On the weekend of July 16–18, 2004, the city of Chicago opened its much touted and thoroughly over-budget Millennium Park along the Lake Michigan shore front. This site may merit the label “people's park” for its open access, but the presence of sponsorship brands, expensive concessions, and the ongoing efforts of fee-charging institutions to move in on the park leave the whole in precarious balance between a public space of recreation in “the city that works” and a playground of affluent (...) consumption. On a less visible site a mile to the west, on the de-industrializing periphery of the central district,…. (shrink)

John Dewey presented The Public and Its Problems in a series of lectures in 1926, shortly after Walter Lippmann published two influential works, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public . In those works, Lippmann had denied that broad publics should share in determining public policy. He argued that the policy issues were far removed from the lives of ordinary citizens, whose collective opinion, as a result, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated.Dewey countered that the problem of public (...) opinion was not primarily lack of information, but rather of community formation. A democratic community, he argued, could overcome the ignorance and narrow self-interest that plagued .. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo analiza un conjunto de entrevistas realizadas a poetas mapuche proponiendo una articulación metadiscursiva entre el campo literario y el campo periodístico. El análisis del corpus sugiere la existencia de tensiones en la práctica poética que es posible visualizar en las entrevistas a los autores mapuches. Estas tensiones se manifiestan en tres binomios fundamentales que funcionan aquí como categorías de análisis y que son: alta-baja cultura; distinción público-privado y dinámicas de articulación entre identidad-alteridad. Por último, se propone (...) la dimensión intercultural como pivote articulador de las categorías antes desplegadas y analizadas en la poesía mapuche.: This article analyzes a set of interviews with Mapuche poets proposing a metadiscursive articulation between the literary field and the journalistic field. The corpus analisys`s suggest the existence of three tension in poetic practice that can be seen in interviews with the authors. These tensions are manifested in three fundamental binomials that function here as categories of analysis: high-low culture; public-private distinction and dynamic articulation between identity-alterity. Finally, an intercultural dimension it is proposes as an articulating pivot of categories previously implemented and analyzed in Mapuche poetry. (shrink)

The "public sphere" -- an idea with deep roots in the European enlightenment -- has always been a contested concept in American culture and society. American intellectuals, artists, politicians, and activists have stressed the non-unitary, diversified, and oppositional dynamics of all things public. From the early days of the American republic, competing interest groups and commercial mass media (first newspapers, novels, and the theater, then radio, television, and the internet) have worked to pluralize public speech and public action -- and (...) ultimately the notion of "publicness" itself. This essay collection explores the public sphere in North America as a multi-agential, commercially embattled, highly mediated, and ultimately trans-nationalized aggregate of publics and counterpublics. The contributors present innovative theoretical and historical assessments of American counter/publics across an array of fields including social activism, political communication, literary discourse, and contemporary mass media. (shrink)

Literary racial impersonation occurs when a narrative work fails to express the perspective of a minority ethnic or racial group. Interestingly, even when these works express moral themes congenial to promoting empathetic responses towards these groups, they can be met with public outrage if the group’s perspective is portrayed inaccurately. My goal in this paper is to vindicate the intuition that failure to express the perspective of a minority group well renders the work defective, both aesthetically and morally. I (...) argue that available frameworks exploring the connections between aesthetic and moral realms of value are inadequate to analyzing this phenomenon and propose a novel connection between aesthetic and moral values. Specifically, I demonstrate that the primary defect of literary racial impersonation is aesthetic and contingently constitutes a moral defect in our current social context. (shrink)

Through case studies from diverse fields of cultural studies, this collection examines how different constructions of identity were mediated in England during the long eighteenth century. While the concept of identity has received much critical attention, the question of how identities were mediated usually remains implicit. This volume engages in a critical discussion of the connection between historically specific categories of identity determined by class, gender, nationality, religion, political factions and age, and the media available at the time, including novels, (...) newspapers, trial reports, images and the theatre. Representative case studies are the arrival of children's literature as a genre, the creation of masculine citizenship in Defoe's novels, the performance of gendered and national identities by the actress Kitty Clive or in plays by Henry Fielding and Richard Sheridan, fashion and the public sphere, the emergence of the Whig and Tory parties, the radical culture of the 1790s, and visual representations of domestic and imperial landscape. Recognizing the proliferation of identities in the epoch, these essays explore the ways in which different media determined constructions of identity and were in turn shaped by them. (shrink)

Empirical research into political sentiments gives force to the proposition that, in the context of the 2013–14 Euromaidan and subsequent war, Ukrainian national identity, for most of its history predominantly ethno-cultural, has undergone changes justifying its qualification as ‘civic’. In this article I discuss the ethno-cultural orientation, conventional during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Ukrainian literary history, a scholarly genre that has a tradition of promoting the cause of Ukrainian nation-building; I identify contemporary examples of discourses in the (...) literary sphere – literary works themselves, literary anthologies and the public statements and debates of writers – that embody or applaud civic identities akin to those in evidence on the Euromaidan; and I reflect upon the values, inclusive and multicultural, that a Ukrainian national literary history rhetorically in harmony with post-Euromaidan sentiment would evince. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public LifeDavid GormanPoetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, by Martha C. Nussbaum; xii & 143 pp. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, $20.00.This volume, a revision of lectures given in 1991, is a philosophical study comparing aspects of law and literature. The law in question is contemporary American case law (hence the reference to “Public Life” in the book’s subtitle). (...) The literature to which it is juxtaposed consists primarily of “realist social novels” (p. 87), represented chiefly by Dickens’s Hard Times, though with some attention also given to E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and to passages from Whitman’s poetry (quoted, characteristically, at some length). Nussbaum’s thesis is that both this kind of legal discourse and this kind—or kinds—of literary discourse constitute, involve, or otherwise rely upon an imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities. Thus lawyers have a great deal to learn from literature, insofar as contact with the capacious imaginations of a Dickens or a Whitman can only enlarge the sensibilities of those who read them in a sufficiently open-minded, reflective way.It may be both too kind and overly reductive to ascribe to Poetic Justice such a thing as a thesis. On the contrary, this compact book, like all of Nussbaum’s writings, teems with theories and theses. This is the main reason, I suppose, for the dichotomy of responses to Nussbaum: some find this pullulating quality of her work exhilarating, while others just find it annoying. One advantage that I think both parties will recognize in the compactness of Poetic Justice (due to the constraints of the lecture format) is that it inhibits the author’s native prolixity, which makes her previous books—The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Love’s Knowledge (1990), and The Therapy of Desire (1994)—something of an effort even for Nussbaum’s biggest fans to stay with through every last qualification, tertiary argument, and cross-reference. [End Page 196]The opening pages of these lectures seem, if anything, all too simple. Nussbaum’s initial target is the economistic, deterministic school of social analysis associated with the University of Chicago generally and with Richard Posner in particular, which has lately exercised a disproportionate influence in American jurisprudence and—especially during the Reagan-Bush era—in public policymaking. Against this kind of thinking, which attempts to treat human beings and their actions and decisions as much as possible in terms of quantifiable, statistical measures, Nussbaum emphasizes the autonomy, the irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person’s experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home—hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism. Thus readers will tend to assume from the first lecture (“The Literary Imagination”) that what they are in for, pretty much, is something like Bob Cratchit’s comeback to Ebenezer Scrooge. The Dickensian comparison is not fortuitous, of course, because although the text of reference is Hard Times and not A Christmas Carol, the moral antithesis is familiar enough: a coldly, blindly all-embracing utilitarianism versus a warm, empathetic humanism.Yet, as Nussbaum develops her account, things are not so simple. What emerges is that her aim is not simply to mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing (and thus judging) human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview. This empathetic response to Chicago-style social analysis, in turn, weaves itself into the texture of Nussbaum’s book in two ways. For one thing, it supports her call to treat literature as making a potentially significant contribution to public life, since what better path can there be to understanding neo-utilitarians like Posner than via imaginative portrayals of such paleo-utilitarians as Mr. Gradgrind? For another thing, moreover, the very gesture of trying to empathize with economic determinism rather than trying to bury it serves the purpose of showing up the latter’s limitations, because this kind of other-directed response is just what the utilitarian approach is least... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing (...) the chores for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

We may begin to grasp the importance of exploring the relations between literary studies and the sciences by reflecting on some of the implications of a recent scholarly publication in literary theory. The example that I have in mind is an article by Ruth Salvaggio, entitled "Shakespeare in the Wilderness; or Deconstruction ithe Classroom," which was included in an anthology called Demarcating the Disciplines. In her article Salvaggio reproduces and comments on a paper written by Andrew Scott Jennings, (...) a second-year student in an American university who was enrolled in her survey course on British literature. The paper, she convincingly argues, ably embodies five major features of deconstructive criticism. Although she admits to having taught deconstruction ithe course, she claims that she did not encourage the members of the class to write deconstructive papers, and thus was quite surprised when she received a student essay that boldly reduced Shakespeare's sonnet 104 to the formula: "i + i + i = + 0," concluding that interpreting the poem is a "silly game." Salvaggio comments: "Iwasn't quite prepared. But I am now moving toward acceptance, maybe even welcome. And I am changing many of my assumptions". In his introduction to the volume, Samuel Weber would seem to approve of Salvaggio's willingness to let the sophomore's essay demolish her previous assumptions about the goals and meaning of literary criticism. According to Weber, his volume "assembles protocols of an alteration at work in what is perhaps the beginning of an institution turning itself inside out". It would seem that Salvaggio's account of what Weber refers to as "the confrontationf a college teacher of literature with a strange and remarkable undergraduate paper" deserves to be printed along with one of Derrida's readings of Hegel because both texts contribute to the deconstructive enterprise by exploring the relations between the reading and writing of texts and the operations of the institution. (shrink)

The topical focus of the following inquiry is the critical engagement of French scholars and writers ca. 1800 – for example, Madame de Staël or Charles de Villers – with German philosophical aesthetics. With regard to this case study, the changing relationship of literary criticism and aesthetics within different national contexts can be brought into view. In France, the concept »esthétique«, which was imported as a translation of the German neologism »Ästhetik« current since the publication of Baumgarten’s work, met (...) with firm resistance from the middle of the 18th century on. The task of the following contribution is to analyze the reasons for this rejection in French intellectual circles at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. In the background of these often quite intensely conducted discussions lies the question whether philosophy can legitimately claim to produce a specific discourse regarding literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 80-97 [Access article in PDF] Literary Truth as Dreamlike Expression in Foucault's and Borges's "Chinese Encyclopedia" Robert Wicks ALTHOUGH THE TOPIC REMAINS MOSTLY unexplored, Michel Foucault had an aesthetic and intellectual attraction towards writers and artists in the Spanish-speaking tradition. For example, at the conclusion of his Histoire de la folie (Madness and Civilization, 1961)—a book which brought him extensive intellectual recognition in (...) France—Foucault drew his readers' attention to José de Goya y Lucientes's (1746-1828) well-known etching, El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, Plate 43 of Los Caprichos, 1797). In Foucault's estimation, by revealing a "night which is doubtless that of classical unreason," Goya's work represented a socially removed condition within which people encounter "what is most solitary" and experience what is "deepest" within themselves. With his reference to Goya's imagery, Foucault illustrated a major theme of his history of madness, namely, how people referred to as "mentally ill" experienced a gradual, physical exclusion from participation in public society, and how they were eventually isolated in a more frightening way: within their physical confinement, they were subject to techniques of psychological and spiritual alienation that reduced them to a condition of utter solitude.In a comparable, if not more central manner, Foucault used as thematic motifs for the preface, first and second chapters of a book for which he is widely known, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966), the work of three major writers and artists from the Spanish-speaking world: Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), and Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Among these references, the most popular is probably Foucault's discussion of [End Page 80] Velázquez's Las Meninas—a painting which captured Foucault's interest as a perfect exemplar of its time period—and which inspired him to devote the entire first chapter of his book to decoding the mechanics of its perspectival arrangement. And within the community of those who read, write and discuss the interrelationship between Foucault's thought, literary theory and the contemporary emphasis upon the multivocal quality of textual meaning, Foucault's citation of an excerpt from a short story by Borges—the subject of this essay—is also familiar. Foucault introduced his 1966 book, The Order of Things, with the following words: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies." In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. 1The short story from which Foucault extracted the above, quasi-cubistic, excerpt was published in Borges's 1952 collection, Otras Inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions), and is entitled, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." Although this story's entirety is rarely surveyed in discussions of Foucault, appreciating its broader contents helps illuminate why Foucault began The Order of Things with this entertaining and bizarre segment. Borges's original... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments LITERARY STUDIES AND THE REPRESSION OF REPUTATION by John Rodden 6 6T A Thomakesorbreaks a writer's reputation?" asked Esquire during VV the mid-1960s. The editors' answer, titled "The Structure of the Literary Establishment," came in the form of a multicolored "chart of power." Included was "virtually everyone of serious literary consequence," whether "writer, editor, agent, or simple hipster." The center of power was (...) indicated, noted the editors, by "the hot red blob in the middle," which oozed over the names of the chief literary makers and breakers.1 In 1977 Esquire drove to the heart of the blob, asking a long list of "knowledgeable" writers, academic critics, andjournalists the question, "Which American writers of this century do you consider the most overand under-rated"? Running below the responses across four pages was a sketch of Father Time, busily at work inflating and bursting bubbles bearing the images of various candidates. No consensus was sought, though Dreiser and Willa Cather fared well, and Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Mailer, and Edmund Wilson less well. The editors acknowledged that their respondents generously volunteered a number of nonAmericans too (and stretched "writers of this century" back to the Venerable Bede), "proving that once you get started on this kind of thing, it's hard to know where to stop." 2 Unfortunately, reflection on the matter seems to stop at the doorstep of literary studies. "Reputation" is one of those subjects that readers, 261 262Philosophy and Literature critics, and scholars love to talk about, but to which serious attention is rarely paid, even by sociologists of literature—and not at all by literary critics. Separate disciplines are devoted to the study ofwealth and power, yet none to honor or reputation, the third chiefcategory ofclass systems and human motivation.3 A few cultural critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the "institution of criticism"—book publishing, book reviewing, literaryjournalism, scholarly criticism—has exerted influence on public literary taste or the profession of literary studies. But their work has typically criticized "the culture industry" or "the literary-industrial complex," rather than addressed the making of authors' and books' reputations.4 Although semesterly reading lists and even whole libraries testify to the exalted reputations of a few canonized authors, a near-total silence has prevailed in the academy on reputation as a literary issue in its own right.5 That such a central dynamic of literary life—in a sense the defining, controlling category for an essentially honorific activity like literature and literary criticism—should go virtually unattended by critics of literature might seem at first glance a professional conspiracy by Esquire's "blob." Yet the academy's neglectof"the problem ofreputation" is hardly due to outright professional collusion, but rather to a joint matter of institutional and historical factors. These have partly to do with the elusiveness of "reputation" as a concept, which has accommodated the more important repressive factors: the academy's preoccupation with literary interpretation and its persistent habit of averting its eyes from its own institutional history. This essay explores the problematics of literary reputation, the essence of which consists in our unrefiective tendency to assume that what is valued is invariably what is also reputed. II Few readers would deny that authors' reputations bear heavily on practices in publishing and literary journalism. Few even question Esquire 's buried point that "reputations get made" through institutional networks which exchange and distribute information. Yet the literary academy has traditionally relegated the subject to the slick magazines and, more recendy, to the sociology of art and occupations, where it has received scant attention and where literary canons are not made.6 On those rare occasions when journals like The American Scholar have taken up literary reputation as an issue, they have politely asked only the first of Esquire's questions (about underrated books and authors), John Rodden263 characterizing their discussion as "the game" ofrediscovering "neglected books." 7 Indeed the topic may well strike a bit too close to home, as observers as opposed in their literary politics as Norman Podhoretz and Richard Kostelanetz seem to agree.8 For elite institutions and star reputations exist in academe and in the literary... (shrink)

What is life and what does it mean to be in the living political universe of entitiness without rhyme or reason? Flappy exudate, a bag in a bag, corpuscles of corporeality, worms (or flesh tubes) with appendages, even the cult of first involution – these are our body pods and the hunger and thirst of being-in. How can the situation of anatomical form be analysed without the illusion of instrumentalized reflection? Perhaps by amalgamating the categories and their issues. The issuance (...) of taxonomy is the actual fine muck of excrement, which every brick of ordered life leaks as exudence and decay. Deep thoughts leave a mucal snail trail of what was tabular-seeming about our bodily situation, our environs, our friends, our experiments and our nourishment. Especially in this current age of 露 露 and 娜娜 (Lulu and Nana), our first officially public transgenic kindred, the question becomes, ‘who are these free-living divergences and what does it mean to be the uber-ding beyond geoengineering’s capabilities?’. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship (or lack thereof) between authors’ intentions and the meaning of literary works. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of Extreme and Modest Actual Intentionalism, Conventionalism, and two versions of Hypothetical Intentionalism, and discusses the role that one’s theoretical commitments about the robustness of linguistic conventions and the publicity of literary works should play in determining which view one accepts.

Connections between Roman Catholic Modernism and the artistic culture of the fin de siècle have received little attention from scholars, as compared to the prominence accorded intellectual, social, and political issues. Felix Klein is one of a handful of those who worked for intellectual renewal who closely followed developments in literature and music, interpreting those developments in a way that favored an agenda of reconciling Catholicism with modernity. In two collections of essays, Nouvelles tendances en religion et en literature and (...) Autour du dilettantisme Klein expressed hopes for a return to Catholicism among a cultural elite which I turn would have a larger impact upon a broad public. (shrink)

Rush Rhees, Georg Henrik von Wright and Elizabeth Anscombe are well known as the literary executors who made Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy available to all interested readers. Their editions of Wittgenstein’s writings have become an integral part of the modern philosophical canon. However, surprisingly little is known about the circumstances and reasons that made Wittgenstein choose them to edit and publish his papers. This essay sheds light on these questions by presenting the story of their personal relationships—relationships that, on (...) the one hand, gave Rhees, von Wright and Anscombe distinct insights into Wittgenstein’s philosophizing; and, on the other hand, let Wittgenstein assume that these three former students, and later colleagues and friends, were the most capable of preparing his work for publication. Using hitherto unpublished archival material as well as information from published recollections, the essay sketches the development of the personal and philosophical bonds from which the literary heirs’ distinct ways of handling Wittgenstein’s unpublished writings grew in later years. (shrink)

This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, (...) to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities' scholars and historians of the emotions. (shrink)

This article proposes an analysis of the use of emotions, in particular the shame, characterizing the elenctic method performed by Socrates in the dialogue with Callicles in the third part of Plato’s Gorgias. The elenchus aims at improving the interlocutor through a process of purification that is capable of changing his whole existence. However, Plato’s dialogues only rarely give testimony of a successful transformation occurring in the interlocutor. This is due to the interlocutor’s attitude towards shame : the feeling of (...) shame can be accepted as a mean for self-transformation or hidden to protect a social status. The article will explore the way in which this fundamental difference is delineated within the dialogue by providing appropriate textual examples. Arguably, by outlining the distinction between the types of shame, it is possible to notice how the purification of the interlocutor implies a turning point for the public. This is what I call „outreach elenchus”, a specific hermeneutic figure that allows to understand a form of purification of the audience and the spectators witnessing the debate. This type of elenchus steps in at the very moment in which the Socratic interlocutor attempts to protect his social image, concealing his shame. The audience, thanks to Plato’s literary strategy, realizes the failures of the interlocutor even as he refuses to accept them. As a result, his social image becomes tarnished. (shrink)

Literary scholarship has paid little serious attention to Habermas' philosophy, and, on the other hand, the reception of Habermas has given little attention to the role that literary practice can play in a broader theory of communicative action. David Colclasure's argument sets out to demonstrate that a specific, literary form of rationality inheres in literary practice and the public reception of literary works which provides a unique contribution to the political public sphere.

Literary scholarship has paid little serious attention to Habermas' philosophy, and, on the other hand, the reception of Habermas has given little attention to the role that literary practice can play in a broader theory of communicative action. David Colclasure's argument sets out to demonstrate that a specific, literary form of rationality inheres in literary practice and the public reception of literary works which provides a unique contribution to the political public sphere.

This book is largely unpublished material from Popper’s literary remains regarding his The Open Society and Its Enemies that conveys some interesting stories about its publication and initial reception, throws light on its message, and complements it somewhat. It also contains much that Popper hardly discussed elsewhere.

This review essay examines current trends in the field of Quranic studies, as expressed in recent introductory works on the Quran, which in turn reflect developments in more specialized publications. A prominent characteristic in this body of scholarship is an increased emphasis on approaching the Quran as a literary text, as conceived within the structures of textual criticism. Much of this work strives to bypass the autochthonous exegetical corpus developed by Muslim authorities and read the Quran on its own (...) terms, as a text best situated within a sectarian milieu of late antiquity. Particular attention is given here to the configuration of literature as a secular category of analysis and the implications it bears for this growing field. (shrink)

Before liberation, my publications on aesthetics and literary theory had a widespread evil influence upon young readers. Since liberation, I have regretted that. I have eagerly studied Marxism-Leninism, seeking first to establish and then to destroy, in the hope that one day I will have thoroughly cleansed the long-standing infections in my thought. By waiting "to establish" I am putting off the task of "destroying." However, if a thing is not established, it cannot really be destroyed, and if it (...) is not destroyed, it cannot be established; the tasks of establishing and destroying must proceed together. At the present time, in order to bring socialism to its highest point of development, the Party and the government are making even greater demands on the intellectuals, expecting them to carry out a thoroughgoing program of thought reform so as to tran-quilize the remnants of the rotten thinking of the capitalist class and to establish the Marxist-Leninist world outlook and scientific method, thus demonstrating its inherent strength through socialist reconstruction. All the intellectuals accept this summons eagerly. As far as I myself am concerned, the Party's concern and teaching during the past few years have already produced fundamental changes in me, and I am truly grateful for the new life that the Party has given me. I feel that in this great summons, whether it be to wash away the evil influences of the past or whether it be for the benefit of my future scientific work, it is my responsibility to take advantage of this opportunity to progressively and sincerely criticize my own reactionary, rotten thinking. This I understand clearly, but at the present level of my thinking, I still feel unequal to the task. Nevertheless, I am confident that what I cannot see myself my comrades can certainly point out for me. (shrink)

From the time she set the intellectual world on fire with her reflections on Eichmann (1963), Hannah Arendt has been seen, essentially, as a literary commentator who had interesting things to say about political and cultural matters. In this critical study, Shiraz Dossa argues that Arendt is a political theorist in the sense in which Aristotle is a theorist, and that the key to her political theory lies in the twin notions of the “public realm” and the “public self”. (...) In this work, the author explains how Arendt’s unconventional and controversial views make sense on the terrain of her political theory. He shows that her judgement on thinkers, actors, and events as diverse as Plato, Marx, Machiavelli, Freud, Conrad, Hobbes, Hitler, the Holocaust, the French Revolution, and European colonialism flow directly from her political theory. Tracing the origins of this theory to Homer and Periclean Athens, Dossa underlines Arendt’s unique contribution to reinventing the idea and the ideal of citizenship, reminding us that the public realm is the locus of friendship, community, identity, and in a certain sense, humanity. Arendt believes that no one who prefets his or her private interest to public affairs in the old sense can claim to be fully human or truly excellent. (shrink)

Some of Herder's most striking ideas stemmed from his early evaluation of German literary publicity, which to his mind stood in stark contrast to conditions in the sociable world. Such a predicament bespeaks the importance of considering the relationship between printed text and lived sociability in the Enlightenment. By charting the heady twists and turns in his intellectual development from 1765 to 1769, this essay treats the young Herder in what for him became an aesthetically charged field between the (...) two. The public which he came to envision would be manifest to the senses, at least to the extent that it might be by the reader of print, but it also amounted to a surrogate for the more tangibly sensual experience of face-to-face community. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The (Anti)Social Sciences The “Science Effect” and the Modern Fact The “Science Effect” and the APA Publication Manual Society as Text Epistemics are Rhetorics are Politics Models are Stories The Figurality of it All So What?

During a smallpox epidemic in April 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu asked Dr. Charles Maitland to "engraft" her daughter, thus instigating the first documented inoculation for smallpox (_Variola_ virus) in England. Engrafting, or variolation, was a means of conferring immunity to smallpox by placing pus taken from a smallpox pustule under the skin of an uninfected person to create a local infection. The introduction of infectious viral matter, however, could trigger fullblown smallpox, and the practice was controversial for both this (...) reason and the pervasive conviction that it was immoral to intentionally infect a human body. Eventually, engrafting was phased out altogether in favor of vaccination, a much safer procedure established by Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century. Montagu's decision was influenced by her experiences in Constantinople, where she had spent a year, and where engrafting was commonplace. As a smallpox survivor herself, Montagu had taken an interest in Turkish inoculation practices, and had had her son Edward engrafted while in Turkey. She was not the first person to import the idea of smallpox inoculation to England, nor the first English person to have their child inoculated (other English children had been inoculated while visiting Turkey), yet she quickly became known for importing and popularizing smallpox inoculation. At the request of her acquaintances, she took her inoculated daughter with her on a round of visits into elite households to demonstrate the safety of the procedure. The reputation she gained was both positive and negative: monuments were erected in her honor, encomiastic poems were published, and Voltaire declared her "a woman of as fine a genius, and endued with as great a strength of mind as any of her sex in the British Kingdoms"; however, anti-inoculationists ridiculed her, some society figures regarded her warily, and Alexander Pope satirized her in his poetry.

Montagu’s pioneering role in the smallpox debate is undoubtedly significant: she instigated the first smallpox inoculation on English soil, and she was largely responsible for making the practice acceptable in elite circles. My interest in this essay is in the nature and significance of Montagu’s reputation as an inoculation pioneer. I will argue that her reputation was based on the particular combination of her social position as a Whig and an aristocratic woman; her interest in progressive and enlightened forms of social, political, and scientific thought; her standing in influential literary circles; and, not least, the force of her own personality. In broad terms, I offer Montagu’s involvement in the smallpox debate as a case study in a new kind of public role becoming available to elite women in the early eighteenth century — a role that caused considerable discomfort among her peers and in the medical community, and one that stimulated a widespread controversy in print publications of the day. (shrink)

There is relative agreement among modern scholars that the bulk of Arrian's literary activity came late in his life. What has become the standard theory was evolved by Eduard Schwartz, who maintained that it was only after the end of his public career that Arrian turned to writing. According to this hypothesis the Пєρίπλους of 131/ A.D. was a tentative preliminary monograph, which was followed in 136/7 by a work of similar genre, the.

Zechariah Aldāhirī's maqāma collection, Sefer hamusar , is a literary work modeled on the Arabic Maqāmāt of al-Harīrī and the Hebrew Tahkemoni of Alharizi. Although largely fictional in nature, the work offers intriguing evidence of the transmission of kabbalistic thought to Yemen in the sixteenth century. This paper argues that Aldāhirī exploited the text's lighthearted belletristic framework to bring kabbalistic theosophy, literature, and liturgical customs to the attention of a largely uninitiated public in Yemen. But Aldāhirī also conveys an (...) ambivalence towards his project when he parodies the new taste for kabbalistic learning by embedding mystical ideas in complex narratives. (shrink)

The paper presents the project, begun in 2005, of publication of the Collected Works of Salomo Friedlaender / Mynona , a German philosopher and satirist. Starting from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, Kant, and Ernst Marcus, Friedlaender developed the basic motives of „creative indifference” and the specific polarity into an original and penetrating philosophy. Living in Berlin from 1902, he was at the center of significant philosophical and literary developments of the 20th century . He was a determined pacifist and Kantian (...) whose popular satires , during the Frist World War and the Weimar Republic, formulated a severe critique of culture and convincingly suggested that the utopia of eternal peace was practical. Due to unvaforable circumstances and cruel fate he had undeservedly sunk into fatal oblivion. This edition, which will include 30 volumes over several years, finally shows him the way he deserves. (shrink)

For more than a decade Nina Baym has pioneered in the reexamination of American literature. She has led the way in questioning assumptions about American literary history, in critiquing the standard canon of works we read and teach, and in rediscovering lost texts by American women writers. Feminism and American Literary History collects fourteen of her most important essays published since 1980, which, combining feminist perspectives with original archival research, significantly revise standard American literary history. In Part (...) I, "Rewriting Old American Literary History," the focus is on male writers. Essays range from close readings of individual works to ambitious critiques of the main paradigms by which scholars have conventionally linked disparate texts and authors in a narrative of nationalist literary history: the self-in-the-wilderness myth, the romance-novel distinction, the myth of New England origins. Part II, "Writing New American Literary History," studies examples of women's writing from the Revolution through the Civil War. Stressing much overtly public and political writing that has been overlooked even by feminist scholars, noting public and political themes in supposedly domestic works, the essays substantially modify and historicize the paradigm by which premodern American women's writing is currently understood. The contentious and influential essays in Part III, "Two Feminist Polemics," address feminist literary theory and pedagogy, advocating a pluralist practice as the basis for scholarship, criticism, and humane feminism. No one interested in American literature or in women's writing can afford to ignore Baym's revisionist work. Humorous and gracefully written, this book is enjoyable and indispensable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular LanguagesFrançoise Lionnet* (bio)In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf quips: “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men;” literary history, she might have added, is too much about sons murdering their fathers. Canonical readings of the canon have often insisted on the vaguely Freudian (if not biblical) model of literary creation susceptible (...) both to “anxieties of influence” and to creative revisions imposed by strong misreadings. Criticism has followed the same reactive pattern in order to clear new ground for further research: the debate between “traditionalists” and proponents of “cultural studies” all but repeats this familiar and combative dialectic. Between formalist and sociopolitical readings, French texts have been mined by many different critical trends; but the perspectives that do not fit neatly into one or the other of these agonistic moves tend to be left out. Dominick LaCapra has suggested that “one issue for readers today is whether a different, ‘noncanonical’ reading of the canon, which resists symbolic resolutions as well as narrowly formalistic interpretations, may be one force in reopening texts to the[ir] broader sociopolitical effects” [731].In the case of Baudelaire, the way to do this “noncanonical” reading might well be to go back to a discursive field which includes biography and oral histories, and to resist the temptation either to eulogize the innovations of the poet of modernity or to denounce the patent racism of his images. The challenge today is to return to the scene of writing and the conditions of production of the early poetry—in other words, to look at the text from outside of conventional literary, critical or cultural history, to reclaim it for our side, that of a more global francophonie. To do so might mean to map out once again the contested terrain of culturally and politically sensitive readings such as the ones Christopher Miller and Gayatri Spivak claim to do. Their readings, however, do not take into account the residual cultural element of the poetry, that is, the vernacular language it appropriates. This language is all but buried beneath the emergent theoretical practices of postcolonial criticism and its vaguely nationalist agendas. 1 Critics have tended to look for [End Page 63] symbolic resolutions and to settle cultural scores at the expense of historical and geographical specificity, despite claims to the contrary.The facts of Baudelaire’s youthful travels in the Indian Ocean have remained relatively obscure. While doing research in the islands of Mauritius and Réunion on two separate occasions during the past few years, I came across written documents and watercolors that helped me reconstruct the historical and visual contexts that appear to have been Baudelaire’s in 1841. By re-examining the criticisms that have been lodged against the exoticizing rhetoric of his poetry, I want to foreground the links between the Creole culture with which Baudelaire became familiar and the now canonical texts he produced. These links can allow us to bypass the sterile opposition between “literary studies” and “cultural studies” or between aesthetics and politics; they demonstrate the urgency of re-visioning the canon not just from the perspectives of its margins, but as an important source of muted cultural knowledge. The questions with which I begin, then, are the following: where did Baudelaire actually go on his travels in 1841? and why does this matter to the field of French studies?Il faut en finir avec la légende de l’Inde parcourue par Baudelaire. Elle était séduisante, Gautier l’a adoptée, Banville ne l’a pas négligée.... Mais la vérité vraie est que Baudelaire, embarqué malgré lui, brûla la politesse à l’Inde.... Peut-être Baudelaire abandonnait-il complaisamment au commun public ces bruits de longues pérégrinations en pays fabuleux, parce qu’il en tirait, avec des couleurs de mystère, l’air de revenir de loin. Dans tous les cas, il ne nous parlait jamais de ces voyages. A peine, à son retour, nous dit-il quelques mots d’une station dans l’île Maurice ou l’île Bourbon. 2[It is time to put a stop to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Darwin Meets Literary TheoryEllen DissanayakeEvolution and Literary Theory, by Joseph Carroll; xi & 518 pp. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995, $44.95.In my experience, most literary theorists, even those who participate in conferences called “Literature and Science,” know little about evolution, and don’t want to know. For them, “science” means information theory, chaos or catastrophe theory, fractals, pataphysics, “autopoeisis” or self-organization, emergence, cyborgs, hypertext, virtual signs (...) and other aspects of sci-fi, or techno-politics. (I encountered these subjects at a comparative literature conference I attended in March 1995.) These “scientific” positions are used as trendy metaphors for talking about chance, uncertainty, accident, ideology, and multidimensionality in literary works or in the aims of their authors. In other words, the buzzwords of contemporary science become one more angle from which to view or project another facet onto the glassy, self-reflective edifice of contemporary literary theory, rather than a means from which to shatter it and build again from scratch with more earthy, substantial materials. Joseph Carroll’s book provides the view and the means for this genuinely new and constructive (if initially destructive) possibility.It is ironic that in the present critical climate the very virtues of the book might be seen by some as faults—e.g., the lucid, elegant writing and the erudition and interdisciplinarity of the work as a whole. Carroll [End Page 229] writes clearly, authoritatively, without jargon, and with frequent, delicious wit. His values, aims, explanations, evidence, and criticisms are concisely and plainly stated. This is in marked contrast to the enigmatic and idiosyncratic nature of much recent criticism, and might have the initially disorienting effect of returning to earth and breathing pure oxygen after one has become accustomed to the thin and rarefied atmosphere of remote, icy peaks.Carroll offers wide-ranging and illuminating discussions of standard literary and critical works from both the European and Anglo-American tradition over the past several centuries, and refers to dozens of writers from diverse periods and nationalities. Additionally he enlists, and criticizes where appropriate, ideas from such diverse nonliterary figures as Darwin himself and writers about Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Konrad Lorenz, John Bowlby, Sir John Eccles, the prominent sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, S. J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, Derek Bickerton, Piaget, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, H. J. Eysenck, Cardinal Newman, Thorstein Veblen, Trotsky, Raymond Williams, and Richard Rorty, among others.One can be forgiven for wishing to forego an exploration of this demanding array of knowledge argued from the unfamiliar perspective of evolutionary biology. For in order seriously to consider Carroll’s new way of looking at human endeavor (including literature) one must also look critically at what was laboriously mastered during all those years of graduate school and tenure-driven writing for publication. No one wants to be persuaded to give up a view of the world that has been mastered with painstaking diligence. Still less does anyone want to spend time with something that according to conventional academic wisdom is downright wrong-headed. This is really the challenge of Carroll’s book—because such minor matters as the plain unfashionable title, clear writing, impressive erudition, and dated or forgotten thinkers can be overcome if the stakes are high enough.I wish to suggest that the stakes are high enough and that the time is right for this inevitable change of viewpoint. Along with others in diverse fields such as cognitive and developmental psychology, personality theory, neurology, medicine, sociology, political science, epistemology, cultural anthropology, ethics, and linguistics, I find the Darwinian perspective to offer the most comprehensive and viable possibility for an understanding of human behavior and culture, including the arts. Joseph Carroll admirably articulates this position and applies it to literary theory. I invite scholars who think that evolutionary explanations [End Page 230] are erroneous, dangerous, reductionist, simplistic, or irrelevant to read Carroll and deal seriously with his arguments. His book should be the central text for theory classes and seminars, as well as the subject of conferences. Those who would dismiss it should have the courage and curiosity to lay aside their misgivings and have a look. Especially those who are dissatisfied with the surfeit... (shrink)

Examining sources and case studies, this fascinating book explores early Christianity, how it was studied, how it is studied now, and how Judaeo-Christian values came to form the ideological bedrock of modern western culture. Looking at the diverse source materials available, from the earliest New Testament texts and the complex treaties of third century authors such as Lactantius, to archaeology, epigraphy and papyrology, the book examines what is needed to study the subject, what materials were available, how useful they were, (...) and how the study of the subject may be approached. Also including a comprehensive guide for students that lists major collections of literary and non-literary sources, major journals and series, and major text books. (shrink)

By the time Baudelaire starts his work-in-progress prose-poems project, the Petits Poëmes en prose, also known as Le spleen de Paris,1 the poor, a recurrent protagonist of these short narratives, have already achieved a successful literary career of three decades. This evolution has mainly taken place in the rising genre of the novel, which, from the 1830s onward, interacts with an emerging mass public, whether one thinks of Dickens' Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress, the Newgate novels, Eugène (...) Sue's likewise widely popular Les mystères de Paris, George Sand's La mare au Diable or Francois le Champi. At that time, Hugo's masterpiece, Les... (shrink)

Honor has been an indispensable reference in the life of individuals and societies throughout the course of human history. As a basic concern of men and women, the phenomenon already appears in the earliest literary testimonies. The heroes of the Greek, Roman or German epic poems adapt their behavior to the demands of this particular deity, honor. Literature, at any time, in any culture, in any language, makes constant use of honor as an effective dramatic element. The recurrent presence (...) is certainly a reflection of the actual significance the phenomenon of honor had in everyone’s life. This essay clarifies why honor is given such importance; why it has been considered to be more valuable for the individual than his/her own life. To this end, the mention of public opinion is unavoidable. This phenomenon, in its social psychological conception, is the key that permits us to enlighten the labyrinth of honor. (shrink)