract: In 1999, Philosophy and Literature gave the top prize in its annual Bad Writing Contest to Judith Butler, and the national press echoed the journal in denouncing critical theory as overblown, jargon-ridden, and ungrammatical. Academic theorists reacted with pique, but not a soul in the public sphere came to their defense. Now, the professors have issued an anthology justifying their prose and denouncing Denis Dutton and other critics of bad writing. They claim that bad, or rather "difficult" writing has a critical thrust: to break down common sense and dismantle unjust social notions.They fail to make their case. Much of the writing is, alas, bad. Entries offer tendentious, petulant reactions to the hubbub. Rarely do they address the basic point of the contest: that humanities professors no longer respect ideals of wit, eloquence, and learning. Instead, we have another parade of academic parochialism and radical chic passing itself off as adversarial culture and social justice.
- Stow, Simon. : Theoretical Downsizing and the Lost Art of Listening
Abstract: What is the proper role for Theory in literary study? An aid to reading? Or source of insight into the world beyond the text? Half-heartedly apologizing for the political-theoretical excesses of the past two decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Jean-Michel Rabaté offer up more of the same, with Spivak in particular recycling the ideas of others so as to revive literature as a source of political "Othering." Noting the ways in which Theory silences the sounds of "Others," I argue Valentine Cunningham's placing of Theory permits both texts and others to speak, and in so doing, teaches us to listen.
- Gottschall, Jonathan. : Literary Studies, Universals, and the Sciences of the Mind