Book 1 of Hume's Treatise offers a digression on insult and satire that can be expanded when considered in tandem with his account of conflicting emotions in "Of Tragedy." The passage in the Treatise suggests that insult and satire can convey precisely the same disapproval yet arouse quite different reactions from their objects. How can this be? If satire is compared to tragedy, we can see that both give rise to negative reactions that are often mitigated by the manner in which the material is presented.
This paper aims to underscore the significance of T. S. Eliot's philosophical reconception of selfhood in his early poetry. The relativistic conception of the self that Eliot derives from his engagement with figures like F. H. Bradley underlies how the self-obsession of Eliot's personae intersects with inquiries of knowledge and experience. The dialogue between Eliot the philosopher and Eliot the poet illuminates the continuity between his intellectual concerns and his literary-aesthetic principles.
This paper examines how Plato's theories of beauty in The Symposium were adapted into a mid-century aesthetic for American ballet by George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell. Their creative methods resulted in a literal realization of ideal and absolute Platonic beauty. Heeding Diotima's teachings to Socrates on beauty, eroticism, and procreation, Balanchine and Farrell bring the aesthetic relationship between the material body and dematerialized beauty to life in the form of a new "corporeal minimalism"-female beauty in its most absolute state achieved through the dancing body itself.
The Confidence-Man (1857), Herman Melville's last published novel, is a rare document in the history of American thought: an epistemological exploration of Pyrrhonism, or absolute skepticism. Long considered a skeptical text only for its cynical commentary on American society, The Confidence-Man is in fact a philosophical exploration of the value of absolute skepticism as a permanent condition, worth entertaining for its epistemological revelations about the self and the polity, without serious risk of nihilism or destructive relativism. On the contrary, Melville suggests that absolute skepticism may be salutary, a philosophical and political tool for coolheadedly examining American overreliance on faith.
This article discusses the connections between William Shakespeare, the first person to use the word stigma seriously and consistently in English, and Erving Goffman and Leslie Fiedler, the first modern writers to theorize stigma. First, Shakespeare indirectly influenced Goffman's theory and directly influenced Fiedler's. Second, Goffman's and Fiedler's descriptions of stigma as a dramatic scene of social interaction illuminates how Shakespeare used dramatic expression to treat stigma as a social, rather than natural, phenomenon. Finally, Shakespeare's treatment of stigma as a rhetorically charged attack against those who represent difference clarifies an aspect of stigma unaddressed in Goffman's and Fiedler's theories.
Macbeth is not the ultimate source of his actions (the Three Witches are) and he could not have done otherwise (the witches would not allow it). Yet, he is guilty of his heinous crimes. This puzzling combination of intuitions can only be accommodated if human action is understood along the lines proposed by authors such as Harry Frankfurt. Thus, without ever bringing determinism into the discussion, William Shakespeare's Macbeth provides an argument for compatibilism. This argument is relevantly similar to a thought experiment, but the conclusion is left for us to draw.
In Nella Larsen's Passing, light-skinned biracial characters use racial ambiguity to "pass" as white in 1920s America. When race concepts are ambiguous, do they lose their meaning? Some literary critics say yes, taking a postracialist position influenced by poststructuralist theories of language. I argue instead that Passing shows how race is constructed by contexts and interpreted as rules are interpreted-replete with mistakes, uncertainty, and borderline cases. This racial contextualism resonates with the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, suggesting the value of OLP for antiracism and the importance of debates about race in OLP.
This essay explores Friedrich Nietzsche's description of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a "tragedy" in view of his reference to the book as "a book for all and none." It argues that the book is tragic insofar as Zarathustra fails to communicate his humanity-saving message and, as such, he stands as a universal figure that expresses our existential solitude. In this respect the book is for everyone. It also argues that the book is a therapeutic work that expresses an unachievable conception of health that is inconsistent with the human condition. In the latter respect, the book is for no one.
I contrast a cognitive approach to language and meaning with literary theory's regnant assumptions, arguing against the empiricism and antifoundationalism of poststructuralism for a nativist foundational-ism underlying syntactic-semantic meaning. Works of literature should not be considered communicative speech requiring the interpretation of literary meaning but rather linguistic scripts that guide the human faculty of language to engender conceptual understanding through mental representation. I explicate aspects of the literary cognition by which we understand a work of literature, and conclude that literary scholarship can eschew endless interpretation and criticism in favor of explanation and commentary.
There is no more damning literary judgment than cliched. Art and writing that traffics in stereotypes fail to incite insight. Cliches bespeak laziness. But what if this judgment is, itself, also a cliche? This paper investigates literature's most maligned storehouse of cultural expectation. It argues that prejudice against the hackneyed derives from an overemphasis on the value of novelty within artistic expression. As a result, we misrepresent what a cliche is and malign what it does. The paper presents a new way of defining cliches, and in the process demonstrates their relevance to how we evaluate and teach literature.
This article claims William Shakespeare's Macbeth anticipates many elements of contemporary nihilism. The article focuses on the active and passive nihilism of Macbeth and Malcolm but also explores the structural nihilism pervading the Kingdom of Scotland, and, finally, a cosmic nihilism in which the Weird Sisters and Hecate represent the absurd regnant. In an era defined by a lack of faith in both God and man, Macbeth's exploration of the nihilistic will to power and its effects on politics and society is perhaps more relevant than ever.
In several remarks by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, we can find a conception of private language that suggests an interesting sense in which private language exists. This paper offers an interpretation of these remarks, before outlining some practical implications. The analysis makes reference to Plato's Phaedrus, including the dialogue's paradoxical argument according to which writing cannot achieve its purpose. The paper argues that Plato, Socrates, and Wittgenstein all thought about the same problem, namely the privacy of thought that arises from the complexity of the objects of thought.
The opposition of abstraction and generality in James Joyce contrasts the collection of similar individuals into general categories with the abstraction of a quality from many individuals. In Finnegans Wake , G. W. F. Hegel, George Berkeley, and Benedict Spinoza appear as philosophers who favor generality over abstraction. The abstract noun that tends to dismiss the individual case is also contrasted with the common noun that encounters all kinds of individual, concrete things. This theme of coming down from the abstract to the concrete is developed through Joyce's engagements with Hegel's concrete universal, Ludwig Wittgenstein's concrete cases, and Galton's compound photographs.
Confronting Penelope Fitzgerald's subtleties of style and construction, critics of her novels often resort to phrases like "distillation," "economy, "magical" and "how is it done?" But the brimming sense of life that Fitzgerald shares in her brief pages reflects not so much magic as a lifetime of hard thought about power, voice, representation, gender, and recognition. Recent work in postcolonial studies, political ecology, philosophy of mind, anthropology, feminist theory, and translation studies can help achieve a better understanding of how she does it. " "tamped-down force," "muted power," "the unsaid speaks,"
Although the Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday describes himself as "a man made of words," he is nevertheless inordinately drawn to silence. I argue that these silences are not so much the suspension of language, occurring unreachably beyond what is sayable, but silences that are themselves acts of communication and disclosure. Momaday employs silence in order to make something present in its very absence and to elicit ways of seeing and understanding that simultaneously mark the limits of the spoken word.
What can be said about animal interiority? John Berryman's "Snow Line" suggests that we can talk about nonhuman consciousness only in the way we can talk about God: apophatically. His sheep persona poem, alongside its precedent Psalm 23, offers a definitive exploration of apophasis in theological and zoological terms. Emergent in the poem is a negative zoology in formation, here reformulated via Jacques Derrida's "divinanimality" and "negative zootheology": its loping negations and sheep figurations unsteady readings of the imago dei and paradoxically suggest that poetic language may be uniquely suited for expressing the unknowable and unsayable.
This paper proposes that romantic love is shaped by a complex temporal structure in which past, present, and future are interconnected through a nonlinear narrative flow. Love is a continuous process in which lovers collaboratively construct and narrate a mythologized memory of the past, imbuing their relationship with meaning and projecting it forward as an ideal state to be regained. To elaborate on this proposal, I draw on Plato's theory of love as recollection and examine two twentieth-century works: Marcel Proust's Swann in Love and Marguerite Duras's Blue Eyes, Black Hair .
