Philosophy of Literature

La entrevista realizada al doctor Wilfredo Penco indaga acerca de las constantes confrontaciones que existen en las disciplinas de la Literatura y la política; sobre todo, en el tema del compromiso del autor con su respectiva sociedad. En ese sentido, las respuestas que se obtendrán partirán de dos referentes esenciales: los sucesos históricos y los casos particulares que se han apreciado en el ámbito académico, en la que los intelectuales y los escritores cumplen un rol determinante. Uno de los interrogantes (...) que se busca resolver con esta constatación es comprender si es necesario que se articule un compromiso político en un texto literario. (shrink)

César Ernesto Arenas Ulloa nació el 15 de septiembre de 1988 en Chiclayo (Lambayeque, Perú). Realizó estudios literarios en la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, hasta obtener el grado de licenciado. En el 2012, obtuvo un reconocimiento académico por ocupar el primer puesto a nivel de toda la escuela de Literatura. En el 2018, presentó su tesis titulada Autonomía y especificidad de la obra dramática: una lectura semiológica de El sistema Solar de Mariana de Althaus. Asimismo, tiene intereses en (...) el teatro peruano, el psicoanálisis y la escritura. Ha sido docente de Lenguaje en diversas universidades privadas de Lima. Ha publicado en revistas indexadas, así como ha participado en congresos y proyectos financiados. Actualmente, vive y estudia en Italia. (shrink)

Within science fiction the topic of ‘first contact’ is a popular theme. How will an encounter with aliens unfold? Will we succeed in communicating with them? Although such questions are present in the background of many science fiction novels, they are not always explicitly dealt with and even if so, often in a poor way. In this article, I will introduce a typology of five dominant types of solutions to the problem of first contact in science fiction works. The first (...) four solutions are the more dominant, but also the least interesting ones. There is a fifth category that addresses the question of first contact in a more interesting way, exemplified by the work of Stanisław Lem. This fifth option defines itself as a critique of the four previous categories, or of their shared assumption of what Lem (1967) has called ‘the myth of cognitive universality’. Lem is sceptical of the common optimism that first contact will always be successful. In books such as Solaris (1961), His Master’s Voice (1967) and Fiasco (1986), humanity makes first contact with an alien phenomenon, but fails to comprehend the phenomenon. Fundamentally, it will be argued that Lem’s work shows that in such an encounter we will typically not only lack the right answers to our questions, but that we also often lack the correct questions: we simply do not have the right categories or instruments to even recognize, let alone meaningfully interrogate, the alien phenomenon. The article ends with an exploration of the implications of Lem’s pessimism and whether it is the most plausible option for first contact. Moreover, the article will draw some lessons for philosophy of science, by exploring the parallel with the confrontation of novel or deviant phenomena in science. Lem’s work is helpful here because it succeeds in articulating what has not always been appreciated in the philosophy of science, namely that the right questions by which to interrogate scientific phenomena are not given, but that their articulation always requires work. (shrink)

In this paper, I highlight the philosophical differences between Camus’s and Sartre’s notions of the absurd. “The absurd” is a technical term for both philosophers, and they mean different things by it. The Camusian absurd is a mismatch between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning. The Sartrean absurd, in contrast, is our theoretical inability to explain contingency or existence. For Sartre, there is only relative, local absurdity; for Camus, the absurd is universal and absolute. I show how their different understandings of (...) the absurd led to Sartre’s misreading of The Stranger; he misses its main mechanism for generating the feeling of the absurd because he reads the novel through his own conception. In order to draw out their philosophical differences, I will provide a reading of the novel that contrasts with Sartre’s. (shrink)

Band 13 der psycho-logik widmet sich aus fächerübergreifendem Blickwinkel dem Thema Identität, das in den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften zu einem Schlagwort des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts geworden ist. Gerade die moderne und liberale Gesellschaftsordnung, die uns ungeahnt viel Freiheit ermöglicht hat, charakterisiert ein Patchwork aus Identifikationsangeboten, das zugleich die kollektive und personale Identitätsfindung problematisch macht. Aktuell hat die narrative Theorie die erinnerte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte zum Gründungsort des Selbst erhoben. Sie spielt auch in den Beiträgen dieses Bandes eine prominente Rolle. (...) Es zeigt sich, dass die Identitätskonstruktion ein Prozess ist, in dem sich Identität als etwas Fragiles und Plurales offenbart. Identität ist ein tragisches Spiel zwischen Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit: Identität(en). Forscher*innen aus Deutschland, Irland und den USA mit ihren Beiträgen aus Literaturwissenschaft, Theologie, Philosophie und Psychologie diskutieren u. a. das Band zwischen Identität und Erinnerung bei Marcel Proust, transsexuelle Identitätskonstruktionen in US-amerikanischen Biopics, den Film als Identitätsbildungsmedium des Publikums, Identitätspolitik(en) am Beispiel des Zugangs zu US-amerikanischen Hochschulen, die Identitätsfindung in Lebensgeschichten und den psychotherapeutischen Umgang mit gebrochenen Identitäten. Fotoarbeiten des Künstlers Hermann Recknagel runden den Band ab. Mit Beiträgen von Michaela I. Abdelhamid, Carsten Albers, Paul Clogher, Katherine Duval, Winfried Eckel, Fiona Ennis, Annette Hilt, Christopher A. Nixon, Paul Nnodim, Hermann Recknagel, Patricia Rehm-Grätzel, Martin Reker, Annika Schlitte und Hartwig Wiedebach. (shrink)

From the beginning, Augustine's "Confessions" presents itself as a dialogue with God. Taking a cue from Ludwig Feuerbach’s "The Essence of Christianity [Das Wesen des Christentums]," this dialogue can easily be dismissed as a projection of the self. This would imply that the divine otherness is nothing more than a mirror of one’s own fears and preferences. “Does this critique,” I asked myself in this piece, “really do justice to a position like that of Augustine?” For a long time, I (...) did not know how to approach what I had — provisionally — called Augustine’s dialogue with God. It appeared to me that Augustine, in an accidental and indirect way, had re-invented the Platonic dialogue and had turned it into a new Christian genre. “It is true,” I told myself, “that the genre of the Confessions shows family resemblances with the hagiography and the autobiography. But most certainly it cannot be reduced to these genres.” The Greek words ‘hagios’ (holy) and ‘autos’ (self) are in flagrant contradiction with the intention of the Confessions. Augustine tries to stay clear of any claim of holiness and only highlights his own ‘self’ to immediately question it. “Is the Platonic dialogue,” I asked myself, “not a far more appropriate predecessor for Augustine’s dialogue with God?” Both types of dialogues can be seen as true dia logoi in which at least two different voices emerge. However, contrary to what one would expect, it is not the dialogue form itself that frames these two voices. Instead the two voices emerge within the discourse of a single speaker, incorporating true otherness within the discourse of the self. Building on these reflections, I explore how Augustine's dialogue with God succeeds in eluding Feuerbach's charge of self-projection. (shrink)

This article argues that we can construct a complex interpretation of the nature of time by linking Aciman’s gnostic thread to aspects of twentieth century theory, from philosophy and psychoanalysis. In brief, it attempts to demonstrate the roles of dislocation, deferral, and Otherness in constituting human temporality. The essay begins by surmising the conceptual history of time, touching on key ideas put forward by Augustine and Bergson. The second section takes a psychoanalytic turn after exploring Homo Irrealis to describe the (...) significance of desire and fantasy. Thirdly, we develop a unique and temporal application of difference and deferral, building off of Deleuze and Derrida. The fourth section will consider how the psychoanalytic concept of the Other is inhered within time. We conclude that an Acimanic analysis of time is the means by which we can understand existence not as a series of moments, but a rich progression of dissimilitude and Otherness defined moreso by its lack of cohesion and directness of being than by a unified and self-identifying subject. (shrink)

Many writers who have discussed the Singularity have treated it not only as the inevitable outcome of advancements in cybernetic technology, but also as natural consequence of broader patterns in the development of human knowledge, or of human history itself. In this paper I examine these claims in light of Karl Popper’s famous philosophical critique of historicism. I argue that, because the Singularity is regarded as both a product of human ingenuity and a reflection of the permanent limitations of our (...) rational capacities, speculation about its likelihood occupies an interesting border zone between what Popper referred to as “technological prediction” and what he lambasted as “prophecy.” I go on to examine representations of a post-singularity world in the novels of Iain M. Banks, as well as in Bruce Sterling’s short story “The Beautiful and the Sublime.” These narratives demonstrate how trying to imagine what human life might be like in the presence of intellectually superior AIs requires a more aggressively skeptical attitude toward the human capacity to understand our own history than even Popper was prepared to allow for. (shrink)

This article raises the problem of philosophical aspects of William Faulkner’s works. It is intended first of all to review in brief the place of philosophy in literature and to prove that William Faulkner deserves a special place among philosophical writers such as Kierkegaard, Marcel and Sartre. Although not sufficiently recognized as a philosophical writer, William Faulkner is among those who have successfully introduced philosophical ideas into their novels. This article intends to bear out that Faulkner’s novels do not only (...) consider some fundamental philosophical concepts but also open the door to further philosophical debates. The first, shortest part of this work is a presentation of the philosophical discussion concerning the fusion of philosophy and literature. There, the focus is on the negative and positive approaches to the issue of combining philosophy and literature as represented by such prominent philosophers as Iris Murdoch, Jacquelyne Kegley, Martha Nussbaum and Philip Kitcher. In its second part, the article presents William Faulkner’s philosophical affiliations of interest, which are: metaphysics, linguistics, ethics, religion and existentialism. The conclusion stresses Faulkner’s input into philosophy but also indicates different fields his novels open for further philosophical investigation. Keywords: literature, philosophy, Faulkner, metaphysics, linguistics, ethics, religion,. (shrink)

Literature, in particular philosophical literature, proves to be particularly challenging when read in isolation from the philosophy it comes from. Reading Sarte’s Nausea through Kierkegaard illuminates important themes of language, music, the ethical and aesthetic, and immediacy in both Nausea and Kierkegaard’s various pseudonymous works. The comparison here is extremely fruitful given the poetic and literary form of Kierkegaard’s work, especially against this particular work from Sartre. The themes in Nausea that are examined are interestingly not present in his other (...) works and are necessary in some regard to be brought forth in a novel rather than a philosophical treatise. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView. -/- // Abstract: In her recent book, A Different Order of Difficulty, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé uses a resolute reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to highlight similarities between Wittgenstein’s work and his contemporaries Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. On the basis of this reading, she claims that Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece is a modernist work. -/- This article argues that there are profound problems with the resolute reading that she offers, and it suggests that ‘traditional’ readings of the (...) Tractatus survive the criticisms she makes of them. Nonetheless, a case can still be made that Wittgenstein’s work is a modernist one, and it is a useful exercise to compare the Tractatus with modernist works from the 1920s. (shrink)

Esta es una entrevista realizada al escritor peruano Cronwell Jara en el 2009.

This essay experiments with Kant’s writings on rational religion distilled through the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as canonical confrontations with primal problems of evil. It suggests boundaries between Stevenson’s characters and their occupations comparable to the those conflicted in the Kantian university, namely, law, medicine, theology, and philosophy (which makes a short anticipatory appearance in his earlier text on rational religion). With various faculties it investigates diffuse comprehensions—respectively, legal crime, biogenetic transmission, and original sin—of key ethical (...) modes: will, inheritance, incorporation, freedom, duty, obligation, love, living, and killing to conclude on the possible logic of evil (or evils of logic) collateral and possibly innate to Kant’s comprehension of radical evil. (shrink)

The role of reading in educating a future writer is discussed through study of memoirs by writers including Janet Frame, James Baldwin, and Eudora Welty. The memoirs show reading books to have been a transformative way of melding forms of experience. The following features of childhood reading are examined: (1) the role of the physical book, (2) the cognitive-aesthetic-affective impact of letters, words and ‘voices’, (3) the partially unplanned and challenging path of children’s exposure to texts, and (4) absorption of (...) models that can be imitated and outgrown. The discussion links sympathetically to views in philosophy of education about the importance of content and beauty and of influences whose impact cannot be planned, measured or captured as generic skills. The autobiographical evidence considered here suggests that these influences can nonetheless be crucial to expanding learners’ horizons and stimulating their educational and artistic progress. (shrink)

The editors of the recently published English translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone—the philosophical and philological commentary/notebook begun in the summer of 1817, when he was 19 years of age, and abandoned in the winter of 1832, four years before his death in Naples—note that for the first time, in his entry on April 20, 1821, Leopardi supplements the date of the secular calendar with a Roman Catholic festival, such as Good Friday.1 Leopardi’s references to the Catholic calendar increase in early (...) 1822 and continue with greater frequency until the reference to Holy Week 1829. These cited festivals range from major holidays, such as Christmas and Easter (Z 4254.. (shrink)

XENOLOGY AND XENOTOPOGRAPHY OF BERNHARD WALDENFELS The paper strives to adapt Bernhard Waldenfels’ xenology and so called ‘xenotopography’ for the philosophico-literary studies in fantastic world-building with a special concern of the ‘portal-quest’ model of fantasy and SF. Following Waldenfel’s remarks on the nature of post- Husserlian diastasis of our world [Heimwelt] and otherworld [Fremdwelt] and acknowledging the consequences of allocating one’s attitude towards the otherness in the symbolical borderland [‘sphere of intermonde’] in between, it is examined whether such a model (...) can occur in the fantastic literature and what may be the consequence of xenotopographic reconsideration of its basic ontological premises. Additionally, the article offers an original xenotopograpfic model of worldbuilding which addresses three carefully chosen case studies of fantastic worlds from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game tetralogy, Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and George R. R. Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire. In the end, it is suggested that hitherto presented xenotopography gravely inspired a postmodern shift in the genres of fantasy and SF which results in more ethically conscious representations of the otherness and even more concise and alien comprehensive world-building. (shrink)

Early on in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein lists various examples of the term Sprachspiel. He begins with “commanding and following commands” and ends with “asking a favor, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying,” all familiar ingredients of what we would now call a speech act theory of language. In the middle of this list, however, is an example that has received little attention: “playing theater”.1 With this formulation, Wittgenstein moves away from a focus on games such as chess, which have unduly dominated (...) the discussion of his late philosophy, and toward an expanded notion of play that includes theater.Once one approaches Wittgenstein’s conception of language through the.. (shrink)

This article presents itself as an attempt to explain Proust’s expression, “The matter of experience”, from Husserl’s concept of Materie in the Logical Investigations. This Husserlian concept will enable us to rethink the “matter” of experience, as being both intrinsically determined and intrinsically “relational”. Husserl uses this concept of Materie in two main senses. In the fifth Logical Investigation, it is used in order to define the “content” of the act and this concept will be explained in its own equivocation, (...) as it both means the direction of the act and the ideal “signification” which prescribes this very determination. The concept of Materie is also used in the third Logical Investigation to designate the “content” of the object, and will also be explained in its own equivocation, as it both means the individual determination of the object and its essential determination. In the last part of this study, a few of the difficulties which are brought by this double equivocation of Husserl’s concept of Materie will be exposed, and a few programmatic solutions for its redefinition as the unique “matter” of our experience, will be proposed. This investigation might eventually imply a definition of phenomenology itself, as the very experience of this matter. (shrink)

-/- Die genaue Verbindung von Literatur und Ethik allgemeingültig zu beschreiben, ist eine anspruchsvolle Aufgabe: Die klassischen und gegenwärtigen Diskurse über Ethik berühren sich nur an wenigen Punkten mit der Ästhetik, dann aber — wie etwa in Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft — in emphatischer und für die ethische und die ästhetische Fragestellung in jeweils keineswegs unproblematischer Weise. 1 Sich der Verbindung von Kunst und Ethik über die Grenzen der (praktischen) Vernunft und die Möglichkeit der Darstellung des sittlich Guten zu nähern, (...) wie Kant dies tut, ist jedoch nur eine Möglichkeit unter anderen, diese Verbindung zu beschreiben. Fragt man nach dem Beitrag von Literatur zu einem guten Leben, ist damit ein anderer, nicht weniger wichtiger Topos der Ethik in der aristotelischen Tradition aufgerufen. 2 Oder man fragt – im Anschluss an Gadamer – nach dem Potential von Weltliteratur als Schule universell-menschlicher Kultur. 3 Und nicht zuletzt kann man den Beitrag von Literatur zu einem Nachdenken nicht über das Gute, sondern über Gerechtigkeit beschreiben. Diesen Versuch macht Charles Bambach mit seinem Buch.... (shrink)

Although the three authors studied, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite, and Esther Tusquets, are sophisticated intellectuals, they have chosen fairy tales and texts from other marginalized genres originally for female consumption as the major intertexts in their novels for adults as well as in their fictions for children. Against the backdrop feminist theory and recent critical studies of fairy tales and children’s literature, Soliño studies the works of these authors as “gendered texts.” Soliño’s book opens with a chapter that (...) traces the historical development of the fairy tale genre, examines their didactic intent, and critiques the images of women in fairy tales. The second chapter explores the manners by which fairy tales were used as a tool for indoctrination during the formative years of the three authors under consideration. These introductory chapters are followed by individual chapters devoted to Martín Gaite, Matute, and Tusquets in which Soliño explores the connections between the literature these authors published for children and the novels they penned for an adult readership. (shrink)

Oriental perspective on Shakespearean themes, drawing on Eastern philosophical, religious and ethical traditions.

There are many significant philosophical issues in Shakespeare's creation, unrecognized by literary critics, especially those who are unfamiliar with both old and new philosophical ideas and trends, such as the linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy. This book also uncovers certain underlying trends: naturalistic and humanistic, anti-scholastic, anti-war, anti-racist, and a Stoical stance.

The notion that new worlds of post-revolutionary political realities are inevitably degradations of earlier eras is ubiquitous in English drama of the period, but perhaps most strikingly evident in Shakespeare's Henry V, argues Rebholz. He explores this theme in the play, c.

Discusses about politics, writing and thinking in the American South from the 1930's to the 1990's. This book shows that everyday life is, of course, full of existential problems. It argues that these problems have long been the subject of Southern poetry. It describes how people in the South of the 1990s struggle daily with private problems.