In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Three Moments in the Crisis of Exemplarity: Boccaccio-Petrarch, Montaigne, and CervantesKarlheinz StierleIn his recent book History as Topic Peter von Moos denies that there was any crisis for the exemplum in the Renaissance. 1 He strongly argues against my essay on “History as exemplum,” where I pointed out that in Montaigne, as earlier in Boccaccio, the pragmatic form of exemplum is put into question. 2 My main interest in (...) this essay, however, was not to mark a break between Middle Ages and Renaissance but to understand the way in which the correlation between sententia and exemplum was transformed into a more complex relation between moral reflection and particular case. Undoubtedly, since Valerius Maximus and his Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri, there has always been, as in John of Salisbury’s Policratius, the possibility of questioning the exemplary truth of the exemplum by opposing it to a never-ending wealth of counter-examples. This, however, never puts into question the idea of exemplarity itself. The validity of the exemplum as a rhetorical form of narration that tends towards its own conceptual or ideological structure has an anthropological basis. It presupposes that over time, there is more analogy in human experience than diversity, or that in all situations of civil and political life the pole of equality is stronger than that of difference.Boccaccio’s novella is precisely the narrative form that puts this anthropological basis into question. Each novella in the Decameron is essentially a [End Page 581] particular variant of a more general conceptual scheme. The stress of narration, however, is not on the scheme itself but on the autonomy of the variant. Basically the novella is a form of rewriting in the mode of retelling, thus bringing an elementary narration to higher complexity. 3 Each of the “vari casi,” mostly of love-affairs, is a confrontation of exemplarity and contingency. It is the power of contingency or fortuna that brings forth the specific particularity of each novella. The art of the writer Boccaccio, whose primary fiction is oral story-telling, consists in giving aesthetic evidence to this particularity. Reading, not listening, is the form of reception that corresponds to this structure. That Boccaccio adds the other title “Il Prencipe Galeotto” to the Decameron is an allusion to Dante’s Divine Commedy where in the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca (Inf. V), Galeotto becomes the personification of the allegory of reading and its seduction.Contingency, or, in Boccaccio’s own medieval terms, fortuna, is the real poet of the novella. That is why the most important scenes of the novellas are those where the power of contingency comes to light: at the sea and in the city. The particular shape of novella, which results from a balance between contingency and significant configuration, emerges from contingency itself. Its configuration is a particular case of contingency, one that by its immanent structural elegance is aesthetically gratifying. It nevertheless leaves open the question whether there might not be a power of a superior kind behind contingency. Because there is an ambiguity between contingency and sense, the exemplary status of each story is, ironically, placed in question. Contingency overcomes exemplarity; however, it never triumphs definitely. The impact on the exemplum by contingency not only gives to each narrative case its difference or even autonomy, it also opens up a new temporal dimension. The exemplum seems to move in an essential time where all time-aspects are controlled and functionalized by a dominating conceptual structure. In the novella time becomes a primary structure. “Or avviene che” is the narrative formula for this new quality of narrative time, becoming a time of disruption and instability where things and situations may change in a moment for the better or for the worse.I would like to illustrate the structure of the Boccaccian novella by at least one exemplary case. Almost in the middle of the book—which means in the middle of its temporal space of ten days—we find the novella of Federigo degli Alberighi, considered to be one of Boccaccio’s finest (V, 9). Federigo, in a world of merchants and trade, is the perfect nobleman who ruins himself by his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Exemplarities: A Response to Timothy Hampton and Karlheinz StierleFrançois Cornilliat*Karlheinz Stierle and Timothy Hampton have both played a major part in defining and mapping the much-debated subject of exemplarity: Stierle as early as 1972, in his ground-breaking article for Poétique, 1 Hampton in his acclaimed 1990 book, Writing from History. 2 While their approaches have a lot in common, they also reveal a number of (...) important differences, and it seems to me that those differences teach us something not only about the problem of exemplarity in the Renaissance but also about the role played by that notion in our latest effort to capture that mercurial era. In what follows I will—somewhat unfairly—focus on the conceptual differences revealed by our authors’ contributions and reflect on what they suggest regarding the problematic usefulness of the exemplary in the Renaissance as well as in Renaissance studies.A convenient place to start, to differentiate the two contributions, is the status of the emerging genre of the novella vis-à-vis the problem of exemplarity. For Stierle “contingency is the real poet of the novella.” For Hampton, the novella genre also marks a shift in the regime of exemplarity, but the “real poet of the novella” is not exactly contingency; it is not exemplarity either, but some kind of sub-species. Yet to define that sub-species in Hamptonian terms is to abandon the immanent or “formal” descriptions practiced in the discipline of “pure” poetics. It would not be sufficient, for instance, to decide that the novella poetic principle is “political exemplarity,” [End Page 613] as opposed to “moral exemplarity.” Hampton tells us that the Heptameron recasts the fictions of aristocratic heroism “as tales whose exemplarity is moral, rather than political.” But such a recasting, seen from another level of interpretation, is indeed a political gesture.Whatever is political—as a topic—in the romance genre, is anachronistic and fictional; it is a set of poetic tricks appealing only to private fantasy. Fantasy, however, still has the capacity to mistaking itself for a pertinent social ambition and a program for action, as in the case of Don Quixote. This makes it all the more visible as a symptom of displaced politics. Whatever is moral—as a topic—in the novella genre, bears witness to the prince’s reinforced power to define what noble people are supposed to do—to talk about, that is, within closely guarded borders. The “moral” is, if considered in its infrastructure, a topic mapped by the political; similarly the production of discourse, the very domain of rhetoric or poetics is recast as the new type of political “action” expected from the former ruling class. So the “real poet” of the novella splits in two; and in that sense, one could say that the novella has no such thing as a “real poet.” The poets of the novella are a class whose conception of exemplarity has just been redefined by the prince. One could say that the “real poet” is the prince or the emerging nation state, but this would overlook the division of tasks between the poet and the prince. Instead of expressing the values of its own politics, the poetic class of the Heptameron’s narrators fundamentally exemplifies those values which the prince or the state allows them to have. Conversely, it is not the prince who does the talking or the writing in this exemplification process. And this, incidentally, leads us to a perhaps naive question about the status of the Queen of Navarre as an author vis-à-vis this new princely role: is she on one side or the other, is she a go-between?At any rate, exemplarity also splits: a good exemplar of those recast values (say, honnesteté) also exemplifies something else which is not set within those values per se but has to do with who institutes them, and why. In other words a good exemplar is also, from an interpretative standpoint, immediately a symptom, insofar as it is an operator for some invisible casting. Behind a “I want to be like x” kind of statement lurks an “I want you to be like that,” with the latter... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 112 Heft: 1 Seiten: 243-246.

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 96 Heft: 1 Seiten: 337-346.

This book is a short, up-to-date survey of the science and technology of photography. Modern photographic chemistry and physics is highlighted with emphasis given to current photographic processes and the structure of photographic materials. All technical professionals in the field of photography will find this book of enormous value as it is unique in its concise, detailed presentation of the subject.

Die Welt, in der wir leben, andert sich rasant. Doch nicht nur sie, sondern auch die Religionen, die Gottesvorstellungen. Nach christlicher Vorstellung ist Gott selbst in die Dynamik der Welt verstrickt. Gerade die Prozesstheologie macht Gott im Fluss der Zeit denkbar. Welches ware der Gott, den wir brauchen? Welche Konsequenzen haben mogliche Antworten fur Religion und Politik, Okonomie und Okologie, Gesellschaft und Kultur? Diesen Fragen geht der Band nach.

Bd. 1. Absenz-Darstellung -- Bd. 2. Dekadent-Grotesk -- Bd. 3. Harmonie-Material -- Bd. 4. Medien-Popular -- Bd. 5. Postmoderne-Synästhesie -- Bd. 6. Tanz-Zeitalter/Epoche -- Bd. 7. Register und Supplemente.

This chapter stages an ongoing conversation between Arthur Danto and the author. In a series of encounters from 1985 till 2012 (in New York City and elsewhere) the problem of defining art is explored from different angles. Eventually, two kinds of definition are distinguished. On the one hand, a definition may aspire to identify peculiar characteristics of the things that are commonly regarded members of the noble class of artworks. On the other hand, a definition might also name criteria for (...) deciding whether an object may become a member of this class in the first place. Danto focused on the first task because he felt, quite rightly, that the second would require competences that philosophy does not dispose of. (shrink)

English summary: Heinz Ludeking belonged to the German philosophical movement that explored analytical esthetics. Ludekings analytical approach to art brought new light to the definition and concept of art. In particular, he created a connection between logical reflection and esthetic investigation. French description: Heinz Ludeking appartient a ce courant de la philosophie allemande qui a pris pour objet l'esthetique analytique, et qui est encore largement meconnu en France en depit de sa productivite conceptuelle. Dans cet ouvrage, l'auteur s'est efforce d'etablir (...) un bilan critique de la premiere philosophie analytique de l'art - celle des annees 50-60 -, c'est-a-dire des travaux qui ont precede les theories de Goodman et de Danto. L'approche analytique de Ludeking, volontiers caustique, peut etre devastatrice. Elle apporte neanmoins une lumiere nouvelle sur un probleme central, jamais veritablement resolu, celui de la definition de l'art et du concept d'art. L'une des qualites dominantes de cette analyse est d'etre parvenue a realiser une jonction exceptionnellement rigoureuse entre la reflexion logique et l'investigation proprement esthetique. (shrink)