Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

The exciting new book argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism--contrary to the trend of post-humanism, or what Neema Parvini calls "the anti-humanism" of the last several decades of literary and theoretical scholarship. In this trail-blazing study, Michael Bryson argues for this renewal of perspective by covering literature written in different languages, times, and places, calling for a return to a humanism, which focuses on literary characters and their psychological and existential struggles--not struggles of competition, but of connection, the (...) struggles of fragmented, incomplete individuals for integration, wholeness, and unity. (shrink)

There are many moral values that the Arab writers have written about either in prose or poetry. This emphasis on morality in classical Arabic literature has also been the subject of many academic studies. The abundance of the literary material in this field has attracted the attention of researchers. One of these is the emphasis on "naturalness" which we have seen in classical Arabic literature. In the Arab society which social ties are very strong the moral values have been summarized (...) with the concept of al-murūah/chivalry over time. In these sources that is including poems, parables and anecdotes about morality allthings on the moral values are brought together. Hereunder the main thing in the moral maturity is the naturality. Criticism of ostensible behaviors has taken place in an important part of these works. For example, ancient perception of morality is a predestination that comes from creation has found its response in Arabic poetry. Many Arab poets have stated that one's innate character will beat and the reason will be defeated. On the other hand, some poets tried to establish a balance between character and wisdom. Accordingly, it has been stated that people are innately inclined to falses but they also have the potential to restrain their innate evil tendencies with the ability of mind given to them. These poets liked to explain this balance through the simile stating he ambitious horse that wants to run at full speed is restrained with a bit. According to this simile the man is like a person on the back of a raging horse with the evil inclinations cultivated in his nature. The soul he carries wants to take him wherever it wishes. However, he has a mind that is like a bridle in return for the soul inside him. On the other hand, when we look at the encyclopedic sources of Arabic proverbs we see that there are proverbs comparing many moral attributes with animals. In Turkish proverbs, cunning is identified with the fox and industriousness with the ant, and in Arabic proverbs a very rich human character-animal pairings stand out. These proverbs are based on the idea that people's character is the product of nature. Because each animal species has appreciated characteristics and these features occur without learning and education. In addition, the issue of the naturalness of morality was also used for the purpose of praise and satire in the classical Arabic poets. The poet makes his reproach or anger towards someone through his character. When describing his lover he states that the beauties that adorn him come from creation. Therefore, it can be said that the emphasises of character/nature/temperament in the poems in which these and similar emotions are aroused, are the motifs that serve the purpose of the poet. Finally Arab writers have offered many recommendations in literary form on issues such as brotherhood, solidarity and cooperation for the healthy continuity of social relations in the Muslim society, and they have included anecdotes and poems within the framework of the subject. The study is mainly based on the descriptive method, however, the way the authors handled the subject is analysed when it is deemed to be appropriate. Considering that there is no specific study in Turkish and Arabic literature within the framework of the present study, it is aimed to investigate the literary material in the subject in question. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and ArtSusan FeaginDeeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art, by Jenefer Robinson; 516 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, $35.00.Jenefer Robinson's lucid yet closely-argued book has four parts. The first part presents a theory of the emotions in general. The second part develops and defends the view that "some works of literature... need to (...) be experienced emotionally if they are to be properly understood" (p. 3) and draws some implications for other arts. Part Three develops a new theory of expression, and Part Four examines the expression of emotion in and listeners' emotional responses to music. Robinson applies her theory of emotions and how they arise and are expressed in response to individual works of art throughout, and the extended discussions of Edith Wharton's The Reef and one of the intermezzi from Brahms's Opus 117 set are not to be missed.Robinson's use of psychological research to develop a philosophical theory of emotion is characteristic of an increasingly popular practice in the philosophy of mind. Her descriptions of this often highly technical literature are among the best with respect to accuracy and clarity. On most accounts, emotions are mental states; on Robinson's, they are mental processes. These processes are always initiated by "an automatic 'affective appraisal' [that] induces characteristic physiological and behavioral changes and is succeeded by... 'cognitive monitoring' of the situation" (p. 3). The appraisal is also referred to as a 'non-cognitive' appraisal, which may sound like an oxymoron. Robinson explains: these appraisals are non-cognitive "in the sense that they occur without any conscious deliberation or awareness, and that they do not involve any complex information processing" (p. 45; see also p. 59). Appraisals have a valence, positive or negative, sufficient to induce a characteristic pattern of physiological and (roughly, involuntary) behavioral responses, such as alterations in galvanic skin response and movements of facial muscles. These changes are succeeded by cognitive monitoring of the situation, resulting in conceptually more sophisticated assessments of one's initial response with respect to its suitability to the circumstances and in relation to one's beliefs. Thus, cognitive monitoring generates the more cognitively complex emotions, and here she is in agreement [End Page 420] with the "judgment theorists" (p. 90) that these emotions are individuated by cognitions. Robinson seeks a univocal account of emotions for humans and other sentient creatures, though with humans it is possible for a "complex cognition" to trigger the process that constitutes having an emotion and cognitive feedback may occur in general throughout the process in ways that are not possible for creatures lacking the relevant complex mental capacities (p. 93).The fact that complex cognitions can constitute the initial stage of an emotion makes it possible to respond emotionally to literature. As in emotional situations in real life, emotions are initiated by automatic affective appraisals that have to do with one's own wants and interests, calling our attention to something important in the novel, which may lay down its own memory system, linked with bodily feelings, which is then subject to cognitive appraisal and reappraisal. Cognitive reflection facilitates the understanding of narratives as well as characters, and with respect to the latter, she argues, deploys the same mental systems that are engaged in understanding people. Further, it is not merely the beliefs that one may acquire as a result of the process that is educational, but the process of emotional understanding itself (p. 155). Indeed, Robinson endorses the strong claim that for at least some novels, those that are part of the "Great Tradition" of nineteenth-century realistic British and American literature, it is necessary to experience them emotionally to understand them.Part Three exposits a theory of the expression of emotion simpliciter and then makes adjustments to it to build a theory of expression in art, taking advantage of Romantic theories of expression developed in the works of, for example, Collingwood. Reflection on ordinary expression allows an artist to clarify and articulate "what it is like to go through the emotion process," which may be revealed both in the... (shrink)

Armed with a fresh analysis of Shakespeare's inherited resources for articulating anxieties rooted in philosophical doubt, Skulsky shows that in four plays—Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Othello—the drama of doubt in search of an exit gives its own kind of urgency to the more familiar Shakespearean drama of action and motive. From Skulsky's study, the four plays emerge as insidiously telling exercises in challenging our working faith in the objectivity of moral choice and the possibility of knowing other (...) minds. In particular, Skulsky notes that Shakespeare takes calculated risks with our personal interest in his heroes by assigning them disturbing convictions as well as contemptible actions. In one of the plays, such convictions end by looking just as threatening as they do at the outset. In the others, Shakespeare offers a special kind of affirmation and compassion—an affirmation designed to stand against the worst of pessimism, and a compassion that makes room for the worst of the damned. (shrink)

Although it has become commonplace to regard Marsiglio of Padua's Defensor Pacis (completed in 1324) as a quintessential work of medieval Aristotelian political theory, this view has been challenged for various reasons in recent years. Some scholarship has pointed to the superficial quality of Marsiglio's appeal to Aristotle's �authority�. Others have emphasized Marsiglio's decisive reliance on sources and doctrines which were quite at odds with his overtly Aristotelian commitments. A revealing measure of the depth of his Aristotelianism is perhaps his (...) failure to cite Aristotle's authority at all in the Defensor Minor, an abbreviated version of the Defensor Pacis composed about 1340.4 At minimum, it seems necessary to reconsider the claim (pioneered already by Albertus Pighius in the sixteenth century) that Marsiglio was �homo magis aristotelicus quam christianus�.5 Indeed, it may be true to say that the assumption of Marsiglio's fidelity to Aristotle has acted as a filter, screening out interesting or original features of his thought because they are cloaked in outwardly Aristotelian language. In this paper, I would like to test this hypothesis with reference to Marsiglio's alleged application of the basic principles of Aristotelian moral psychology (in particular, Aristotle's doctrine of hexis) within the Defensor's account of the constituent parts of the political community. In both his Ethics and his Politics, Aristotle had employed the idea of hexis (often translated as �habit�, but more properly denoting �state� or �firm disposition�) to explain the way in which moral and civil virtues come to be instilled in persons. Thus, hexis served as the foundation for his conception of ethical and political education. Marsiglio seems to use the Latin rendering of hexis, habitus, in a very similar manner. He argues that the different parts of the community, ranging from the rulers and priests to the warriors and farmers, each have a set of characteristics unique to their function. These functional properties are, he says, a result of the differing kinds of habitus which typify each part of the community. (shrink)

Today humanity is in the midst of the massive expansion of new and fundamental technology, represented by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The ongoing revolution of these technologies and their profound impact across various sectors, has triggered discussions about the characteristics and values that should guide their use and development in a responsible manner. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review with the aim of pointing out existing challenges and required principles in AI-based systems in different industries. (...) We discuss our findings and provide general recommendations to be considered during AI deployment in production. The results have shown many gaps and concerns towards responsible AI and integration of complex AI models in the industry that the research community could address. (shrink)

Mixing passion and humor, a personal work of literary criticism that demonstrates the power of our greatest books to illuminate our lives. Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring (...) intellect, a professor's life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person--and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature's knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters' lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge--and come to understand its cost. In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters most because we never stop discovering who we are. (shrink)

The paper discusses in six parts the role of knowledge and omniscience in narration. The first part identifies kinds of knowledge which usually inform narratives, using modern and medieval narratives as examples. The second part focuses on the carrier of knowledge: it is the author, but also the narrator to whom omniscience is attributed. The third part describes the phenomenology of this knowledge which cannot be derived in a natural manner and traces it back in the history of narration. The (...) concept of omniscience is defined in the fourth part and distinguished from divine omniscientia. Omniscience was ›discovered‹ as a characteristic of third-person narration only at the beginning of the 19th century – evidence of this is given in part V. Finally, part VI discusses if the concept of omniscience can apply to modern forms of representing the mental states of characters. (shrink)

In his classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach famously cites the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot as emblematic of modern realism. With their minute description of the boardinghouse, where much of the novel’s action takes place, these pages emphasize physical setting, Auerbach argues, in a way new to Western literature. Yet Balzac’s descriptions are driven by something more than an ambition to represent “contemporary life” in scrupulous detail. In Auerbach’s view, the characteristic (...) element of Balzac’s realism is an obsession with the reciprocal action of characters and milieu, a scientific or philosophical principle according to which the quality... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pleasure and Pain in LiteratureOliver ConollyWhy do we enjoy the depiction, in imaginative literature, of situations that typically arouse negative emotions such as pity, sadness, and horror? One view, which aims to dissolve rather than solve the problem, is that we do not enjoy them at all. According to this theory—the pure pain theory—the problem does not arise in the first place. But the theory must explain why we (...) chose to undergo such painful experiences. Are we simply aesthetic masochists? The pure pleasure theory, by contrast, denies that there are any painful aspects to our experience of such literature. This theory must explain how we can take pure delight in the literary depiction of suffering. Are we simply aesthetic sadists? Lying between both extremes is the hybrid theory, which asserts that there are both painful and pleasant aspects of such experiences. The hybrid theory must specify which aspects of the experience are painful and which pleasant. In this paper a version of the hybrid theory is advanced and defended.IThe pure pleasure theory denies that we feel painful emotional identification with fictional characters. Why take this view? One reason is that it is a way of resolving the paradox of fiction, as formulated by Colin Radford.1 The paradox asserts that there is an inconsistency between the propositions that: (1) we have emotions for fictional characters, (2) we know that they do not exist, (3) it is irrational to have emotions for non-existent objects. Each proposition seems plausible, yet one must be false. Whilst most of the participants in the debate have attacked the notion that feelings for fictions are irrational, some have [End Page 305] denied that we have such feelings in the first place. One intuition guiding this denial is that the depiction of a fictional horrible event is likely to be less painful than the depiction of an identical but real event. In other words, the mere fictionality of an event is liable, by itself, to diminish the pain we are liable to feel at its depiction in comparison with a real event: I label this the fictionality gap. If the fictionality gap exists, it applies across the board, to the sufferings of Pip in Great Expectations as well as those of King Lear. The characters in those works are fictional, and so the lessening of the pain we feel at their fates must, if the fictionality gap holds, hold merely in virtue of the fact that they are fictional.It has often been noted—rather than argued, but this is question of impression rather than logic—that one would feel more affected were the stories real rather than fictional. The kinds of events depicted in King Lear—ugly struggles for power, the manipulation of the naïve, the impotence of the good, inconsolable grief—are not in themselves other-worldly, and can be imagined taking place in reality. However it is much more difficult to imagine King Lear in its full particularity taking place in the real world, given the theatricality of its form and language. In order to imagine King Lear as real, one would have to rob it of Shakespeare's poetry, which is other-worldly in its eloquence. French proponents of the Three Unities thought that theatre should aim at, among other things, verisimilitude, but never overcame the problem that the fact that characters in French theatre speak in rhyming couplets might detract from that verisimilitude, which it clearly does. This worry about the transplantability of King Lear into the real world appears to be less of a problem in relation to realist novels, which, as their appellation suggests, are easier to imagine taking place in the real world. Not only is the language used in realist novels less exalted than that used in tragedies, the situations such novels depict tend to be more likely to occur. Clearly, the realist novel is capable of depicting horrible or unpleasant events. About such novels, say, Madame Bovary, it seems to make sense to ask ourselves how we would feel about them if we read them as true stories.I would like however to question the very intelligibility of the... (shrink)

Much effort has been invested by scholars in defining the specific character of the Homeric values as against those that obtained at later periods of Greek history. The distinction between the ‘shame-culture’ and the ‘guilt-culture’ introduced by E. R. Dodds, and that between the ‘competitive’ and the ‘cooperative’ values advocated by A. W. H. Adkins, are among the more influential ones. Although Adkins's taxonomy encountered some acute criticism, notably from A. A. Long, it has become generally adopted both in the (...) scholarly literature and in general philosophical discussions of Greek ethics. Objections to Adkins's approach have mainly concentrated on demonstrating that his denial of the cooperative values to Homer is untenable on general grounds and is not supported by Homeric evidence. Characteristically, Adkins's thesis concerning the centrality to Homer's ethics of the so-called ‘competitive values‘ has never received similar attention, probably owing to the fact that this is the point at which his picture of the Homeric society concurs with the influential reconstructions by W Jaeger and M. I. Finley. The present study oftimēandaretē, generally held to be the two competitive values central to the Homeric poems, purports to address this issue. (shrink)

Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia served as models for most of the literary utopias written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, dystopian novels began to displace their positive counterparts. Five dystopian fictions published between 1891 and 1949—Jerome’s “The New Utopia”, Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—exhibit many common themes, such as isolation, totalitarianism, technology in service of the state, rigid social organization, uniformity and social control. (...) In the twenty-first century, some of these characteristics of fictional dystopian societies have become realities in the form of unseen technological surveillance and control. Nevertheless, utopia lives on as an ideal, for instance in philosophical transhumanism. (shrink)

This publication discusses how modernist techniques for depicting characters' thoughts, feelings, and desires have been reinvented by some of the most influential and innovative writers of the postwar period, including Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J.M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride.

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789Patrick HenryCitizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789, by Daniel Gordon; viii & 270 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $39.50.Under examination here is the early modern period in France from Louis XIV to the French Revolution when kings ruled absolutely and citizens were without sovereignty. Discarding the traditional image of the Enlightenment as the absolute (...) enemy of absolutism, Gordon, in this sense, follows Norbert Elias and Robert Darnton who treat the Enlightenment as part of an elitist and hierarchical establishment. More specifically, as his subtitle indicates, Gordon portrays the invention of a “nonpolitical polis” (p. 6), an ideological social space where, despite political inequality, citizens could practice social equality in a hierarchical régime. The rise of this “nondemocratic egalitarian ethos” (p. 7) brought with it a new cult of sociabilité, a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe the idealization of the private sphere and the practice of social equality.The first chapter, then, ties sociability not to democracy, as in the Habermasian model, but to the absolutism that stimulated it and coexisted with it. A series of five ideal types of sociability depict how men and women, members of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, came together—in commerce, public welfare, scientific academies, salons, cafés, public libraries, and various other social situations not protorevolutionary in character—to create a bond among equals [End Page 279] under the ancien régime. In this framework, progress and modernity are born during the absolute monarchy where sociability suggests conviviality rather than class warfare. Every major French novel of the eighteenth century supports Gordon’s refutation of De Toqueville’s surprising statement that “noblemen and bourgeois never met except by chance in private life “in prerevolutionary France” (p. 27).In chapters two and three, Gordon examines the nature of the rules of sociability found in courtesy literature and their functioning as the imagined basis of the newly invented idealized space called société. In addition to analyzing in great detail the nature and frequency of the vocabulary invented to define and describe sociabilité, Gordon discusses sociabilité in the context of natural law theory in Hobbes, Bossuet, and among others, Pufendorf, who wanted to refute Hobbes by showing that self-interest leads humans to establish stable social relations even before government orders them to do so. Holbach surfaces here too for having amalgamated the older language of politeness and the newer language of natural law. In Holbach, as in the Encyclopédie, sociability, based on egalitarian premises of natural law, is nonetheless fully compatible with the hierarchical regime. Among other things, this shows clearly that the philosophes never preached the French Revolution. Striving to eliminate the abuses of despotism and establish equality in private life was not tantamount to working for political equality and the abolition of all rank. In this same vein, Gordon paints the apolitical essence of the private sphere and, by a rigorous study of the seventeenth-century manuals of polite living, shows convincingly (this time against Elias who saw the court as a model of refined behavior) that the salon was indeed a world unto itself, independent of preexisting social hierarchies. Rejecting Paul Hazard’s conception of absolute rupture between seventeenth-century culture and eighteenth-century thought, Gordon destroys the facile dichotomy between seventeenth-century hierarchy and eighteenth-century equality and, once again, admirably depicts the compatibility of Enlightenment and absolutism.If chapters one to three underscore a certain continuity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chapters four and five explain important changes. It is not, for example, the mere preservation of the idea of sociable communication but rather its new use that is germane in understanding the Enlightenment. Now “conversation” and “civility” no longer had meaning only for an urban elite but had in fact become ideals in all philosophical endeavors including the writing of universal history. Sociable communication had become the defining characteristic of modern nations. In the fourth chapter, by analyzing in detail the works of Jean-Baptiste Suard, Gordon demonstrates the meaning that the writing of universal history in Scotland acquired within the French... (shrink)

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of (...) 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)

Although fictional characters have long dominated the reception of literature, films, television programs, comics, and other media products, only recently have they begun to attract their due attention in literary and media theory. The book systematically surveys todays diverse and at times conflicting theoretical perspectives on fictional character, spanning research on topics such as the differences between fictional characters and real persons, the ontological status of characters, the strategies of their representation and characterization, the psychology of their (...) reception, as well as their specific forms and constellations in - and across - different media, from the book to the internet.". (shrink)

In Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds, Donald Beecher explores the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the brain as they affect the study of fiction. He builds upon insights from the cognitive sciences to explain how we actualize imaginary persons, read the clues to their intentional states, assess their representations of selfhood, and empathize with their felt experiences in imaginary environments. He considers how our own faculty of memory, in all its selective particularity and planned oblivion, becomes an increasingly significant dimension (...) of the critical act, and how our own emotions become aggressive readers of literary experience, culminating in states which define the genres of literature. Beecher illustrates his points with examples from major works of the Renaissance period, including Dr Faustus, The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, The Yorkshire Tragedy, Menaphon, The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, and The Moral Philosophy of Doni. In this volume, studies in the science of mind come into their own in explaining the architectures of the brain that shape such emergent properties as empathy, suspense, curiosity, the formation of communities, gossip, rationalization, confabulation, and so much more that pertains to the behaviour of characters, the orientation of readers, and the construction of meaning. Discussing a breadth of topics – from the mysteries of the criminal mind to the psychology of tears – Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds is the most comprehensive work available on the study of fictional worlds and their relation to the constitution of the human brain. (shrink)

Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls “the normality of evil.” Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of dehumanization, showing literature’s (...) exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters’ being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor. (shrink)

Poetry is a literary art, and is often examined alongside the novel, stories, and theater. But poetry, much of it, has more in common with music, in important respects, than with other forms of literature. The emphasis on sound and rhythm in both poetry and music is obvious, but I will explore a very different similarity between them. All or almost all works of literary fiction have narrators—so it is said anyway—characters who, in the world of the fiction, utter (...) or write the words of the text thereby reporting the events of the story. But there is a very different way of understanding literary works, one applicable especially to poetry. Much music can be understood in a similar manner, and doing so nicely explains several important characteristics of listen-ers’ experiences. (shrink)

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equippedwith a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law (...) with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government,along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. Athird connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in thistroubled domain.The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. Thecumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quitesane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin aconversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature. (shrink)

Character and Culture by Irving Babbitt is the latest volume in the Library of Conservative Thought. Babbitt was the leader of the twentieth-century intellectual and cultural movement called American Humanism or the New Humanism. More than half a century after his death his intellectual staying power remains undiminished. The qualities that marked Irving Babbitt as a thinker and cultural critic of the first rank are richly represented in "Character and Culture. "First published togetherin 1940 (under the misleading title "Spanish Character), (...) "these essays span his scholarly career and cover a wide range of subjects. The diverse topics discussed here--aesthetics, ethics, religion, politics, literature--are illuminated by the same unifying vision of human existence that informs and structures all of Babbitt's writing. Babbitt never took up a subject out of idle curiosity. All of his books and articles grew out of a desire to address certain fundamental questions of life and letters. The essaysin this volume are as worthy of attention now as when they were originally written. Set in then- philosophical and historical context by Claes G. Ryn's new introduction, they are a good place to start for persons who wish to acquaint themselves not only with Babbitt's central ideas but with the scope of his mind and interests. Readers familiar with other books by Babbitt may recognize particular ideas and formulations but will also find much new material to ponder. Ryn's introduction provides a comprehensive look at Irving Babbitt's life, career, writings, and influence. He shows how Babbitt has survived and sustained often harsh criticism from representatives of dominant trends. Ryn describes his writing style as having "a kind of rugged American elegance." The substantial critical introduction also elucidates Babbitt's central ideas in relation to the volume. "Character and Culture "will be of interest to scholars of literature, philosophers, historians, theologians, and political theorists. The extensive index to all of Babbitt's books, including this one, increases the value of the volume. (shrink)

Character strengths profiles in the specific setting of medical professionals are widely unchartered territory. This paper focused on an overview of character strengths profiles of medical professionals (medical students and physicians) based on literature research and available empirical data illustrating their impact on well-being and work engagement. A literature research was conducted and the majority of peer-reviewed considered articles dealt with theoretical or conceptually driven ‘virtues’ associated with medical specialties or questions of ethics in patient care (e.g., professionalism, or what (...) makes a good physician). The virtues of compassion, courage, altruism, and benevolence were described most often. Only a limited number of papers addressed character strengths of medical students or physicians according to the VIA-classification. Those articles showed that the VIA-character strengthsfairness, honesty,kindness, andteamworkwere considered most often by respondents to be particularly important for the medical profession. Available cross-sectional (time span: six years) and longitudinal (time span: three years) data regarding VIA-character strengths profiles of medical professionals were analyzed (N= 584 medical students, 274 physicians). These profiles were quite homogenous among both groups. The character strengthsfairness,honesty,judgment,kindness, andlovehad the highest means in both samples. Noteworthy differences appeared when comparing medical specialties, in particular concerning general surgeons and psychiatrists, with the former reporting clearly higher levels of e.g.,honesty(d= 1.02) orprudence(d= 1.19). Long-term results revealed significant positive effects of character strengths on well-being and work engagement (e.g.,perseveranceon physicians’ work engagement) but also significant negative effects (e.g.,appreciation of beauty and excellenceon students’ well-being). Further,hopewas significantly associated both positively with physicians’ well-being and negatively with students’ work engagement, possibly indicating specific issues concerning medical education or hospital working conditions. According to the modern-day physician’s pledge, medical professionals should pay attention to their own well-being and health. Therefore, promoting self-awareness and character building among medical professionals could be a beneficial strategy. (shrink)

Scientific publications depict science as an orderly endeavour and the epitome of rationality. In contrast, scientific practice is messy and not strictly rational. Here, I analyse this inconsistency, which is recurrent, and try to clarify its meaning for the functioning of science. The discussion is based on a review of relevant literature and detailed analysis of the role of each of the three intervening elements, the scientist, his/her practice and the scientific publication, with an emphasis on the circular mode of (...) the latter’s creation. This way, I will discuss the nature, causes and relevance of the inconsistency. That corresponds to answering three questions, respectively: ‘what are the characteristics of the inconsistency?’, ‘what are its origins?’ and ‘how could it be interpreted within a model for the structure and functioning of science?’ From this discussion it is concluded that, contrary to the negative character generally attributed to it, the inconsistency between practice and reporting is part of the production mechanism of science. (shrink)

AimTo investigate the status of positive mental characters and humanistic care ability among Chinese nursing students, and confirm the association between positive mental characters and humanistic care ability.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted. Nine hundred eighty-one Chinese nursing students were recruited from hospitals and community healthcare services in Changsha, Hunan, China. Three different self-reported questionnaires were applied: The Demographic Characteristics Questionnaire, Humanistic care ability of Nursing Undergraduates Assessment Scale and Positive Mental Characters Scale for Chinese College Students. (...) Pearson correlation analysis and multiple liner regression analysis were performed to analyze the association between positive mental character and humanistic care ability for Chinese nursing students.ResultsThe mean scores of nursing students' humanistic care ability and positive mental character were 125.94 ± 21.19, 233.18 ± 38.59, respectively. The Pearson correlation results showed that positive mental character was significantly associated with humanistic care ability. Multiple liner regression analysis indicated that positive mental characters, four dimensions of courage, humanity, justice and transcendence in positive mental character, care from classmates were found to be independent predictors of humanistic care ability.ConclusionPositive mental characters are important considerations in the development, implementation and evaluation of humanistic care ability interventions. (shrink)

The Texas borderlands have come to be increasingly important in the historical literature and in public opinion for the way that the region shapes national thought on race, borders, and ethnicity. With this increasing importance, it is pressing to examine the history of these issues in the region so that they may be accurately and insightfully deployed. This article contributes to the existing scholarship with a close discursive analysis of race in the booster materials, 1904-1941. The booster materials forge a (...) notion of race relations that borrows from tropes common across the West but is also informed by Jim Crow and the unique demands of the region. The booster materials forward a notion of race that is largely unique in Western boosterism, positing only two major characters, Mexicans and white Northerners. The figure of ‘the Mexican’ is drawn more as a part of nature than human society in that it shares the fundamental characteristics of the land, animals, and rivers of the region. Nature in the region is depicted as an adventitious, disorderly, and wasteful body that calls out for northern discipline. The ‘Northerners’ are figured as the ones who, through applying discipline to the natural resources of the area (land, water, and Mexicans) can bring reason, fertility, and profitable connection to the national economy. The consequences of this racial division are further explored in the article as they play out in schooling, religion, justice, beauty, leisure, and sport. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789Patrick HenryCitizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789, by Daniel Gordon; viii & 270 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $39.50.Under examination here is the early modern period in France from Louis XIV to the French Revolution when kings ruled absolutely and citizens were without sovereignty. Discarding the traditional image of the Enlightenment as the absolute (...) enemy of absolutism, Gordon, in this sense, follows Norbert Elias and Robert Darnton who treat the Enlightenment as part of an elitist and hierarchical establishment. More specifically, as his subtitle indicates, Gordon portrays the invention of a “nonpolitical polis” (p. 6), an ideological social space where, despite political inequality, citizens could practice social equality in a hierarchical régime. The rise of this “nondemocratic egalitarian ethos” (p. 7) brought with it a new cult of sociabilité, a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe the idealization of the private sphere and the practice of social equality.The first chapter, then, ties sociability not to democracy, as in the Habermasian model, but to the absolutism that stimulated it and coexisted with it. A series of five ideal types of sociability depict how men and women, members of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, came together—in commerce, public welfare, scientific academies, salons, cafés, public libraries, and various other social situations not protorevolutionary in character—to create a bond among equals [End Page 279] under the ancien régime. In this framework, progress and modernity are born during the absolute monarchy where sociability suggests conviviality rather than class warfare. Every major French novel of the eighteenth century supports Gordon’s refutation of De Toqueville’s surprising statement that “noblemen and bourgeois never met except by chance in private life “in prerevolutionary France” (p. 27).In chapters two and three, Gordon examines the nature of the rules of sociability found in courtesy literature and their functioning as the imagined basis of the newly invented idealized space called société. In addition to analyzing in great detail the nature and frequency of the vocabulary invented to define and describe sociabilité, Gordon discusses sociabilité in the context of natural law theory in Hobbes, Bossuet, and among others, Pufendorf, who wanted to refute Hobbes by showing that self-interest leads humans to establish stable social relations even before government orders them to do so. Holbach surfaces here too for having amalgamated the older language of politeness and the newer language of natural law. In Holbach, as in the Encyclopédie, sociability, based on egalitarian premises of natural law, is nonetheless fully compatible with the hierarchical regime. Among other things, this shows clearly that the philosophes never preached the French Revolution. Striving to eliminate the abuses of despotism and establish equality in private life was not tantamount to working for political equality and the abolition of all rank. In this same vein, Gordon paints the apolitical essence of the private sphere and, by a rigorous study of the seventeenth-century manuals of polite living, shows convincingly (this time against Elias who saw the court as a model of refined behavior) that the salon was indeed a world unto itself, independent of preexisting social hierarchies. Rejecting Paul Hazard’s conception of absolute rupture between seventeenth-century culture and eighteenth-century thought, Gordon destroys the facile dichotomy between seventeenth-century hierarchy and eighteenth-century equality and, once again, admirably depicts the compatibility of Enlightenment and absolutism.If chapters one to three underscore a certain continuity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chapters four and five explain important changes. It is not, for example, the mere preservation of the idea of sociable communication but rather its new use that is germane in understanding the Enlightenment. Now “conversation” and “civility” no longer had meaning only for an urban elite but had in fact become ideals in all philosophical endeavors including the writing of universal history. Sociable communication had become the defining characteristic of modern nations. In the fourth chapter, by analyzing in detail the works of Jean-Baptiste Suard, Gordon demonstrates the meaning that the writing of universal history in Scotland acquired within the French... (shrink)

In the article the mutual influence of folk theatre, Austrian Singspiel and Viennese opera in the genres of comic opera, operetta and drama performances involving music, singing and dancing is studied. The powerful influence of Italian and French opera schools, as well as the Italian Commedia Dell'arte led to the flourishing of music and theatre art in Austria: opera buffa (A. Salieri, Ch. W. Glück, J. Haydn, W. A. Mozart), fairy-tale comedies of F. Raimund and satirical dramas of Nestroy. Their (...) game-like nature finds its expression in musical turns, satirical songs and duets. Viennese dance operetta has absorbed the traditions of Viennese popular comedy and comic opera. Recitative, vocal music and folk dances were the key elements of operettas (J. Strauss junior, F. von Suppe, K. Millöcker, K. Zeller, F. Lehar). The music and the game in Austria are the results of theatralization of life: the life turns into something like art. Austrian culture, which is addressed directly to the human being and short of complex philosophical musings and speculative schemes, has genetically built-in playful, musical and theatrical basis, as well as German. Strongly-pronounced playful and musical source as an important national component of the culture, its code, determine its highly fictitious character (staginess) and integrity (both genre and intermediately), thereby maintain its special status in the European culture. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the experience of empathizing with the fictional characters of literary works, through the lens of Husserl's theory of presentification. Via a critical analysis of Husserl and other phenomenologists, I argue that fictional characters, though lacking embodied presence, can be presentified to the reader in the mode of "as if." Moreover, I claim that imaginative empathy is a guided creative reproduction of sedimented past bodily experiences. This explains why, motivated by imaginative empathetic presentification, (...) not only aesthetic feelings, but also "as if" existential feelings come to the fore. Finally, it shows to what extent presentation and the different modes of presentification are interwoven and function together. (shrink)

This paper theorizes and historicizes the ideas of modern language and translation and challenges the imperialist and nationalistic mode of worlding with the notion of ‘untranslatability’ that is embedded in the linguistic and cultural practices of colonial Taiwan and Korea. I redefine the notion of translation as a bordering system – the knowledge-production of boundaries, discrimination, and classification – that simultaneously creates the translatable and the untranslatable in asymmetrical power relations. With this, I discuss how this ambivalence is embodied in (...) the experiences of colonial writers Wu Yung-fu and Pak T’aewŏn and their novellas ‘Head and Body’ and ‘A Day in the life of Kubo the Novelist’. I illustrate two characteristics of the ambivalent untranslatability embedded in their novellas: the linguistic untranslatability and the experience of ‘unhomeness’. The linguistic untranslatability and unhomeness, I argue, result in the colonized’s dislocation in homogeneous time-space relationships, resulting to the incompletion of the modernization project through colonialism. At the same time untranslatability offers a site to explore the transnational space that crosses linguistic boundaries, and to caution against the legacy of colonialism. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider (...) the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

Different styles of social interaction are one of the core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder. Social differences among individuals with ASD often include difficulty in discerning the emotions of neurotypical people based on their facial expressions. This review first covers the rich body of literature studying differences in facial emotion recognition in those with ASD, including behavioral studies and neurological findings. In particular, we highlight subtle emotion recognition and various factors related to inconsistent findings in behavioral studies of FER (...) in ASD. Then, we discuss the dual problem of FER – namely facial emotion expression or the production of facial expressions of emotion. Despite being less studied, social interaction involves both the ability to recognize emotions and to produce appropriate facial expressions. How others perceive facial expressions of emotion in those with ASD has remained an under-researched area. Finally, we propose a method for teaching FER [FER teaching hierarchy ] based on recent research investigating FER in ASD, considering the use of posed vs. genuine emotions and static vs. dynamic stimuli. We also propose two possible teaching approaches: a standard method of teaching progressively from simple drawings and cartoon characters to more complex audio-visual video clips of genuine human expressions of emotion with context clues or teaching in a field of images that includes posed and genuine emotions to improve generalizability before progressing to more complex audio-visual stimuli. Lastly, we advocate for autism interventionists to use FER stimuli developed primarily for research purposes to facilitate the incorporation of well-controlled stimuli to teach FER and bridge the gap between intervention and research in this area. (shrink)

I argue that the ontological status of fictional characters is determined by the beliefs and practices of those who competently deal with works of literature, and draw out three important consequences of this. First, heavily revisionary theories cannot be considered as ‘discoveries’ about the ‘true nature’ of fictional characters; any acceptable realist theory of fiction must preserve all or most of the common conception of fictional characters. Second, once we note that the existence conditions for fictional (...) class='Hi'>characters are extremely minimal, it makes little sense to deny the existence of fictional characters, leaving anti-realist views of fiction unmotivated. Finally, the role of ordinary beliefs and practices in determining facts about the ontology of fictional characters explains why non-revisionary theories of fiction are bound to yield no determinate or precise answer to certain questions about fictional characters, demonstrating the limits of a theory of fiction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Belief and Context Determinacy in Interpreting FictionChristine Richards (bio)1Context Determinacy and the Interpretation of FictionThe Pragmatics of ReadingThe basic pragmatic structure of the reading of fiction has been described as a communicative context which has a speaker who performs the speech acts represented by the text and a hearer (addressee) to whom the speech acts are directed [Adams 12]. This model is based on the assumption that the reader (...) and the writer share not only a common language but a common context, which clearly presents problems for readers of fiction, where generic conventions as well as other cultural conventions of writing, such as satire and irony, or the separation of writers and readers by time, have to be contended with. The code model, which assumes that the writer and the reader share a common context, can be represented as shown in figure 1. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.W = writer, S = speaker, H = hearer, R = reader.However, it has also been argued [Eco, Role of the Reader 40; Eco, Semiotics 69; Richards 262] that no theory of a text is possible without a theory of contexts, since texts are processed and given meaning by a synthesis of propositions in them with those which originate in readers’ supplied contexts; and since the contexts of readers consist, first and foremost, of their background knowledge, beliefs, and culture, which are fundamentally interrelated, interpretation is inevitably determined by extralinguistic as well as linguistic factors. The context model might be represented as shown in figure 2. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.W = writer, N = narrator, R = reader.[End Page 81]The Extralinguistic ContextA good example of the role played by extralinguistic contexts in the interpretation of a text is to be found in the multiple interpretations of the sentence “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer,” from Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage [64]. Susan Horton, in her discussion of accounts of this sentence [10–14], shows both how R. W. Stallman interprets Crane’s antiwar fiction as a Christian allegory where the word “wafer” functions as a symbol of the Eucharist [130], and how Marston La France rejects Stallman’s interpretation on the basis that Crane is not a Christian, and certainly not a Catholic [99–100]. La France’s rejection of Stallman’s Christian context for atheism is rooted in his interpretation of the sun as a repeated image in the co-text, which he believes signifies nature’s indifference to death, war and heroism. Here the lexemes “pasted” and “wafer” become images of a seal at the end of a legal document, implying the finality of death in war. Milne Holton interprets the image of the sun as a characteristic of the symbolic imagination of the character Henry Fleming rather than of the writer (Crane) [90–91].Horton documents but does not theorize the determining features of these contexts, but this problem can be tackled by applying Marcello Pagnini’s theory of “the introjection of the referent” [9] to explain how the contextual semes of readers, determined by different cultural systems, are introjected into texts. Following Jurij M. Lotman’s typology of cultural systems [Lotman and Uspenskij], Pagnini cites as relevant systems ethics, ideology, history, philosophy, myth, the law, anthropology, politics, ethnicity, literature, aesthetics, psychology, rhetoric and symbolism [34], which represent fundamentally interrelated complexes of systems that make up societies. If Pagnini’s model is taken with that of Richards [267], which conceives of interpretation as a synthesis of propositional inferences in texts with those drawn from readers’ contexts, these two models provide a methodological basis for explaining how the contexts of Stallman’s and La France’s conflicting interpretations derive from philosophically opposed belief systems within culture—Christianity and atheism. These models also help to explain Holton’s interpretation as one located within a different philosophical context, that of the convention of character analysis in fiction, which during the last few decades has developed into the more theoretically sophisticated field of narratology. It should be stressed, however, that interpretations themselves always take place within historical and interactive frameworks, which are influenced... (shrink)

In this paper I contribute to the recovery of women in the history of philosophy by giving the first modern-day philosophical account of the ideas on aesthetics and ethics of Anna Jameson (1794–1860). Although Jameson was massive in her time, she wrote in a place and period, nineteenth-century Britain, and on an area, aesthetics, that the recovery effort has hardly reached yet. Throughout her work Jameson argued that aesthetics and ethics were very closely connected. Here I focus on how she (...) made that connection in her 1832 work _Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical_. Looking at Shakespeare’s female characters, Jameson argued that they provide moral examples of various sorts: role models, warnings, or a mixture of the two. The characters only provide these examples because they are rounded, psychologically complete individuals who are therefore in a certain sense real. In addition, because they are complete, the characters are aesthetic wholes, and art-works in turn are aesthetic wholes just when they depict characters as aesthetic wholes. The consequence for Jameson is that art-works can only be aesthetically good – in virtue of being wholes – if they are also morally good – in presenting characters that serve as moral examples. Published on 2023-03-21 09:06:33. (shrink)

The article devoted to the study of an artistic image of female saint from stylistic and linguocultural perspectives. The image is represented by the characters of Judith and Juliana in Anglo-Saxon literature. Stylistic peculiarities of the image are result of the fact that it emerges as a combination of heroic and religious genres. Thus, two genre pictures of the world account for characteristics of the image: on the one hand, it is described by epithets relating to the sphere (...) of divinity, on the other, by lexis relating to military heroism. As a result, Anglo-saxon female saint stands out among other female images by a considerable degree of activity, which is manifested at all levels of analysis. Female saints are connotated positively and described as ‘bright‘, ‘wise‘, and ‘brave‘. A category binding the image and a sphere of culture is a notion of value, which is reflected in a linguocultural concept. Study ofconceptual space of female saints contributes to reconstructing values and anti-values of the Anglo-Saxon period. An interaction of heroic and religious pictures of the world account for a specific character of an image of the saint in Old English literature, namely the co-existence of concepts typical of these conceptual outlooks. On the one hand, God-related concepts: God, love, glory, on the other, such heroic concepts as strength, bravery, dignity. Anti-values within the image are associated with the macroconcept ‘devil‘ and devil-related concepts like death and feud. (shrink)

Aristotle considered the plot the most important element in tragedy. By μῦθυς--from which our word "myth" comes--he meant an imitation of action--of action in the "real world," that is. Here, as elsewhere in Greek literary criticism, "imitation" does not mean simply "exact reproduction." To what extent it may mean something like "symbolic," or otherwise "oblique," representation, is hard to determine. It will be enough, for our purposes, to think of "imitation" as exact reproduction with allowance made simply for the transference--always (...) radically transforming--into another medium: from life into art. What, then, did Aristotle mean by "action"? The noun πρᾶξις takes us back to the verb πράττω. Action meant a "doing" to Aristotle, rather as poetry meant to him a "making." Such a "doing," then, is a time-crossing event, in fact an event whose nature is closely involved with its temporal status. Such an event has a personal agent, or vehicle, and transacts with other persons, or more generally, with the "other." In fact, the notion of a transaction is especially fitting to describe action, for that notion emphasizes the dialogue-like structure of action, which always involves its agent with "the world," whether of people or of things. Plot, for Aristotle, was the turning of such action into art. (shrink)

Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity, one dimension of which is ethical content. This striking collection of new essays pursues a fuller and richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical content. These aspects are: the question of character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding; literature's distinctive role in self-identity and self-understanding; patterns of moral growth and change that emerge from the philosophical reading (...) of literature; and the historical sources and genealogies of some of our most central contemporary conceptions of the ethical dimension of literature. The volume engages with literary work from Homer to J. M. Coetzee, Shakespeare to David Foster Wallace, and explores the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and others. This rich collection presents some of the best new thinking about the ethical content that lies within literature, and it shows why our reflective absorption in literature is the humane--and humanizing--experience many of us have long taken it to be. (shrink)

Literature and Character Education in Universities presents the potential of literary and philosophical texts for character education in modern universities. The book engages with theoretical and practical aspects of character development in higher education, combining conceptual discussion of the role of literature in character education with applied case studies from university classrooms. Character education within the academic context of the university presents unique challenges and opportunities. Literature and Character Education in Universities presents perspectives from academics in Europe, the USA and (...) Asia, offering unique insights into the ways that engaged reading and discussion of core texts can promote the development of intellectual and moral virtues. Chapters draw on a wide range of texts from Confucius' Analects to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, focusing on themes such as truthfulness, self-knowledge, prudence, tolerance, friendship, and humility. Literature and Character Education in Universities will be of real use to researchers, academics and postgraduates in the fields of higher education, philosophy, and literature. It should be essential reading for university educators interested in character development and advocates of literary education in modern universities. (shrink)

Resumen La literatura universal, se encuentra poblada de arquetípicos que comparten una condición de desamparo y marginalidad, siendo la literatura realista de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX la que constata y da cuenta de su condición. En un mismo sentido, también la Biblia presenta un sinnúmero de personajes similares, marcando un punto de inflexión al llamarlo bienaventurados. Así pues, el presente estudio bíblico-literario, se centra en el arquetipo de la “viuda pobre”, sosteniendo dicha ficción literaria es una clave interpretativa (...) de la realidad, a la luz de la teoría literaria de la Estética de la Recepción. El articulo estudia la “viuda pobre” como un imaginario cultural y estableciendo la recepción de dicho imaginario en los cuentos “El Chiflón del diablo” y “El pago” del escritor chileno Baldomero Lillo, demostrando cómo el dialogo entre cultura y Biblia representa un aporte a la comprensión de determinadas ficciones literarias como categorías antropológicas.Universal literature is crowded by archetypical characters who share abandonment and marginalization conditions, being second half 19,h century realistic literature that confirms and exposes those conditions. In that sense, The Holy Bible presents a number of those characters. Resides, it highlights a turning point, hence, The Beatitudes point out: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. Thus, the following biblical-literary study, centered in the “Poor widow” archetype, aims to the establishment of literary fiction as interpretative key of reality, under Wolfgang Iser Aesthetics Reception's theory as its methodology. The objective aims to postulate “Poor Widow” as a Cultural imaginary, and finally to establish the reception of that imaginary within the stories “El Chiflón del Diablo” and “El Pago” by the chilean writer Baldomero Lillo, demonstrating that the dialog between culture and The Holy Bible represents a contribution to some literary fiction s as anthropological categories. (shrink)