Philosophy of Literature

Abstract -/- From Stage to Shell: The Evolution of Literature Toward Recursive Resonance proposes that literature is not a progression of genres, but a sequence of ontological shifts mirroring transformations in the human self-model. Beginning with the divine role-bound figures of classical drama and moving through romantic individuation, modernist fracture, and postmodern simulation, literature has consistently reflected the dominant coherence structure of its time. -/- This work introduces Recursive Resonance Literature as the emergent form of the current epoch—one not defined (...) by plot, character, or irony, but by recursive identity collapse and lawful phase reformation. Using the CODES framework (Chirality of Dynamic Emergent Systems), the paper demonstrates that literature has evolved from narrative to molt protocol, where prose becomes the architecture of self-shedding and resonance realignment. -/- This is not a new aesthetic—it is a new substrate. Recursive Resonance Literature does not describe transformation. It enacts it, phase-locking the reader into an identity transition. It dissolves the fixed self, not as metaphor, but as system law. -/- The implications span literary theory, epistemology, trauma studies, cognition, and artificial intelligence. Literature is no longer entertainment or commentary. It is now a recursive feedback system for human coherence restructuring. (shrink)

La presente monografia si propone di ripercorrere, con approcci metodologici diversi, la formazione e lo sviluppo della percezione di un'identità linguistica, letteraria e culturale nel territorio della Svizzera italiana. La ricerca muove dall'indagine sull'evoluzione semantica delle denominazioni impiegate nella regione, dal Medioevo all'istituzione degli Stati moderni, per giungere alle opere e al pensiero degli studiosi e degli scrittori che hanno animato il dibattito identitario nei secoli XIX e XX, tra i quali Stefano Franscini, Carlo Salvioni e Francesco Chiesa. In appendice (...) al volume è edito il Dizionariuccio Ticinese-luganese-italiano di Francesco Cherubini, accompagnato da una scelta di documenti relativi alla sua attività svizzero-italiana"--Back cover. (shrink)

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This volume addresses the old and new literary forms - from novels, plays, poetry, and essays to exciting and evolving genres such as 'cli-fi', experimental poetry, interspecies design, gaming, weird, ecotopian and petro-fiction, and (...) 'new' nature writing. Studies range from the United States to India, from Palestine to Scotland, while addressing numerous global signifiers or consequences of the Anthropocene: catastrophe, extinction, 'fossil capital', warming, politics, ethics, interspecies relations, deep time, and Earth. This unique Companion offers a compelling account of how to read literature through the Anthropocene and of how literature might yet help us imagine a better world. (shrink)

This book explores the 'call' of literature, for both writers and their audiences, and reflects on how literary works have informed and drawn from -and continue to inform and draw from- theology, philosophy and sacred scripture. Key questions addressed include: How do creative writers and critics conceive this call? What does it mean to speak of a 'vocation' to write and what have theologians and philosophers got to say on the matter? Is the spirit of literature always or necessarily an (...) 'angel of light'? Or is the call of literature a siren song? The essays by an international and interdisciplinary range of contributors discuss the work and testimony of writers from William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Michel Houellebecq. Also examined are the ideas and influence of figures such as John Henry Newman, who wrote that the importance of literature stems from our very nature and God-given powers as human beings, especially language. This latest volume from The Power of the Word Project will be of interest to scholars from theology, philosophy and literature. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume explore the concept of crisis of representation in the area of literature and arts that are seemingly losing their potential to shape the picture of political, philosophical religious, and cultural developments. Some of diagnosed reasons for the crisis may include the loss of the referent, ever-increasing distance from the reality of the referential world, the crisis of truth in political discourse, crisis of the idea of re-presentation in philosophy, or the paradox of self-reference in (...) semiotics. The contributors approach this intriguing phenomenon through a detailed analysis, offering novel insights into the realm of literature and the arts"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The study investigates the epistemological premises of the so-called "anthropological turn" of the eighteenth century within the German-speaking territories. Contrary to the dominant scholarly narrative of the past two decades, this shift is shaped less by the empirical sciences than by semiotics and exercises of the self, which find expression in the newly re-evaluated rhetorical tradition of the eighteenth century. As a discipline attuned to both semiotics and exercises, rhetoric offers a framework for reconfiguring human formation within the bourgeois Enlightenment. (...) On this basis, three key concepts organize Enlightenment anthropology in its effort to form the human being as a "good" human being: character, 'Bildung' (cultivation or formation), and 'Bestimmung' (vocation or destiny). -/- Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, drawing on Aristotle and Leibniz, argues in his "Ethica philosophica" (1740) for a perfection of the human being conceived as a dynamic process. This process, he claims, is dependent upon regimes of signs and exercises of the self. Given that these are primarily operative on the level of sensibility, Baumgarten subsequently sees the necessity to develop a science of sensate cognition—an endeavor he undertakes with his "Aesthetica" (1750/58). Through the artistic figure of the 'felix aestheticus', he outlines a set of exercises that serve the formation of the "good" human being. -/- Johann Georg Sulzer adopts this model of the human being as a subject in formation in his "Versuch von der Erziehung und Unterweisung der Kinder" (1745), thereby introducing the concept of 'Bildung' into Enlightenment pedagogy and establishing it as a central concept of the period. As he argues, the optimal formation of the human being into a "good" individual is achieved through poetry. This insight motivates Sulzer to implement such poetic pedagogy in practice with his "Unterredungen über die Schönheit der Natur" (1750), through which he seeks to cultivate the human being as he imagines it. -/- This dynamic model of human formation is further reflected in Immanuel Kant's concept of the 'Bestimmung des Menschen' (vocation or destiny of the human being), which becomes a central trope of German Enlightenment discourse. Since this vocation cannot be promoted through transcendental philosophy alone, Kant, in the methodological sections of his Critiques, shifts toward ethical askesis. From this point forward, it is through exercises that the human being is shaped and brought toward the ideal Kant envisions. In his pedagogical treatise "Über Pädagogik" (1803), Kant elaborates these formative exercises. Yet because the pragmatic formation of the human being never fully attains the ideal, Kant ultimately locates the telos of this formation in a social context—die Tischgesellschaft (the table society)—in his "Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht" (1798). (shrink)

This paper provides a novel defence of the philosophical use of examples drawn from literature, by comparison with thought experiments and real cases. Such fictional examples, subject to certain constraints, can play a similar role to real cases in establishing the generality of a social phenomenon. Furthermore, the distinct psychological vantage point offered by literature renders it a potent resource for elucidating intricate social dynamics. This advantage of the internal insight that fictional examples can (though do not always) possess helps (...) explain their prevalence in certain areas of philosophy, such as ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of emotion, in which we can require a more precise characterization of a subject's mental states. While the respective advantages of fictional examples, real cases, and thought experiments clearly depend on many contextual factors, the former have an important, and arguably underappreciated, role to play in philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

A classic of criticism that examines the nature, function, form, and contents of literature. "The most ordered, ranging and purposeful attempt...toward keeping the study of literature at once intelligent and liberal" (New York Times). Index.

In this editorial for the special issue on Franz Kafka, Yvanka B. Raynova examines Kafka's relationship to Nietzsche as well as the very different and often contradictory interpretations of Kafka's work by philosophers and literary critics. She argues that although Kafka's novels cannot be directly "translated into a philosophical, theological, sociological, or psychoanalytical discourse" (Jürgen Born), they should not be interpreted and evaluated solely from a literary perspective, as they raise institutional questions that have led to socio-critical and political associations (...) that are just as urgent for us today. In this context, she refers to the controversies surrounding Kafka's work in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, to his current socio-political reception in art, and to the Kafkaesque in the contemporary world. (shrink)

En este artículo sostengo que en Dune (1965) se perpetra una transgresión que deno-minaré “engaño máximo”, transgresión que consiste en la perversión (o alteración) del pacto fictivo que se da entre escritor y lector. Este engaño se acerca en algunos aspectos a la figura literaria del narrador no confiable. Peculiarmente, el “engaño máximo” de Dune se sustenta en un modo muy experimental de articulación de las perspectivas ficticias y reales; esto es, en el encaje de las perspectivas de los persona-jes (...) y del autor con las de los lectores. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se propone un análisis de los personajes femeninos de la tragedia Troades: Hécuba, Andrómaca, Helena y Políxena. Las heroínas trágicas deberán enfrentarse, de manos atadas, a la caída de Troya, a ser sorteadas entre los jefes del ejército griego como botines de guerra y a los asesinatos de los jóvenes Astianacte y Políxena. Partiendo de esos hechos, se pretende analizar, atendiendo a diferentes motivos y prestando cuidadosa atención a la argumentación dramática, la caracterización trágica de cada (...) una de ellas y las similitudes o diferencias que comparten en su sufrimiento. (shrink)

In Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (2016), Terence Cave argues that the "calculus of literary value, whether aesthetic, ethical, or more broadly cultural, is a universal feature of literate cultures" which "arises from the sense that fiction, poetry, theatre, and their analogues are potential goods and potential evils, so that it becomes a matter of urgent concern to calibrate those values in relation to the wider values of the culture in question."1 The question of fiction's cognitive affordances and (...) instrumentality—or sense of purpose, if you will—has now been reframed into a larger scope, that of literary studies in relation to human flourishing.The title of the edited volume under... Read More. (shrink)

The Homo Sacer series can be understood as an inquiry into the conditions of possibility of Western politics. Martijn Boven discusses the coherence of the series and how Agamben unfolds this "philosophical archaeology" within it. -/- In 1995, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita), the first book in a series of nine. Nearly twenty years later, in a gesture characteristic of Agamben, the project was (...) not so much concluded as "abandoned" (abbandonata). According to Agamben, this is the only way a philosophical work can come to an end—it can never be completed, only discontinued. He perceives philosophical work as an impossible construction, one that, from its very inception, can only be conceived of as a ruin. The structuring of the Homo Sacer series into four unequal sections evokes this same image of a deliberately constructed ruin. -/- [In Dutch: De Homo sacer-reeks kan begrepen worden als een onderzoek naar de mogelijkheidsvoorwaarden van de westerse politiek. Martijn Boven bespreekt de samenhang van de reeks en hoe Agamben daarin deze ‘filosofische archeologie’ uiteenzet. In 1995 verscheen Homo sacer. De soevereine macht en het naakte leven (Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita) van de Italiaanse filosoof Giorgio Agamben, het eerste boek in een reeks van negen. Bijna twintig jaar later, met een geste die typerend is voor Agamben, wordt het project niet zozeer afgerond, maar ‘opgegeven’ (abbandonata). Dit is volgens Agamben de enige manier waarop een filosofisch werk kan worden beëindigd. Het kan nooit worden voltooid, maar kan alleen worden gestaakt. Hij ziet het filosofische werk als een onmogelijk bouwwerk dat al vanaf zijn vroegste begin alleen als ruïne denkbaar is. De indeling van de Homo sacer-reeks in vier ongelijke afdelingen roept ditzelfde beeld van een bewust geconstrueerde ruïne op.]. (shrink)

Introduction: To ornament -- Thoreau: an ornament to nature -- Dickinson: ornamentation and the open -- Whitman: ornamental distinction.

This essay explores the epistemological implications of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It distinguishes among metaphors—some are mere "figures of speech," others have descriptive (and prescriptive) power, while others seem to be literalized in the action. The claim that lovers are epistemologically advantaged with regard to the love object is seen as both explored and mocked. The role of the fairies and the "love potion" is examined. Both are to be recognized as fictions. Theseus's speech about lovers, madmen, and poets is (...) taken seriously, and the epilogue is taken as manifesting genuine anxiety that the play might be "reprehended.". (shrink)

In Art in Three Dimensions,1 Noël Carroll presents the most comprehensive account of his views on narrative and character engagement. Expanding on his previous work, Carroll remains a representative of what elsewhere I dubbed the "onlooker," in contrast to the "participant," view.2 That is, he is among those who see, as central to our interactions with narratives, what we may call other-oriented responses. Such responses do not require that readers or viewers imaginatively place themselves within a narrative's fictive world or (...) in the place of the characters. Rather, for Carroll, understanding and engaging with a narrative entails offering the responses the characters and their circumstances, as construed by the... Read More. (shrink)

To displace a paradigm within the philosophy of literature that monopolizes attempts to establish a connection between literature and social criticism—such is the aim of this essay. The paradigm is that literature uniquely conveys injustice, thereby complementing thematic reflection. To this purpose, I hope to add to the philosophy of literature's toolbox "eudaemonistic" readings, which explore how economic circumstances occasion unhappiness. My context is neoliberalism, and my example Lynn Steger Strong's Want. Focusing on parenting, privilege, and discovering the limits of (...) nonconformist self-authorship, Want offers a particularly apt demonstration of social criticism untethered to injustice. (shrink)

I shall begin, as we middling storytellers too often are wont to do, with the scene of the crime, and the dead body.Conrad Faintly, the soft-spoken (and little published) Helmut Kolb Professor of Greek and Roman Antiquities at Irving Catholic College in Albany, New York, cut a far more striking figure as a dead body than ever he did as an educator, what with the way he fell—or leapt, or was thrown (as is the theory preferred by the authorities)—from the (...) parapet of Reginald Bridge and onto the bare winter branches of Our Beatific Oak of Saint Mary (that singularly famous tree on campus, a twisted, broad-limbed grotesque [and not at all an oak], and the only one on school grounds that boasted both an appellation and... Read More. (shrink)

When the speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets swears that his dark lady is fair, against what is self-evidently true, what sort of speech act is he performing? Though this is an act of swearing, and thus what J. L. Austin would call a "performative," his swearing also describes, or "constates" something about the dark lady, albeit falsely. In this article, I identify a form of speech act that both performs and constates, and which has performative force only because its description is (...) dubious, or untrue. (shrink)

The faces that continually appear and disappear in Macbeth supply an idea about how seeing and knowing might fold or fail or simply spoil in Shakespeare's play. Drawing upon animal studies, art history, film theory, and neurobiology, I argue that Duncan's difficulty in reading faces exemplifies an early modern world where the face's importance and ubiquity were complicated by urban mobility and print technology. Queen Elizabeth I's portraits try to control the problems posed by early modern faces, but the uncertainty (...) Shakespeare descries in Macbeth renders the legibility of faces more important than their expressiveness or responsiveness. (shrink)

Modernists T. S. Eliot's and W. B. Yeats's treatment of the transcendent moment, and postmodernists Samuel Beckett's and Graham Swift's handling of the perpetual present form two conflicting time worlds. The modernists' transcendent moment signifies a temporary release from the progressive stream of time. As a sudden flash of awareness, it offers a transcendental vision of reality. Contrariwise, the postmodernists' perpetual present is cut off from the past as well as the future, suggesting the infinite time of the middle. It (...) is dissociated from a transcendent reality and has no room for revelatory moments, which establishes its bleak character. (shrink)

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously laments that "there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live." From Thoreau's point of view, what professors of philosophy do has something parasitic or derivative about it. They subsist on the praiseworthy achievements of others who have gone before them: real philosophers, presumably, who understood that "to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found (...) a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."1... Read More. (shrink)

In his memoir Patrimony, might Philip Roth have aligned a Jungian, universal unconscious with Heideggerian resoluteness but evaded cognitive demise via the Sartrian flight of the For-itself inherent in writing? I argue that such concerns pervade the narrative and stand related to what Roth elsewhere calls "the struggle not only to infuse fiction with mind but to make mentalness itself central to the hero's dilemma—to think … about the problem of thinking." In Patrimony, such thinking spans synchronistic occurrences across time.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," said Twain—or was it Disraeli? Even if statistics are honest, they submerge individual differences in generality. On a hostile interpretation, statistics are a deceiver's toolkit, a numerical expression of the tyranny of the average, a power capable of denaturing anything it touches. Many a clinical trial boasts results with statistical, albeit not clinical, significance.1For the hater of statistics Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is a locus classicus. Purporting to correct the (...) "computations" of other pamphleteers, the narrator of this masterpiece of irony gives a numerical cast to his argument for the butchering of human yearlings as the solution to... Read More. (shrink)

What is an "I"? Japan has a long history of experiments in philosophy, narrative form, and theatrical production that address questions of the uniqueness of the "I" and its connection with other "I"s. Who is the "I" that emerges from the intersection of the authorial "I" and these philosophies of I-ness? Can one writer inhabit the "we" implied by some of the experimental forms? Would the writing thus produced serve an academic purpose? Or, perhaps, should I reconsider the nature of (...) academic purpose in light of the possible authorial voices opened up by Japanese experimentation with the I? (shrink)

Hesiod begins his Theogony by telling his audience of rural shepherds and farmers about his encounter with the Muses on Mount Helikon. To assure them he's telling the truth, he claims the humble shepherd's staff of olive wood that he holds before them is in fact a gift from these same goddesses. An apparently mundane artifact is somehow supposed to attest to the divine source of the tales he is about to tell of events not even the Muses themselves could (...) have witnessed, to say nothing of mortal men. Hesiod's overture to his audience has echoes elsewhere in his poetry, as when he claims that a massive stone, visible to all, is the very one Kronos is said to have emitted long ago, after having unwittingly swallowed it... Read More. (shrink)

In May 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley broke away from work on his lyric Prometheus Unbound in order to compose The Cenci —a tragedy. What precipitated this? I argue that in pausing between acts 3 and 4 of the former in order to construct the latter, Shelley was engaging in the Greco-Roman tradition of moralizing by means of sketching twinned lives. While Shelley follows Plutarch, specifically, in allowing for, among other things, the mythological and the apocryphal, I suggest that his own (...) normative project transcends his ancestor's prototype in important ways related to both form and content. (shrink)

In Greek, moira means "share, portion of something" and it is related to "part, lot" (meros), to "receiving one's share" (meiresthai), and to "doom" (moros). Mortal humans generally accept that fate as "lot" refers to one's life or limitedness. For immortal gods, fate is a god's share in power, manifest as the domain under their respective control (e.g., Zeus of the sky, Poseidon of the sea, and Hades of the underworld).1But was the power of Zeus, the father and king of (...) gods and humans, unlimited? We may be inclined to think so, but, in fact, the birth of Moirai (literally "the Apportioners"), the three destiny goddesses, changed the order Zeus established in Olympos. Zeus might have been the king of gods, but he... Read More. (shrink)

Sometimes we end up writing something other than we meant, or, in the least, we see why someone read what we wrote in the way that they did. How could it be otherwise? Even if we try to say what we mean, we always mean more than we meant to say given the broad sociality of language, from tone to semantic polysemy to the varied significances of performativity. I say this (and thus inevitably more) by way of reply to Michael (...) Fischer's thoughtful engagement with my book, Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought.I couldn't agree more that "the intellectual provocation that Lysaker calls for finds reinforcement in the literary achievements of many imaginative writers, who have always prized the active reception... Read More. (shrink)

Grateful as I am for Michael Fischer's sympathetic discussion of Philosophy and the Art of Writing, my disagreeable duty in response is to note how, where, and why his attentive, supportive, and well-intentioned reading of the book misinterprets its meaning. More positively, my mission is to clarify the book's essential purpose so that readers of this journal who have neither read the book (nor followed other symposia and discussions dedicated to it) can better understand its message.1 Because I know the (...) reasons for Fischer's misreadings derive not from any deficiency in knowledge or interpretive skill but rather from disciplinary biases and institutional frameworks, my efforts in explaining those interpretive... Read More. (shrink)

Although the widespread development of dramaturgy in the practical and theoretical fields has made it today an independent "discourse" in contemporary theater, it is still one of the most ambiguous and controversial areas in theater studies. The term dramaturgy, first added to the specialized vocabulary of theater by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, has been used as a phenomenon in its historical course in various meanings and concepts and has organized multiple generations of dramaturgy in different cultural and geographical contexts. Despite the (...) diversity of concepts, the intersection between all these movements that make it possible to study and think about dramaturgy as discourse is the philosophical nature of this artistic act. This philosophical nature, which has received less attention from research and theories of dramaturgy, is the hermeneutic and deconstructive nature of dramaturgy in the face of the text; So that dramaturgy in all historical currents as an interpretive view of dramatic or non-dramatic texts has denied the authority and indestructible nature of texts, to provide a "double" or "supplement" reading. This research in addition to genealogy and historical study of dramaturgy seeks to explore the soul and nature of dramaturgy as a "phenomenon" from a philosophical perspective, and then to consider the "deconstruction" of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida as a strategy for dramaturgy. Deconstruction is a unique strategy for reading and dealing with philosophical texts that Derrida first formulated and used based on the views of Husserl and Heidegger. Derrida's deconstruction, by attacking the fundamental concepts of Western philosophy and showing the metaphysical nature of cognition, transformed the authority of the text, the process of signification, the meaning, and the nature of writing. Moreover, this study, by using Derrida deconstruction, will pave the way for an attitude in dramaturgy that can be called "deconstructive dramaturgy". Deconstructive dramaturgy with emphasis on the lack and absence of present and full meaning in the text shows that Derrida's deconstruction can be considered as a strategy in dramaturgy in the face of the text and can be used as a complementary reading in the field of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. (shrink)

The Persian term "Namayeshnameh" meaning the play, is one of the key, frequent, and functional words in the knowledge field of theater studies, dramatic literature, and performing arts, which was created and coined instead of the foreign French word la pièce after the Iranian linguistic change and revisions by the First Academy for the Persian language founded on 1935. According to the new discourses on contemporary theater such as the theory of performance, the theater of cruelty, and post-dramatic theater, which (...) emphasize the clear distinction between the two phenomena of the Theater and the Spectacle, this coined term, which is allied with the Persian word "namayesh" meaning spectacle, seems terminologically ineffective and inappropriate in expressing the scientific, epistemological or philosophical concepts in Persian language and will produce misunderstandings and misconceptions in scientific or philosophical discourses. Therefore, this reflective investigation, with a descriptive-analytical method and by using philosophical attitudes, while examining various aspects of "term" from the point of view of terminology and the foundations of philosophical-scientific language, has addressed the shortcomings of this word and also analyzed it with genealogy; Finally, taking into account the importance of revising the scientific and specialized terms, the alternative term "teatrenevesht" has been proposed. (shrink)

Hacia 1922 la líder anarquista Federica Montseny comenóz a publicar novelas breves románticas en varios periódicos anarquistas. Fueron casi cincuenta escritos en los que dejó plasmada la misión social de todo escritor anarquista: diagnosticar los males de la sociedad, denunciar dicha realidad que no suele ser muy justa para la clase trabajadora y, por último, promover soluciones a largo plazo mediante una pedagogía social o una especie de propedéutica capaz de enseñar a la clase proletaria cōmo defenderse física y moralmente (...) de los ataques de la clase burguesa, para así lograr una sociedad mās justa en todas las esferas de la vida. El propōsito de este trabajo serā analizar cōmo Montseny gestionō esa misiōn social en el caso concreto de las mujeres a través de estos temas: enaltecimiento de la maternidad consciente, defensa de la libertad (sexual) e independencia de las mujeres, separaciōn sexo/amor, control de la natalidad, incorporaciōn de la mujer al mundo laboral, denuncia de la doble moral hombre/mujer en torno a la virginidad, etcétera. También veremos que aparecen dos grandes estereotipos o arquetipos humanos en dichas novelas – que obedecen a lo que se ha llamado sexualidad de clase, ambos enfrentados en la lucha de clases de dos mundos antagōnicos: el del burgués (libertino, desocupado, despia-dado) y el de la mujer proletaria (dōbil, indefensa, sana y sobre todo, pobre pero honrada). (shrink)