For more than a quarter century, Philosophy and Literature has exploredthe dialogue between literary and philosophical studies. The journaloffers a constant source of fresh, stimulating ideas in the aestheticsof literature, theory of criticism, philosophical interpretation ofliterature, and literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy andLiterature challenges the cant and pretensions of academic priesthoodsby publishing an assortment of lively, wide-ranging essays, notes, andreviews that are written in clear, jargon-free prose. In his regularcolumn, editor Denis Dutton targets the fashions and inanities ofcontemporary intellectual life.
Vol. 33, no 1 (avril 2009)
Henry Alexander
Reflections on Benjamin Button
Benjamin Button was born at the age of seventy and as the years accumulated, grew younger physically. There are in his life three separate lines or threads. His chronological age begins in September of 1860 and terminated seventy years later. His "bodily age" consists of those stages of physical changes and of the different ways that he looked to others and to himself. In 1860, he was an old man; his hair was sparse, scraggly, and nearly white; he had "a long smoke-colored beard"; his eyes were faded, watery, and tired; his teeth were ancient; his skin wrinkled, his voice had a cracked quaver and he had an aged stoop, even though he was five feet eight inches tall. From that time on, he gradually and steadily lost these characteristics of old age and became younger looking both to others and to himself until that time in 1930 when, an infant in his white crib, everything "faded out altogether from his mind." Finally, the third thread in Button's life consists of various psychological stages, attitudes, and feelings: his querulousness, his compliancy, his inquisitiveness, his... (Extrait)
Benjamin La Farge
Comic Romance
On the surface, it would seem that nothing could be more different from comedy than romance. Comedy deflates, romance inflates. Comedy is realistic, romance fantastical. Comedy reduces, romance elevates. Comedy is democratic, romance heroic. Yet there are underlying similarities. Both involve a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses. In both, appearances are typically mistaken for reality, and both end happily. Above all, both are governed by a structure of illogical logic that generates laughter in one and fantasy in the other. The generic differences between comedy and romance are crucial to a proper understanding of their functions. Comedy celebrates the renewal of life, the relation of man to woman and of man to man, in a spirit of tolerant acceptance, while romance celebrates a narcissistic dream of the self. If the former is best enjoyed in a crowded theater, the latter is usually enjoyed in solitude. Romance is a fiction of wish fulfillment. Since wishful thinking is generally understood as childish, romance is often regarded as a poor cousin among literary genres, haughtily dismissed by highbrows who associate it... (Extrait)
Fred Rush
Appreciating Susan Sontag
Project MUSE® - Download/Export Citation
Benjamin La Farge. "Comic Romance." Philosophy and Literature 33.1 (2009): 18-35. Project MUSE. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 8 May. 2009 <http://muse.jhu.edu/>. Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. Benjamin La Farge. (2009). Comic romance. Philosophy and Literature 33(1), 18-35. Retrieved May 8, 2009, from Project MUSE database. Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. Benjamin La Farge. "Comic Romance." Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 18-35. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed May 8, 2009). Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. TY - JOUR
T1 - Comic Romance
A1 - Benjamin La Farge
JF - Philosophy and Literature
VL - 33
IS - 1
SP - 18
EP - 35
Y1 - 2009
PB - The Johns Hopkins University Press
SN - 1086-329X
UR - http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v033/33.1.la-farge.html
N1 - Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009
ER -
Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources.
Much education from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was self-education. Although one might happen to take a university course that incorporated contemporary art and criticism, it was a rarity. More often one supplemented university fare with one's own reading, listening, and viewing of cutting-edge art, anthropology, music, philosophy, linguistics, etc. Susan Sontag was for many Americans of that time a preeminent guide in this process, opening doors to some of the most interesting and influential European work in art and criticism. Sontag's essayistic output -- and she was one of the supreme writers in that genre -- was seminal. Any sociologist or intellectual historian of the period would have to take her work greatly into account. Her incisive takes on her subject matter were not for everyone. Although trained as a philosopher at the then epicenter of the Anglophone philosophical world, Harvard, she did not tiptoe through academic complexities and was, therefore, decidedly out of step with the philosophical temperament of that time. She strode in, proselytized for her favorites, excoriated her... (Extrait)
Joseph Carroll
Jonathan Gottschall
John A. Johnson
Daniel J. Kruger
Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British Novels: Doing the Math
Three broad ambitions animate this study. Building on research in evolutionary social science, we aimed (1) to construct a model of human nature -- of motives, emotions, features of personality, and preferences in marital partners; (2) use that model to analyze some specific body of literary texts and the responses of readers to those texts, and (3) produce data -- information that could be quantified and could serve to test specific hypotheses about those texts. Evolutionary social science is still in the process of constructing a full and adequate model of human nature. Evolutionary social scientists know much already about how human reproductive behavior and human sociality fit into the larger pattern of human evolution. They still have much to learn, though, about the ways literature and the other arts enter into human nature... (Extrait)
Moira Gatens
The Art and Philosophy of George Eliot
Marian Evans began to write novels under the pseudonym George Eliot toward the end of 1856. Several years before "George Eliot" was conceived, the thirty-year-old Evans was the clandestine editor of London's premier journal of ideas, The Westminster Review. She wrote many of its articles, including book reviews, opinion pieces on social and political themes, and reports on contemporary writing from Europe, especially Germany. She also translated David Strauss's The Life of Jesus in 1846, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity in 1854, and Benedict Spinoza's Ethics in 1856. All three theorists were significant figures for the German higher criticism movement, and its influence on British thought owes much to her. This movement sought to reinterpret scripture as an historical record of the thoroughly human endeavor to make sense of life, death, suffering and the place of human being within nature. Strongly influenced by Feuerbach, Evans approached religion in terms of a natural history of the genesis and development of human values. Although she understood... (Extrait)
Grant Tavinor
Bioshock and the Art of Rapture
I am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No!" says the man in Washington, "It belongs to the poor." "No!" says the man in the Vatican, "It belongs to God." "No!" says the man in Moscow, "It belongs to everyone." I rejected these answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture! A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well. Andrew Ryan, opening Bioshock I Bioshock is the Masterpiece of recent gaming. Genre-wise the game is a first person-shooter survival-horror game -- already a complicated mix of gaming forms -- and Bioshock is excellent in these gaming terms: playing the game is a consistently engaging, challenging, and tense experience. The narrative of the game, set in Rapture, a dystopian city beneath the sea, fits perfectly with this interactive gaming form. The premise of Bioshock is... (Extrait)
Michael D. Hurley
How Philosophers Trivialize Art: Bleak House, Oedipus Rex, "Leda and the Swan"
It is a Perverse but unsurprising irony that answers to the question of whether art can give us knowledge characteristically trivialize that which draws us to individual artworks in the first place. The experience of art is sidelined in favor of the apparent after-effect of that experience. Even those writing against each other tend to converge on this. In an essay contesting Nelson Goodman's epistemic claims for art, Gordon Graham nonetheless agrees that, "The question to be asked of such a work is not, 'Does this effectively capture the scene portrayed?', but 'Does this make us see this sort of occasion differently?'"1 Even attempts to distinguish art as "gift" as opposed to commodity predictably figure its value in terms of what might be taken away: "I went to see a landscape painter's works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and the colors I had not seen the day before."2 This state of... (Extrait)
Benjamin H. Ogden
What Philosophy Can't Say About Literature: Stanley Cavell and Endgame
In "Ending the Waiting Game," the philosopher of ordinary language Stanley Cavell attempts to say what Samuel Beckett's Endgame means by explaining what the characters in the play mean by what they say. Cavell attempts to do the very thing that the work says cannot be done, or mocks as foolish and misguided, or resists giving clues to how it could ever be done: he tries to say just "how Beckett's objects mean at all, the original source of their conviction."1 This is not simply a reading tactic that Cavell thinks is well-suited to the difficult task of making sense of a difficult play. It is a demonstration of the theory of language (ordinary language philosophy) that Cavell defends and applies in his collection of essays Must We Mean What We Say?, of which "Ending the Waiting Game" is a chapter. Cavell's literary criticism is in the service of his philosophy. His work of criticism is in search of something that it must find (that is, something that it claims to have... (Extrait)
Christopher Adamo
One True Ring or Many?: Religious Pluralism in Lessing's Nathan the Wise
In the Central Scene of Nathan the Wise, Nathan responds to Saladin's pointed question pertaining to the "true religion" with the famous parable of the three rings.1 As John Pizer notes, Lessing deliberately crafts ambiguous fables to cultivate the reader's capacity for autonomous exercise of hermeneutic skill.2 That Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise evokes a wide variety of interpretations, therefore, should be no surprise.3 However, for Pizer, Lessing's use of fable additionally represents a "key to his Enlightenment ideals, the inculcation of the idea that individuals are responsible for their own actions and for their own maturation as social beings, as later articulated by Kant" (Pizer, p. 101). If the genre of fable itself, for Lessing, serves as a pedagogic tool to cultivate in his readers the rational autonomy as envisioned by Kant in the opening lines of "What is Enlightenment?," then might that suggest Lessing's ring-parable is best... (Extrait)
Patrick Henry
The Gray Zone
The Question of Jewish complicity during the Holocaust remains nuanced and troubling even if recent research has altered some earlier entrenched assumptions regarding its nature and extent. Hannah Arendt, for example, who saw the complicity of the Jewish Councils in the ghettos as part of the general "moral collapse" of the time, remarked famously that: Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.1 Thirty-eight years later, however, in Rethinking the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer points out that not only were the Jewish Councils "in many of the Polish and Lithuanian ghettos . . . not asked for and did not deliver lists of Jews," but also "many of the Soviet territories had no Judenr_te and the destruction was even more efficient there than in Poland." Finally, as Bauer also...(Extrait)
Yi-Ping Ong
A View of Life: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Novel
"My general task," Nietzsche scrawled, in the margins of his own copy of Cervantes's Don Quixote: "to show how life philosophy and art can have a deeper and affinitive relationship with each other."1 This enigmatic inscription commands a second reading not only because it seems to articulate the thread that links many of Nietzsche's philosophical projects together, but also because of the very book in which it appears. The book is not a lofty tome of Schopenhauer's philosophy, as might be expected, but a mere novel: a fact which suggests that the novel itself was the art form that precipitated reflection on the relation of art to what Nietzsche calls here "life philosophy." In this essay, my aim is to deepen critical understanding of the novel's influence on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the two philosophers who are widely considered the fathers of existentialism. By means of a comprehensive overview of the novelistic reading and writing of these thinkers, I will show that both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were profoundly... (Extrait)
William Irwin
Prufrock's Question and Roquentin's Answer
There could not be two more different literary figures than the right-wing, religious T. S. Eliot and the left-wing, atheistic Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet there are striking connections between their first major publications, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) and Nausea (1938). Eliot was aware of and critical of Sartre, especially in the commentary on No Exit in The Cocktail Party, and, no doubt, Sartre became aware of Eliot.1 But as far as can be gleaned, Sartre did not read Eliot's Prufrock, prior to the publication of Nausea, despite his connection to Adrienne Monnier, the French translator of the poem. Indeed Simone de Beauvoir documents the couple's reading habits in some detail in The Prime of Life, including their admiration for Hemingway and Faulkner during that time, but there is no mention of Eliot or Prufrock.2 Both the poem and the novel present us with subjective, mood-laden impressions of the internal melancholic lives of their protagonists. Like Prufrock, Roquentin admits "My passion was dead."3Nausea is... (Extrait)
Project MUSE® - Download/Export Citation
Patrick Henry. "The Gray Zone." Philosophy and Literature 33.1 (2009): 150-166. Project MUSE. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 8 May. 2009 <http://muse.jhu.edu/>. Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. Patrick Henry. (2009). The gray zone. Philosophy and Literature 33(1), 150-166. Retrieved May 8, 2009, from Project MUSE database. Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. Patrick Henry. "The Gray Zone." Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 150-166. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed May 8, 2009). Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. TY - JOUR
T1 - The Gray Zone
A1 - Patrick Henry
JF - Philosophy and Literature
VL - 33
IS - 1
SP - 150
EP - 166
Y1 - 2009
PB - The Johns Hopkins University Press
SN - 1086-329X
UR - http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v033/33.1.henry.html
N1 - Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009
ER -
Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. Project MUSE® - Download/Export Citation
Grant Tavinor. "Bioshock and the Art of Rapture." Philosophy and Literature 33.1 (2009): 91-106. Project MUSE. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 8 May. 2009 <http://muse.jhu.edu/>. Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. Grant Tavinor. (2009). bioshock and the art of rapture. Philosophy and Literature 33(1), 91-106. Retrieved May 8, 2009, from Project MUSE database. Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. Grant Tavinor. "Bioshock and the Art of Rapture." Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 91-106. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed May 8, 2009). Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources. TY - JOUR
T1 - Bioshock and the Art of Rapture
A1 - Grant Tavinor
JF - Philosophy and Literature
VL - 33
IS - 1
SP - 91
EP - 106
Y1 - 2009
PB - The Johns Hopkins University Press
SN - 1086-329X
UR - http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v033/33.1.tavinor.html
N1 - Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009
ER -
Always review your references for accuracy and make any necessarycorrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names,capitalization, and dates. Consult your library or click here for more information on citing sources.