In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Author, AuthorBernard KnoxThe title of this essay is not a reference to that enthusiastic but misguided shout from his friends in the audience at the St. James Theatre in 1895 that brought a reluctant Henry James to the stage at the end of his play Guy Domville, only to be greeted by whistles, shouts, and insults from the irate denizens of the gallery, one of whom had somewhat (...) spoiled the dramatic effect of the actor’s climactic line—“I am the last of the Domvilles”—by shouting: “And a bloody good thing y’are!” My title is the rubric of an infuriating competition that appears every week in the pages of the London Times Literary Supplement; it offers three quotations, all dealing more or less with the same subject, and defies the reader to identify the authors. Since the fiends who concoct these puzzles have carefully avoided passages likely to turn up in anthologies, having, in fact, ransacked their authors’ lesser-known works for texts innocent of such clues as proper names, dates, or allusions to historical events, the reader unwise enough to take a hand in the game has to rely on indications of the personality of the author.Not, obviously, the historical, biographical personality, but the literary personality: the characteristic attitudes and concerns, the rhythms, tones, and levels of discourse, the literary individuality that enables us to distinguish a paragraph of Jane Austen from one of Henry James, and either of them from one of Ernest Hemingway, or the epic blank verse of Milton from that of Keats or Tennyson. This literary identity is now the target of academic assaults from many quarters, of which I propose to single out two in particular—the Roland Barthes-Derrida denial of authors’ identity or even of their existence, and the New [End Page 76] Historicism, which confines that identity to the stringent limitations of the author’s time and place.The first aberration treats the author’s work as a “text,” material for the discovery of intertextuality, subtext, and—a word that I have not seen in print but that, if not yet born, is surely close to delivery from the womb of the goddess Terminologia—metatext, which, on the analogy of “metatheater,” would denote a text discussing its own textuality. In the deconstruction of the text the author disappears; Barthes in fact proclaimed the “death of the author.” But though such theories are usually thought of as French products of the Sixties and Seventies, their origins can be discerned in much earlier work done by Americans in the Forties, the years that saw the birth of that New Criticism which Norman Fruman recalls in his short history of our association, reasserting its basic principle: that “there should be a primary focus on literature as literature and not as something else.” I am myself a child—an aging child—of the New Criticism; the first article I ever published had a title that sounds like a parody of the typical New Critical title—“The Serpent and the Flame.” The editors of the American Journal of Philology, who reluctantly accepted the article after several unsuccessful attempts to get me to tone it down, felt constrained to add to the title: “Patterns of Imagery in the Second Book of the Aeneid.”But there was one aspect of the New Criticism that disturbed me: the influential idea, expounded by a formidable member of the Yale English department, William Wimsatt, called the Intentional Fallacy, which proclaimed that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” Though this pronouncement was hedged about with many limitations and provisos it still seemed to me to give rein to freewheeling interpretations that eased the acceptance of the radical hijacking of the author’s work by Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, and hoc genus omne.I was especially disturbed by this doctrine because, as a classical scholar, I had been very much concerned, as is every member of our discipline, with authorial intention at the basic level—the often vexed question not of what impression the author sought to make on the... (shrink)

On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Marx, has not the moment come at last to render an equitable judgment, of the type which only the passage of time allows us to formulate, on the man whom we do not know how to describe— philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, politician, theoretician of the worker movement, reformer, revolutionary or prophet? And this judgment, which will take everything and examine it before putting all things in their proper place, (...) could it not take the form of a response to the famous question: what is dead and what is still living today in that work which is as monumental as it is diverse since it touches every domain of knowledge and action? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to MiltonWilliam WalkerMachiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton, by Victoria Kahn; xv & 3l4 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $29.95.The premise of this book is that the account of Machiavelli’s politics given by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock is fundamentally inadequate. It is inadequate in that it fails to recognize that the Machiavelli of force and fraud—what Kahn (...) calls the “rhetorical Machiavel”—is inseparable from the republican, and that his politics “could be used not only pro and contra republicanism but pro and contra secular thought” (p. 12). This failure is answerable to a flawed methodology: reading Machiavelli’s texts for content, Skinner and Pocock neglect Machiavelli’s rhetorical techniques which “fragment, subvert, or otherwise qualify the literal sense” of his texts (p. 5). By paying attention to these rhetorical techniques, Kahn claims to correct Skinner and Pocock’s misunderstanding of Machiavelli as a virtuous, secular republican and “to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England” (p. 4).The main reason for the failure of this project is Kahn’s crude understanding of Skinner and Pocock. Rather than seeing Machiavelli assimilating virtù with classical virtue, Skinner observes that Machiavelli’s exclusion of justice from republican virtù is an epoch-making break with the classical republican analysis of the cardinal virtues as expounded in Cicero’s Of Duties. Pocock, too, clearly recognizes that Roman republican virtù as it is documented by Machiavelli includes what Kahn calls “the resources of the Machiavel” (p. 124). In addition, rather than equating Machiavellism with secular republicanism, Pocock observes that it was difficult for not just Machiavelli but everyone in the Renaissance to conceive the moment of recreating the republic without making recourse to the apocalyptic moment, the moment at which grace acted in history. And to think as Kahn does that Pocock needs to be told that Machiavellism could be “used for sectarian religious purposes” (p. 8) is simply to disregard Pocock’s own assertion of this fact and his tremendous meditation on how this actually occurred in the millennially oriented society of seventeenth-century England.The claims which Kahn makes on the basis of her perceptive close readings [End Page 370] of the rhetoric of Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses, then, do not significantly revise Pocock and Skinner. Neither do her considerations of readings of Machiavelli by counter-Reformation thinkers such as Zuccolo, Caterino, and Botero, sixteenth-century Englishmen such as Starkey, Gardiner, Ralegh, Bacon, and Shakespeare, and the seventeenth-century Englishmen who were involved in civil war and Interregnum political debates. These considerations simply make the point that Machiavelli was read in very different ways and was used to support very different political agendas—an interesting point, and one which is entirely consistent with the views of Skinner and Pocock. Kahn’s revised history of English Machiavellism is further compromised by her construal, beginning in chapter five, of Machiavellism as “the Machiavellian topics of legitimacy and force, virtue and success, intention and effect, means and ends” (p. 156). Kahn seems to suppose that because Machiavelli writes about these topics, these topics are Machiavellian, and anyone who writes about them in English is therefore a subscriber to “English Machiavellism.” This move allows her to consider all kinds of texts which only seem remotely connected to Machiavelli—from sixteenth-century debates over things indifferent, to Coriolanus, to masques by Jonson and Carew, to Milton’s Areopagitica, Comus, and Paradise Lost—as cases of “English Machiavellism.” Kahn ends up defining Machiavellism so widely, that is, that she finds it everywhere. On the other hand, she ignores it where it is most conspicuous: she gives passing attention to Marchamont Nedham’s fully articulated republicanism and no attention whatsoever to the most comprehensive English reading of Machiavelli in the seventeenth century: James Harrington’s Oceana.A revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England? Hardly. Skinner and Pocock still rule.William WalkerUniversity of Canterbury, New ZealandCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political ChangeWilliam WalkerProfessional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, by Stanley Fish; xi & 146 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, $22.00 paper.Our greatest living Miltonist, Professor Fish, continues to address the most hotly contested issues of the profession of literary criticism in prose which, if perhaps not quite the best in Anglo-American literary studies as he once judged it to be, is certainly (...) distinguished by coherence, power, and wit. In this version of material he presented in a workshop at the Folger Library in 1990 and as the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University in 1993, Fish analyzes the relationship between literary criticism and political change. By literary criticism, he means the activity of determining what a literary text means. According to Fish, while in the eighteenth century just about any kind of commentary on literature counted as literary criticism, the determination of the meaning of literature is the essential job of literary criticism in the twentieth century. By political change, Fish means changes in things such as the way governments spend money, treat their citizens and foreign governments, establish the civil law, and appoint people to office. The major claim of the book is that doing literary criticism in the United States today rarely causes political change. The counsel he offers to all those literary critics who want to bring about political change through their literary work is thus to find a new job: “if you want to send a message that will be heard beyond the academy, get out of it” (p. 2).But why can’t observing that Lycidas means that Milton is afraid of women help to overthrow patriarchy and the legal/cultural system which continues to perpetuate it? Because, Fish claims, “there are, at present, no well-established routes by which literary criticism is first brought to the attention of those who inhabit the centers of power and then presented to them in a way that ties it to their concerns” (p. 52). That is to say that it is because American society is structured in a particular way that literary interpretive acts are politically inconsequential. Though he does not provide much evidence for this big claim about the structure of American society and its relation to literary criticism, Fish does support it by asking us to see the absurdity of imagining otherwise: “think about it. You are about to open a new business or introduce a bill in Congress or initiate an advertising campaign, but you pause to ask yourself, ‘What would the readers of Diacritics say?’” (p. 91). This is not to say that the segregation of literary work from political work is a given of the human condition. Fish cites Renaissance England and contemporary Israel as cases of societies structured in such a way that literary acts have immediate and important political consequences (though literary acts and political acts in these societies are still clearly distinct because their purposes are still different). The point is just that, because American society is currently structured as it is, the activity of identifying the meaning of works of literature is rarely [End Page 544] relevant to political change. The point holds even when one shifts the center of literary work from determining the meaning of literature to (i) observing how literature and the act of professing it are deeply implicated in society-wide structures of power and legitimization, or (ii) observing and “transcending” the boundaries between literary criticism and other disciplines. That is to say that even if one were to transform literary criticism in the way new historicists and several proponents of cultural studies whom Fish cites propose, work in this discipline would still rarely cause significant political change. For the contingent fact is that, regardless of what academics do, think they do, and intend to do, “no one cares very much about literary criticism outside the confines of its professional practice” (p. 55).But if literary criticism cannot, at least for the moment in the U.S., do significant political work, and if, as Fish also claims, it cannot do significant moral, cultural work (making people better, preserving the best that is said... (shrink)

In the major political prose works which he published from 1649 to 1654, Milton argues that it was not the parliamentarians but Charles Stuart and his supporters who were the real rebels during the wars of the 1640s. He claims that during this period, the parliamentarians did not fight to overturn law, church, and government, but to preserve peace, to maintain the old, orthodox form of Christianity which had only partially been re-established in England, and to defend English law (...) and the civil liberties it safeguarded. He disavows any hostility to true monarchy and asserts the right of all peoples to choose for themselves whatever form of government they wish. He argues that, since by 1649 Charles Stuart had long been deposed, there was no regicide but merely a legal execution, one which was also consistent with the ancient constitution of England and the political thought of the champion of ancient Roman laws and customs, Cicero. All of this supports several recent accounts of Interregnum political thought and rhetoric and challenges much of the work, from Christopher Hill on, which makes Milton out to be a radical. (shrink)

Some of the founding documents of our modern human rights culture assert that, by virtue of natural law, the will of God, the will of a Supreme Being, or some kind of natural world order, all humans have a right to civil liberties. In Areopagitica, Milton rejects this way of grounding the claim to civil liberties. Instead, he argues for civil liberties on pragmatic grounds, but also on the premise that members of political societies are entitled to civil liberties (...) from their governors only insofar as those members are rational and virtuous. His argument for civil liberties is also grounded in the view that the proper function of government includes propagating virtue in those it governs, assessing their rationality and moral virtue, and extending civil liberties to them in accordance with this assessment. Arguing in this way, Milton opposes the notion that, simply by virtue of being human, all members of political societies have a specific set of rights which their governments, and indeed all other people on earth, are bound to respect. He thus has more in common with Isocrates and Renaissance humanists than he does with the defenders of our modern human rights culture. (shrink)

None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin.Henry Thoreau, Walden.

In his epic poem, Paradise Lost, Milton does not, as many critics have recently claimed, repudiate monarchy and recommend republics; he rather asserts that the legitimacy of any particular form of government in any particular situation depends upon what he refers to as the ‘merit’ or ‘worth’ of the rulers and the ruled. On a strict definition of republicanism as a position grounded in the repudiation of monarchy and the recommendation of republics, this poem would thus fail to qualify (...) as a republican text. However, neither Livy's History nor Machiavelli's Discourses unconditionally repudiates monarchy and recommends republics; both texts claim that the legitimacy of any particular form of government in any particular situation depends upon many things, including the merit of the rulers and the ruled. Given that both of these texts fall within the tradition of republican thought, it follows that Milton's teaching on the forms of government in Paradise Lost is consistent in important respects with some of the central texts of this tradition, and that the poem may thus reasonably be understood as a republican text. But this teaching is also consistent with Milton's Protestant commitment to evaluating all human works and forms on the grounds of the spirit in which they are produced and administered. (shrink)

"L'oeuvre d'art est une tentative vers l'unique, elle s'affirme comme un tout, comme un absolu et, en même temps, elle appartient à un système de relations complexes [...]. Elle est matière et elle est esprit, elle est forme et elle est contenu [...]. Elle est créatrice de l'homme, créatrice du monde et elle installe dans l'histoire un ordre qui ne se réduit à rien d'autre." Un Eloge de la main complète ce texte. "La main arrache le toucher à sa passivité (...) réceptive, elle l'organise pour l'expérience et pour l'action [...]. Elle se mesure avec la matière qu'elle métamorphose, avec la forme qu'elle transfigure. Educatrice de l'homme, elle le multiplie dans l'espace et dans le temps." [Source : 4e de couv.]. (shrink)

Integrating personality, behavioral, and cognitive theories of change, the author examines the operations, measurement, and evolution of behavioral and ethical standards that distinguish capitalism from other ideologies.

Garrett Sullivan explores the changing impact of Aristotelian conceptions of vitality and humanness on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature before and after the rise of Descartes. Aristotle's tripartite soul is usually considered in relation to concepts of psychology and physiology. However, Sullivan argues that its significance is much greater, constituting a theory of vitality that simultaneously distinguishes man from, and connects him to, other forms of life. He contends that, in works such as Sidney's Old Arcadia, Shakespeare's Henry IV and (...) Henry V, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost and Dryden's All for Love, the genres of epic and romance, whose operations are informed by Aristotle's theory, provide the raw materials for exploring different models of humanness; and that sleep is the vehicle for such exploration as it blurs distinctions among man, plant and animal. (shrink)

Fifteen original essays open up a novel area of inquiry: the distinctively ethical dimensions of women's experiences of and in aging. Contributors distinguished in the fields of feminist ethics and the ethics of aging explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women's well-being and dignity in later life. The book brings to the study of women's aging a reflective dimension missing from the empirical work that has predominated to date. Ethical studies of aging have so far failed to (...) emphasize gender. And feminist ethics has neglected older women, even when emphasizing other dimensions of 'difference.' Finally work on aging in all fields has focused on the elderly, while this volume sees aging as an extended process of negotiating personal and social change. (shrink)

There is not, of course, a one-to-one relation between policy conclusions and the conclusions of positive economics; if there were, there would be no ...

_Philosophy and the Maternal Body_ gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

The paper examines a single, apparently simple argument for the existence of incompatibilities between the virtues as traits of character. This argument appeals not to empirical truths about human psychology or human nature but to the possibility of conflict between the exercise of different virtues in action. There are, for example, situations in which we can exercise the virtue of truthfulness only at the expense of not exercising the virtue of tact, as when we are asked a question to which (...) the straightforward answer will pain our questioner. The person who in these situations would give a straightforward answer possesses the virtue of truthfulness to a higher degree than the person who would respond more evasively, whereas the latter person possesses the virtue of tact to a higher degree than the former. But since the two responses are mutually exclusive, it follows that the degree to which we possess the virtue of truthfulness must, at least in some measure, correlate inversely with the degree to which we possess the virtue of tact. And similarly for many other pairs of virtues. My paper focusses on the two cardinal assumptions of this argument, viz., (i) that sometimes the exercise of one virtue can conflict with the exercise of another, and (ii) that the degree to which a person possesses a virtue correlates directly with the extent of its exercise, and defends both assumptions against a variety of objections which allege that, in different ways, they are insensitive to the complexity of the virtues. (shrink)

_Philosophy and the Maternal Body_ gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

This paper addresses the relation between Luce Irigaray’s work and politics by asking what it means to read her work locally, in place. The philosophical work of Indigenous scholar, Mary Graham, on the law of obligation, serves to ground such a local reading presenting, simultaneously, a case for a uniquely Australian philosophy. By way of suggesting possible connections between the work of Irigaray and Graham, the paper places Graham’s work on obligation alongside Irigaray’s work on the importance of a symbolic (...) re-distribution of value suggested in her philosophy of horizontal transcendence. Such a reading encourages us to consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray’s, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing. (shrink)

En este artículo deseamos observar, desde el punto de vista literario, el relato de la Creación contado por los indígenas mayas-quichés en el Popol Vuh y compararlo con el relato bíblico del Génesis. Encontrar los puntos en común y las diferencias entre los dos textos nos llevará a observar la idea ..

El presente trabajo estudia la concepción erótica de la subjetividad en la Fenomenología del espíritu de Hegel. Las tesis que intentamos mostrar son dos. La primera es que la concepción erótica de la subjetividad tiene un sentido muy restringido: es la referencia negativa y puramente inmediata a la cosa viva, la aniquilación del objeto natural que no alcanza la completa negación del ser-otro porque la dimensión erótica de la subjetividad requiere e implica la autonomía del objeto en cuestión. La segunda (...) tesis es que, en cuanto posicionamiento práctico y negativo de la autoconciencia respecto de su objeto, la concepción erótica de la subjetividad no se limita al Capítulo IV, aunque es en este último, y específicamente en su parte introductoria, donde se establecen los caracteres propios de dicha concepción. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to systematize Butler’s reading of the introductory part and section A of chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit through the joint approach of Subjects of Desire, The Psychic Life of Power and You Be My Body for Me. Secondly, to take a critical position regarding the Butlerian hermeneutics. The existing research lacks a critical approach. We seek to problematize her reading so as to be able to contribute critically to the corpus (...) of complementary bibliography on this issue. (shrink)

El presente trabajo aborda de manera exploratoria la recepción argentina de la Phänomenologie des Geistes de 1807 en los años 60. Nuestro propósito consiste en examinar las obras más destacadas, delimitar los lineamientos interpretativos, las problemáticas de interés más acuciantes, los interlocutores principales y las obras disponibles. En primer lugar, presentamos el tema y señalamos los antecedentes más relevantes. En segundo lugar, nos detenemos en la década de 1960. Sostenemos que los intereses fundamentales de esta etapa se dividen en cuatro (...) temáticas: i. la dialéctica de las figuras de la conciencia, ii. los escritos juveniles de Hegel y su relación con la Phä., iii. las interpretaciones francesas y iv. la relación entre Hegel y Marx. Examinamos las obras más significativas de este periodo a la luz de esta estructuración temática. Finalmente, en tercer lugar, realizamos algunas consideraciones conclusivas que nos permiten dar con una caracterización general de la cuestión desarrollada. (shrink)