The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management. This paper makes a case for the employee (at any level) as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion about the notion of discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some individuals in (...) corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. My underlying assumption is that CSR isn’t solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by employees’ own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics, distinguished by their individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

In this theoretical paper, motives for CSR are considered. An underlying assumption is that the commercial imperative is not the sole driver of CSR decision-making in private sector companies, but that the formal adoption and implementation of CSR by corporations could be associated with the changing personal values of individual managers. These values may find expression through the opportunity to exercise discretion, which may arise in various ways. It is suggested that in so far as CSR initiatives represent individuals' values, (...) so the responsibility in evidence is less obviously corporate. Our emphasis on personal initiative is intended to counter a tendency to view the corporation as the agent, and may serve to remind us that individuals can, indeed, make a difference. (shrink)

This article uses the life stories approach to leadership and leadership development. Using exploratory, qualitative data from a Forbes Global 2000 and FTSE 100 company, we discuss the role of the turning point as an important antecedent of leadership in corporate social responsibility. We argue that TPs are causally efficacious, linking them to the development of life narratives concerned with an evolving sense of personal identity. Using both a multi-disciplinary perspective and a multi-level focus on CSR leadership, we identify four (...) narrative cases. We propose that they helped to re-define individuals’ sense of self and in some extreme cases completely transformed their self-identity as leaders of CSR. Hence, we also distinguish the momentous turning point that created a seismic shift in personality, through re-evaluation of the individuals’ personal values. We argue that whilst TPs are developmental experiences that can produce responsible leadership, the MTP changes the individuals’ personal priorities in life to produce responsible leadership that perhaps did not exist previously. Thus, we appropriate Maslow’s metaphorical phrase ‘A falling of the veils’ from his discussion of peak and desolation experiences that produce personal growth. Using a multi-disciplinary literature from social theory moral psychology Personality, identity and character: explorations in moral psychology, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009) and social psychology Prosocial motives, emotions, and behaviour: the better angels of our nature, American Psychological Association, Washington, 2010), we present a theoretical model that illustrates the psychological process of the TP, thus contributing to the growing literature on the microfoundations of CSR. (shrink)

E. H. Gombrich in 1968: Methodological Individualism and the Contradictions of Conservatism The commonalities Gombrich affirmed between his own positions on science, politics, and art and those of his friend Karl Popper are key to understanding both his work on the history of style and the conservative fulminations on method he published from the early 1950s onwards. United with Popper by their shared experience of exile from fascism, Gombrich failed to register the amateurish character of Popper's political theory and that (...) his aversion to notions of social determination disabled the historian. Popper's skepticism regarding the ontological status of social collectivities and rejection of the concept of totality reinforced Gombrich's suspicions of holistic analysis and led him to fall back on naturalistic descriptions of individuals acting in a social world glued together by such commonsensical categories as "traditions" and "institutions". In this regard he is representative of the common aversion to sociology of the British intellectual establishment in the early Cold War. (shrink)

While caregiving in northern, rural and remote communities takes place in the context of conditions unique to smaller communities, caregivers live with social policies that are shaped by urban norms rather than rural realities. In times of economic decline and government cuts rural issues of limited services and infrastructure as well as dependency on a single industry can lead to unemployment, community and family instability, and a decline in health and well-being. During these times caregivers face increased pressure to voluntarily (...) fill the gaps left by service cuts. Research with women caregivers in four communities in northern British Columbia (BC), Canada explores the experiences of caring and the social, geographic, economic and political contexts within which the caregiving occurs. The discourse of economic efficiencies that speaks solely to the monetary value of care is contrasted with the human condition of connectedness and relationships. These two contradictory perspectives are uncovered during interviews with women caregivers and analyzed in the framework of Olena Hankivsky's discussion of an ethic of care. (shrink)

Purpose. An empirical verification of the Hemingway’s “sad hypothesis” and study of some individual characteristics of a discourse formation in a process of short texts understanding. -/- Methods and procedure of research. The study was based on the principle of a standardized interview, which was carried out on a random sample (103 respondents) using the questionnaire. The subjects interpreted two proverbs and the short story by Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”). In each case, it was proposed (...) to choose one of the six ready-made interpretations or to create an original one. Proverb explications were classified by experts as “normative” or “deviating”, and interpretations of the story were evaluated into “sad” or “pragmatic” ones. Also, a “normativity index” was calculated for each respondent, reflecting the number of normative renditions of proverbs. The Psychogeometric test was used, and such socio-demographic characteristics were recorded as: gender, age, having children. -/- Results. This study refutes the “sad hypothesis” regarding Hemingway’s six-word story affect. The prevalence of pragmatic type interpretation over sentimental one is statistically significant. The type of interpretation turned out to be not directly related to any of the considered socio-demographic characteristics. It was found that the sad interpretation of the story reliably corresponds to a high normativity of the proverbs explications. Conversely, respondents with deviating interpretations of proverbs were significantly more likely to interpret Hemingway’s story in a pragmatic way. Differential psychological features, which were distinguished using the Psychogeometric test, turned out to be an insignificant predictor of the six-word story interpretations. -/- Conclusions. The analysis of the research results made it possible to argue the thesis that the differences in the formation of individual discourses are directly related to a worldview and indirectly determined by other factors in turn influencing the outlook. The interaction of the worldview with discursive practice that arises in the process of short texts understanding is carried out according to differential scenarios. These scenarios are conditioned by such individual characteristics as discursive conformity and discursive lability, which, in turn, correspond with high and low normativity, respectively. Above features are cognitive in nature. Their ontological localization coincides with the I-language (Chomsky). (shrink)

Since literary historian Robert Bone published his seminal essay ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance’ in 1986, scholars have created new cartographies of previously unexplored terrain in American cultural history. The earliest studies focused on literature, but more recently attention has turned to other disciplines, including visual arts. Recent publication of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (2011) by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage promises to decisively broaden scholarly understandings of the scope and significance (...) of Chicago-centred cultural production during the Great Depression and post-war years. Of particular relevance to contemporary studies of new media art is the manner in which then-emergent ideas and practices – centring on racialized subject matter, elite and mass audiences, traditional and new mediums of expression, private vs public sponsorship, and passive vs active reception of art objects – converged to create new paradigms and possibilities for visual artists to reshape consciousness in a period of institutional collapse and change. Chicago’s New Negro artists of the 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in 1920s Harlem, sought to reframe perceptions of African American life, to re-present the black subject as something other than an object of contempt or amusement beneath the privileged gaze of the white viewer. Just as these artists sought to revise perceptions of racial reality, examination of the wide range of actual images they created and the mediums and styles they explored revises reductive notions about creative expression in this period, which often portray a mere subordination of art to propaganda and an embrace of representational aesthetics and simplistic narratives in a fruitless detour in the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. On the contrary, Andrew Hemingway notes the range of stylistic experiment and characterizes so-called ‘social art’ as ‘a hybrid and unstable mode [which] had to carry the imperative to be an art equal in formal achievement to both the great art of the past and the modern tradition … [and] to suggest a political orientation without becoming overt revolutionary propaganda’ (2002).New media theorist Oliver Grau observes thatIn many quarters, virtual reality is viewed as a totally new phenomenon… but it did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computer-aided virtual realities. On the contrary, virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images… grounded in art traditions that have receivedscant attention up to now.(2004)In the midst of another period of change, of transformed and transforming ideas and practices in the arts, we have much to learn from the attempts of Chicago’s New (Media) Negro artists to create ‘art for the people’, to immerse broad audiences in such accessible media as mural painting, photography and graphic arts. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War and during the years of American Prohibition, Paris became a cheap and popular tourist destination as well as the home to a new generation of aspiring writers from artists including Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. Novels written during that period and memoirs remembering it have described the exciting, boozy community there but none have been read as widely as Hemingway’s The (...) Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. This paper aims to discuss the ways in which alcohol and sports play a part in the community of American expatriates in 1920s Paris and how this can be seen in particular in Hemingway’s works. It will also discuss how the prevalence of alcohol and sports in this period affected Hemingway and his work for the rest of his life. (shrink)

Petro Marko (1913-1991) was an Albanian journalist, writer and communist activist, who volunteered in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards, he was imprisoned in the island of Ustica by the Italian occupiers of Albania during the Second World War and was briefly imprisoned by the communist regime of Albania in the late 1940s. Afterwards he worked as a journalist and a writer, being closely surveyed by the communist regime. The Spanish experience was the most important formative period (...) throughout Marko’s stormy life, through which he was able to stay faithful to his communist and internationalist beliefs in the face of fascism and one of the most totalitarian and isolationist regimes in Europe. Marko wrote about the International Brigades in his most prominent novel, Hasta la Vista, and in his posthumously published autobiography. This paper will investigate these works by putting them in the historical context of the events themselves and of the time of the writing process. The aim is to look into how internationalism moulded his own identity, but also how this ideal was presented publicly under a communist regime that was becoming more and more isolated and xenophobic. (shrink)

“In Another Country” draws upon Hemingway's experiences during World War I. Narrated by a wounded young American, this story is a parable of early machine-rehabilitation therapy, one in which the strong optimism of a physician employing new machines is contrasted with the skepticism of an Italian major (“the greatest fencer in Italy”) who, disbelieving in the machines, nevertheless comes regularly for therapy to his hand. That daily attendance is interrupted only when the major's young wife dies suddenly. The major, (...) who had instructed the American never to put himself “in a position to lose,” has himself just “lost” the wife he had married when he felt sure that his own wounding had effectively taken him out of danger of being killed at the front. His continued stoicism offers the young soldier an example of ethical and moral behavior, for after her funeral he resumes his daily routine of machine-therapy. Seen against the ineffectiveness of the machines, the major's behavior seems to offer an example of the only “therapy” possible in this world of wounds and machines. (shrink)

I. NIETZSCHE Eterno retorno. Muerte de Dios-Nihilismo-Superhombre. Voluntad de poder. Lo apolíneo y lo dionisíaco. Lo que le debemos a Nietzsche. II. KAFKA El mundo administrado. Los oráculos han cambiado de lugar. La autocracia del mecanismo. De aquí nadie sale vivo. III. HEMINGWAY Algo de verdad. En manos de profesionales. Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos. IV. CALLEJONES SIN SALIDA El ocaso del intelectual público. Educación, filosofía y literatura. Cápsulas de tiempo.

With the earliest known reference to angling with a fly dating from the Chou Dynasty, more than 2,300 years ago, it should come as no surprise that when asked to justify their passionate devotion to fly fishing, many anglers will refer to the rich and venerable literature the sport has generated. Ranging from Plutarch's references to Nile fishing in the Life of Antonius, to Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis, to the fifteenth century classic, Dame Julian Berner's The Treatyse of Fysshynge (...) wyth an Angle, to the sport's bible, the 17th century The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, to literary treatments in the work of authors such as John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway, the wealth of literature devoted to fly fishing appears to be out of proportion to what is, ultimately, just a way of seducing an animal with a brain the size of a pea into inhaling a hook upon which some feathers, furs and tinsels have been lashed. What then, one may legitimately ask, is it about this sport that creates fanatical devotion on the part of its practitioners, who tend to regard it with such zeal and passion as is commonly reserved for art and religion? (shrink)

Preface -- I. WELCOME TO THE WAR -- Introduction -- The war of the worldviews -- Who will be God? -- II. WORLDVIEWS IN PHILOSOPHY -- Introduction -- Thomas Aquinas -- The first battle front -- René Descartes -- John Locke -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Karl Marx -- Ralph Waldo Emerson -- The second battle front -- Jeremy Bentham -- Charles Darwin -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- John Dewey -- Jean-Paul Sartre -- III. WORLDVIEWS IN LITERATURE -- Introduction -- The third (...) battle front -- William Shakespeare -- Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Mark Twain -- Ernest Hemingway & John Steinbeck -- IV. WORLDVIEWS IN CULTURE -- Pandora's machine -- Glossary -- List of images. (shrink)

We retrieve Bakhtin's reflections on Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel present in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin in order to verify the variations of the 'Ancient Biography and Autobiography Chronotope' in contemporary autobiography novel. We thus analyze the chronotope in the autobiography novels A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, and Chá das cinco com o vampire [Afternoon Tea with the Vampire], by the Brazilian writer Miguel Sanches Neto. Our reading of Bakhtin's (...) notion of chronotope in these narratives leads us to relate the form of public and private space configuration with different strategies of representation. (shrink)

Rush Rhees held Wittgenstein's work in high esteem but considered it in need of deepening. He was critical of Wittgenstein's idea that the builders' game might be the whole language of a tribe and that human language could be thought of as simply a range of language games. Rhees thought that Wittgenstein failed to do justice to the unity of language. The idea of the unity of language appears to have both an anthropological and an ethical aspect. The latter is (...) illustrated with the help of a Hemingway story. (shrink)

** Named a Best Book of 2007 by Ready Steady Book, an independent book review website, working in association with The Book Depository, which is devoted to reviewing the best books in literary fiction, poetry, history and philosophy. "An invaluable guide to new literary territory, Taylor is equally good in discussing writers whom the reader already knows." -- Raphael Rubenstein, Rain Taxi "The paths that John Taylor invites us to walk in this book are inviting ones: fifty-five luminous essays devoted (...) to the broad avenues and the seductive byways of contemporary writing in France. John Taylor is opinionated but his opinions are rigorously argued ones. He strikes a canny and productive balance among a variety of competing concerns: the will to instruct his readers, the desire to share with them some very real pleasures, the imperative to interpret critically, and so forth. What emerges here is the image of a rare reader, one who is always willing to engage literature on its own terms, and that of a literature that is mobile, ambitious, provocative and deeply invested in the process of becoming. -- Warren Motte, Review of Contemporary Fiction "In this great introduction to some 50 French writers and poets little known outside of France, Taylor (The Presence of Things Past; The World As It Is), winner of the Three Oaks Prize for Fiction, invites his readers on an interesting journey."--Library Journal "Here it is under one cover: a deeply informed, delightful, and provocative stroll' through the literature of postwar France. From the chroniques of Cingria to the mythologies of Barthes, John Taylor introduces us to the prose and poetry of dozens of French authors, many of them regrettably never translated into English. Taylor is a skillful and witty guide, able to locate a writer between the traditions of Catullus and Pavese or to identify a style borrowing equally from Hlderlin and Hemingway. Working across every genre from autobiography to poetry to fiction to travelogue to the essay, these French authors, well known and obscure, have plumbed the quintessential French problem' of subjectivity. Tired of the culture wars? The language-lyric debate? The post-game analysis of post-structuralism? I suggest you dive into any one of John Taylor's Paths' for a reminder of the astonishing breadth and depth and complexity of which literature is capable."--Erica Funkhouser, author, Pursuit "Here we have vast erudition revealed in graceful, arresting sentences, writing that provides confidence and pleasure. John Taylor's writing strongly evokes Henry James' writing about French literature in his own day. Like James, Taylor is both generous and astute, never relinquishing admiration for the intricate process of analysis, analysis that he does so penetratingly and eloquently. However brilliant Taylor's observations, behind them rests a deep esteem for the writer, for his or her work, and for the tradition from which it comes. This is critical writing that is satisfying at every single level."--Richard Goodman, author, French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France "As they stroll through forgotten quartiers of Paris, wander in memory through the fields of a Norman childhood, reflect on a poem's resemblance to the salt marshes of the Breton coast, mourn the death of a beloved young wife, or look for answers in questions to which the only answers are more questions--France's most celebrated and, in some cases, still uncelebrated contemporary writers are exquisitely captured by John Taylor in a prose both limpid and lapidary and through a host of finely wrought essays, each a small jewel of critical insight, poetic sensitivity, and meticulous interpretation. Like a message in a bottle cast up on the shore, this work offers the English-speaking reader an original and poetic way to understand, appreciate, and love French. (shrink)

In 1989, a literary landmark in New York City closed. Scribner’s Bookstore, 597 Fifth Avenue, stood at the epicentre of Manhattan’s retail district. The Scribner’s publishing company was then 153 years old. In the 1920s, driven by genius editor Max Perkins, Scribner’s published Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. Scribner’s Magazine was The New Yorker of its day. The bookshop and publisher occupied a 10-storey Beaux-Arts building, designed by Ernest Flagg, which eventually won protection from the New York City Landmarks Preservation (...) Commission. Medallions honoured printers Benjamin Franklin, William Caxton, Johann Gutenberg, and Aldus Manutius. The ‘Byzantine cathedral of books’ offered deeply informed personal service. But the paperback revolution gained momentum, bookshop chains like Barnes & Noble and Brentano’s adopted extreme discounting, and the no-discounting Scribner’s business model became unsustainable. Real estate developers swooped in. The bookshop’s ignominious end came when Italian clothier Benetton took over its space. (shrink)

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, emphasizes diagnosis and statistically significant commonalities in mental disorders. As stated in the Introduction, “[i]t must be admitted that no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of ‘mental disorder’ ” (DSM-IV, 1994, xxi). Further, “[t]he clinician using DSM-IV should ... consider that individuals sharing a diagnosis are likely to be heterogeneous, even in regard to the defining features of the diagnosis, and that boundary cases will be difficult to (...) diagnose in any but a probabilistic fashion” (DSM-IV, 1994, xxii). This article proposes that it may be helpful for clinicians to study narratives of illness which emphasize this heterogeneity over statistically significant symptoms.This paper examines the recorded experiences of unusually articulate sufferers of the disorder classified as Major Depression. Although sharing a diagnosis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Styron demonstrated different understandings of their illness and its symptoms and experienced different resolutions, which may have had something to do with the differing meanings they made of it.I have proposed a word, autopathography, to describe a type of literature in which the author's illness is the primary lens through which the narrative is filtered. This word is an augmentation of an existing word, pathography, which The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, defines as “a) [t]he, or a, description of a disease,” and “b) [t]he, or a, study of the life and character of an individual or community as influenced by a disease.” The second definition is the one that I find relevant and which I feel may be helpful to clinicians in broadening their understanding of the patient's experience. (shrink)

Where Men Hide is a spirited tour of the dark and often dirty places men go to find comfort, camaraderie, relaxation, and escape. Ken Ross's striking photographs and James B. Twitchell's lively analysis trace the evolution of these virtual caves, and question why they are rapidly disappearing. They find that for centuries men have met with each other in underground lairs and clubhouses to conduct business or to bond and indulge in shady entertainments. In these secret dens, certain rules are (...) abandoned while others are obeyed. Twitchell connects the places men hide with figures like Hemingway and Huck Finn, Frederick Jackson Turner's theory of the American frontier, and the mythological interpretations of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly. Documenting both traditional and contemporary male haunts, Twitchell and Ross examine the provenance, purpose, and appeal of this little-discussed and controversial phenomenon. (shrink)

Actually, I am not a person who likes to badmouth the United States. I like the Americans' frankness, I like Hemingway's works, and I prefer flying in a Boeing to flying in a Tupolev.

The psychological condition of being happy is best understood as a matter of a person's emotional condition. I elucidate the notion of an emotional condition by introducing two distinctions concerning affect, and argue that this “emotional state” view is probably superior on intuitive and substantive grounds to theories that identify happiness with pleasure or life satisfaction. Life satisfaction views, for example, appear to have deflationary consequences for happiness’ value. This would make happiness an unpromising candidate for the central element in (...) a theory of well-being, as it is in L. W. Sumner's work. Yet on an emotional state conception, happiness may prove to be a key constituent of well-being. the emotional state view also makes happiness less vulnerable to common doubts about the importance of happiness, and indicates that mood states are more important for well-being than is generally recognized.Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.Ernest Hemingway. (shrink)

In her excellent and comprehensive article, Friesen argues that utilising personal responsibility in healthcare is problematic in several ways: it is difficult to ascribe responsibility to behaviour; there is a risk of prejudice and bias in deciding which behaviours a person should be held responsible for; it may be ineffective at reducing health costs. In this short commentary, I will elaborate the critique of personal responsibility in health but suggest one way in which it could be used ethically. In doing (...) so, I will introduce the concepts of reasonable risk and golden opportunity. I previously argued that it is both difficult to disentangle responsibility and that we risk prejudice and bias in singling out behaviours that are socially disapproved of.1 So I am sympathetic to Friesen’s concerns. I also discussed another way in which ascribing personal responsibility for health is problematic which Friesen does not discuss and which, in my view, is the most concerning and further supports her arguments. It represents a back door assault on liberalism and neutrality towards concepts of the good life. Even if one were to accurately and in an unbiased way divine the personal contribution to disease, the greatest problem would remain: those who voluntarily take on risk would be penalised. That is, such a system would be risk-averse. Those lives which avoided risk would be prioritised, while those who chose to take on risky activities in their conception of the good life would be penalised. Yet risk is necessary, both for the good life, and social progress. Columbus, Edmund Hilary, Florence Nightingale, Ernest Hemingway and countless monumental figures in human history took risks in order to achieve something great. Should we aim for a society of trembling, teetotalling health nuts? Surely that prospect is horrific. It is horrific because it elevates health …. (shrink)

Few concepts are more central to ethics than love, but none is more subject to false consolation. This 1999 book explores several theological, philosophical and literary accounts of love, focusing on how it relates to matters such as self-interest and self-sacrifice, and invulnerability and immortality. Timothy Jackson first considers key aspects of what the Bible says about love, then he further examines the meaning of love and sacrifice through a close reading of novels by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Lastly, he (...) evaluates how love constrains, and is constrained by, other traditional moral concepts. Throughout, Jackson defends the moral priority of what the Christian tradition calls 'agape'. He argues that a proper understanding of agapic love rejects both moral relativism and the comfort of believing that good people cannot be harmed, or that God causally necessitates every historical action and event. When love is thus disconsoled, it neither fears death nor despises life. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is an undisputed giant of twentieth-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism combined with his creative and artistic flair have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion. This substantial and meticulously researched biography is accessible, fast-paced, often amusing and at times deeply moving. Existentialism and Excess covers (...) all the main events of Sartre's remarkable seventy-five-year life from his early years as a precocious brat devouring his grandfather's library, through his time as a brilliant student in Paris, his wilderness years as a provincial teacher-writer experimenting with mescaline, his World War II adventures as a POW and member of the resistance, his post-war politicization, his immense amphetamine fueled feats of writing productivity, his harem of women, his many travels and his final decline into blindness and old age. Along the way there are countless intriguing anecdotes, some amusing, some tragic, some controversial: his loathing of crustaceans and his belief that he was being pursued by a giant lobster, his escape from a POW camp, the bombing of his apartment, his influence on the May 1968 uprising and his many love affairs. Cox deftly moves from these episodes to discussing his intellectual development, his famous feuds with Aron, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty, his encounters with other giant figures of his day: Roosevelt, Hemingway, Heidegger, John Huston, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Khrushchev and Tito, and, above all, his long, complex and creative relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism and Excess also gives serious consideration to Sartre's ideas and many philosophical works, novels, stories, plays and biographies, revealing their intimate connection with his personal life. Cox has written an entertaining, thought-provoking and compulsive book, much like the man himself. (shrink)

Mad about it they still were, in 1926, when Hemingway's splendid spoofing appeared in The Sun Also Rises. But it was not everybody who had been responsible. It was mainly Anatole France, abetted by his almost unanimously enthusiastic critics. And of all his works, the one that must have seemed to fit the formula best was Thaïs, already a quarter of a century old when Jake Barnes learned of irony and pity. It is not a bad formula for the (...) effect of Thaïs, as formulas go. It is at least as useful—and at least as misleading—as "pity and fear" for tragedy. There is, however, a surprising difference. If I tell you the story of any classical tragedy, even in very brief form, you will know at once why someone might talk about that story using the terms "pity" and "fear." But if I tell you of the priest who lost his soul converting the prostitute, you will not be able to predict any determinate reaction—except perhaps that the story will have for everyone a slight bit of ironic wonder at the grand reversal. In other words, a teller will be able to turn such material almost any direction he chooses, making it into a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, a celebration of God's wonder and mystery—or a tale playing with pity and irony. Wayne C. Booth's most recent books are A Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. He is now completing a book on critical warfare and critical pluralism . A version of one chapter from that book, "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," will appear in the Spring issue of Critical Inquiry. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" , "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" , "Notes and Exchanges" , "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" , "Ten Literal ‘Theses’" , with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" , and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979". (shrink)

Georg Lukac's most recent work of literary criticism, on the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, hails the Russian author as a major force in redirecting socialist realism toward the level it once occupied in the 1920s when Soviet writers portrayed the turbulent transition to socialist society.In the first essay Lukacs compares the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to short pieces by "bourgeois" writers Conrad and Hemingway and explains the nature of Solzhenitsyn's criticism of the Stalinist (...) period implied in the situation, characters, and their interaction. He also briefly describes Matriona's House, An Incident at the Kretchetovka Station, and For the Good of the Cause -- stories that depict various aspects of life in Stalinist Russia.In the second, longer section, Lukacs greets Solzhenitsyn's novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward, which were published outside Russia, as representing "a new high point in contemporary world literature." These books mark Solzhenitsyn as heir to the best tendencies in postrevolutionary socialist realism and to the literary tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moreover, from the point of view of the development of the novel, Lukacs finds the Russian author to be a successful exponent of innovative methods originating in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.The central problem of contemporary socialist realism is a predominant theme in the book: how to come to critical terms with the legacy of Stalin. The enthusiasm with which Lukacs acclaims Solzhenitsyn will not surprise those who have followed his persistent refusal to endorse the so-called socialist realist writers of the Stalinist era. He outlines the aspects of Solzhenitsyn's creative method that allows him to cross the ideological boudaries of the Stalinist tradition, yet he finds a basic pessimism in Solzhenitsyn's work that makes him a "plebeian" rather than a socialist writer.Of Ivan Denisovich and the future of socialist realist literature, Lukacs urges: "If socialist writers were to reflect upon their task, if they were again to feel an artistic responsibiliity towards the great problems of the present, powerful forces could be unleashed leading in the direction of relevant socialist literature. In this process of transformation and renewal, which signifies an abrupt departure from the socialist realism of the Stalin era, the role of landmark on the road to the future falls to Solzhenitsyn's story.". (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)

contents: -/- 1. the Romantic fragment 2. life would want to die, a little 3. pain itself is the meaning, in Nietzsche 4. martyrs do not underrate the body 5. inwardly, an Actor prepares 5b. brother, bro: it's only you that overhears you 5c. J is like Hamlet / Herzog / Holden Caulfield / Raskolnikov 5d. they take him to a basement and they feed him METH 6. a surface is revealed / the depths are all inferred 6b. my Self (...) is all depth: a long internal vertical 6c. Joyce knows not the inside of ideas 6d. perception of depth is maladaptive 7. by knowing Death, humans are the Woken Ones 8. all as straw, or graphomania 8b. i tend to write thru / tho unless i'm imitating English 9. Finnegans Wake as Literature's endgame 10. Hard Realism: Hemingway, Knausgård 11. the cause of pain, in Buddhism 11b. duḥkha is uh-hukha: the gut's double throb. (shrink)

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

Trilling's "larger naturalism," acknowledging as it does the value of mystery and the power of fact, aligns him with Arnold and Freud and Forster in an effort to synthesize the legacies of the Enlightenment and of the Romantic movement: conscious of the authority of the imagination, he "never deceives himself into believing that the power of the imagination is sovereign, that it can make the power of circumstance of no account" ; committed to reason and to an ideal of rational (...) order, he is yet continuously aware of the limits of reason, of the rational intellect's potential tyranny over the emotions, of those forces within men and without which frustrate the mind's will to organize and control experience.1 And this "larger naturalism," with its emphasis upon "a social tradition," implicates Trilling in a particular view of the novel - a view which may be said to inform all of his thinking but which achieves its fullest and clearest expression in such well-known essays as "Manners, Morals and the Novel" and "Art and Fortune." "The novel," he remarks in the first of these polemics, "...is a perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research being always the social world, the material of its analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of man's soul” . · 1. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., makes substantially the same point in his superb and very nearly definitive account of Trilling's "Anxious Humanism" . Readers familiar with Professor Scott's study will recognize at once the deep and general indebtedness which I am pleased to acknowledge here. Tom Samet is an instructor in literature at Douglass College, Rutgers University. He is currently preparing essays on Henry James and on Conrad and Hemingway. "The Modulated Vision" is part of a study, in progress, of Lionel Trilling and the Anxieties of the Modern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.2 (2004) 393-405 [Access article in PDF] Decency and Its Discontents Richard Freadman La Trobe University In The Beginning of the Journey, Diana Trilling makes this rather shocking claim about her husband, Lionel: "In the dark recesses of his heart where unhappiness was so often his companion, he was contemptuous of everything in his life that was dedicated to seriousness and responsibility."1 Lionel had been dead (...) almost 20 years when a near blind Diana dictated this comment in her controversial auto/biography in the early 1990s. Of course he was revered for—among other things—precisely his qualities of intellectual "seriousness and responsibility." But Diana argued that Lionel had in effect settled for such sober virtues because for temperamental and other reasons he could not live the life he really craved—the life of a swashbuckling novelist, with all its recklessness, its refusal of compromise, even its moral waywardness. When Hemingway died Lionel wrote in his notebook: "who would suppose how much he haunted me? How much he existed in my mind—as a reproach? He was the only writer of our time I envied" (Beginning, p. 371). Lionel's critical discussions of Hemingway's fiction are judicious and qualified.2 He admired the uncompromising short story writer who was "passionately and aggressively concerned with truth" (SLS, p. 127), but found the work of the self-conscious "legend" (p. 125), writing in the first-person, ponderous and disappointing. It was not the prose that Lionel so wanted to emulate. It was the life; in particular, its power to release and nurture creativity. Diana continues: "It was to decency that Lionel felt he had sacrificed his hope of being a writer of fiction—conscience had not made a coward of him, it had made him a critic" (Beginning, p. 372). [End Page 393]Decency—how often we use the word. How seldom we ask what we mean by it. Usually it functions as a sort of guarantor term, like the caged canary in the coal mine. If the canary lives, the miners are judged to have fair air to breathe; if a person possesses certain qualities, or a society provides certain requisite conditions, we say the person is "decent," or that this is a "decent society." Yet remarkably few virtue ethicists have countenanced the possibility that decency might be counted among the virtues; that it might be the subject of substantive intellectual reflection; that we might investigate its relation to other virtues, its internal structure, its characteristic patterns and possibilities of existential investment. As John Kekes, one of the very few philosophers to have paid the notion serious philosophical attention, says: "Decency is generally admitted to be a good thing, but is not generally supposed to be particularly important."3In this short essay I attempt two linked undertakings: first, to offer a characterization of Decency—the term henceforth accorded a capital "D" to indicate its status as a moral virtue; second, to read aspects of Lionel Trilling's life and work, and Diana's late assessment of him, in the light of Decency, as I understand the term. I "Decent" seems to refer to a "state," a sort of moral condition a person is "in," and to a resultant orientation towards others. The "state" is one of modesty, even humility. The ego doesn't loom large or get in the way. The orientation is one of solicitude towards others. Decent people of this kind genuinely care about, feel for others. Unless they are given good reason to behave otherwise, their disposition towards others tends to be respectful; they bring to most situations an assumption that the other person is worthy, deserves to be taken seriously. Decency of this kind tends to be associated with receptiveness, relatedness, a patient openness to others, though it need not be passive.The word "decent" derives from the Latin, deceré—to become, to be fitting. It's been used in English since about the 1530s. From that period to the early twentieth century "decent" has generally indicated that something is fitting, appropriate, with respect to social rank... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 171-173 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding, by David Ellis; ix & 195 pp. New York: Routledge, 2000, $35. In his discussion of biography as a form, Ellis points to his study as a response to the scarcity of "monographs on biography... and [that] none of them are (...) particularly satisfactory" (p. 2). He further points out that "the comparative dearth of analytic enquiry into biography is surprising" (p. 3). In short, his first pages get off to a rocky start in their tatty justification of a critical study. Though a critic of D. H. Lawrence, Ellis uses the English writer sparingly, pointing out in his "Preface" what he feels is a need "to keep illustration involving Lawrence to a decent minimum" (p. viii) while concentrating on those problems which face the biographer. That said, he sets about to characterize biography as an integration of "a disinterested enthusiasm for information... [fashioning a]... compelling story in which many details with no direct relevance to the life of his subject can be considered as contributing successfully to a period atmosphere" (p. 35). Ellis is thinking specifically of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene through which he has brought to the discussion his intent of pointing to an approach which concerns itself with chapters on "Ancestors," "Primal Scenes," "Body Matters," "the Sociological [End Page 171] Imagination," "History, Chance and Self-determination," "Compatibility, Sartre and Long Biographies." All are aspects of biography.As well as the approach he suggests by these areas of concentration, Ellis draws broadly from many subjects of biography, always keeping a critical eye on its form. Anne Stevenson's approach "is towards psychological determinism" (p. 135); Ackroyd in his biography of Dickens raises "through a degree of intellectual play" the questions of when "lineage" is appropriate, that is, the extent to which it has any productive consequence. He also uses Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf as examples. Writing of the role of the historian raises difficulties for writers creating biographies from such an early period as that of Chaucer; Ellis points to Derek Pearsall's "excellent Life of Geoffrey Chaucer" (p. 121).Ellis neither can nor should ignore Lawrence and what better chapter to include him in than "Body Matters" in its concentration on illness. Here Ellis draws on Lawrence's concern with the harm of his health on his work (p. 78). He also considers Flaubert, Sartre, and Woolf. Briefly he mentions Stendhal's imagination of his "future audience" after his death (p. 109), sensibly rejects the long ago depleted and so, parenthetically, apparently permanent speculation on what Keats's might have become had he lived a full life "in a time of drugs for treatment of tuberculosis" (p. 123) and the equally mined issue of what prompted Hemingway's suicide (pp. 132-33). Certainly he is aware of the danger that such a use of material may pander to the pleasure of mere name-hunters (what if there were no index!). At the same time, if the effect of his range of examples invites additions of our own, while keeping before us that his study is about biography as form, it is successful.In "Primal Scenes," the fourth chapter of his book, Ellis gives what he feels is necessary space to Freud, the creator of the term. He points to Wordsworth's "spots of time" as only one indication of the difficulty--if not impossibility--of capturing biographically those moments in childhood by which the individual written about might be defined (p. 57). (Such an impossibility should not be surprising to those of us readers who recognize the nearly impossible task for ourselves in our own lives.) Surely both the biographer and autobiographer share this ignorance and frustration. In a very interesting move, Ellis points to Compton Mackenzie's discussion of a critical event in his six-year old life surrounding the interruption of an Easter evening with his parents and siblings, interrupted by the arrival of friends. Ellis writes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prufrock's Question and Roquentin's AnswerWilliam IrwinThere could not be two more different literary figures than the right-wing, religious T. S. Eliot and the left-wing, atheistic Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet there are striking connections between their first major publications, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) and Nausea (1938). Eliot was aware of and critical of Sartre, especially in the commentary on No Exit in The Cocktail Party, and, no (...) doubt, Sartre became aware of Eliot.1 But as far as can be gleaned, Sartre did not read Eliot's Prufrock, prior to the publication of Nausea, despite his connection to Adrienne Monnier, the French translator of the poem. Indeed Simone de Beauvoir documents the couple's reading habits in some detail in The Prime of Life, including their admiration for Hemingway and Faulkner during that time, but there is no mention of Eliot or Prufrock.2Both the poem and the novel present us with subjective, mood-laden impressions of the internal melancholic lives of their protagonists. Like Prufrock, Roquentin admits "My passion was dead."3Nausea is presented as a diary intended to be read by no one, and Prufrock is presented as a self-confession that no one is to hear. As Guido da Montefeltro in the poem's epigram is willing to speak to Dante because he believes Dante will never return to share what he has heard with the living, so Prufrock is solipsistically introspecting. The "you" of "Let us go then, you and I" is likely Prufrock addressing himself. But if it is addressed to another person, it can only be a reader who is as hopeless as he is, with no chance of return or redemption—only such a reader would really understand what is said. The final line of the poem "Till human voices wake us, and we drown" takes us back to the "patient etherized upon a table." Like Roquentin, Prufrock has taken himself and the reader [End Page 184] by proxy on an inner journey, a dream-like state in which the real and surreal come together.In the opening stanza of the poem, Prufrock describes his internal cityscape as including "Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question... / Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'" The question is mentioned twice more, but it is never articulated. Obviously it is an issue of great existential import concerning the meaning of life. Though Prufrock does not verbalize it, the question must be essentially Roquentin's question to himself: "Can you justify your existence then? Just a little?" (p. 177).As we shall see, even though Sartre's philosophy as developed in Nausea and crystallized in Being and Nothingness comes later and likely with no knowledge of Prufrock, the philosophy can still shed light on the poem—and in a way that in turn elucidates the philosophy.4IMeaning for Sartre is found in existence itself, emerging through the coloring and conceptualization of consciousness.5 While this does not necessarily imply the stereotypical existential view that life is bleak, meaningless, and possibly not worth living, this does nevertheless seem to be the conclusion that Roquentin draws early in Nausea. Consider this dark concern: "My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?" (p. 86). Early in the novel Roquentin concludes "Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition" (p. 39). This life as Roquentin describes it sounds eerily like the humdrum pointless existence of Prufrock, who has measured out his life with coffee spoons and spit out the butt-ends of his days and ways amidst the monotony of women who come and go talking of Michelangelo—a great man he resembles not at all.Later in the novel Roquentin admits "And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put... (shrink)

DURRELL BOWMAN suggests that Ayn Rand's influence on Neil Peart's lyrics mainly existed in a few science-fiction and technology-oriented works from the mid-1970s to the early-1980s. Peart's individualism in the 1980s had at least as much to do with Hemingway, Faulkner, religious imagery , and other influences. Many of his lyrics suggest "left-wing libertarianism," random contingencies, science, nature, the environment, relationships, and even humor. In any case, Peart's copious reading and varied lyrics contradict Rand as his "major influence.".

Collections demand great care. In any attempt to select, sift, and/or package the literary efforts of a major literary figure, whatever is included will be debated and found wanting. For example, what short stories of Ernest Hemingway or sonnets of William Shakespeare or pithy comments of Winston Churchill would make up a selected collection? The choices and possibilities are numerous, and the possible repercussions mind bending. Arguments are sure to ensue, and even like-minded advocates will fiercely debate the inclusion (...) or exclusion of a specific work.Renowned French mathematician Jules Henri Poincare mused to colleague Lord Bertrand Russell that “Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a... (shrink)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have?Amihud GileadOf the best shortest story, we have only tales. According to one of them, Ernest Hemingway was proud of being the author of a story written in merely six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." He considered this as his best story.1 Interviewing Gary Paulsen, Lori Atkins Goodson heard another version:Probably the best writing ever done was by (...) class='Hi'>Hemingway and several other writers—I think it was in North Africa. During a drunken discussion, somebody said that they should write the best and shortest story they could write. They all had stories. Hemingway came up with six words: "For sale: Baby shoes. Never used."... Isn't that great? That's all there is. Six words. There's a book, there's a movie, there's a short story, there's a poem—anything you want to do with those six words, you can do it. It's just amazing what you can do with your words.2I greatly prefer the first version to the second despite its musicality or semi-rhythm. The minor colon is better than the major full stop and the capital letters. The whole story is genuinely minor in tone, and its great power rests upon this tone. "Used" is much less evocative and more commercially practical than "worn." "Used" draws the attention to the shoes, whereas "worn" intimately relates to the dead baby. Yes indeed, these six words can initiate a book, a feature movie, and the like; yet, as you will see below, I prefer to think about a whole world centered around, or arising out of, Hemingway's six words. Whether his six-words story is the shortest ever written is quite a different question, which will not be discussed in this paper.A very short story may comprise more than six words, say, seventeen, [End Page 119] such as the following: "The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door" ("Knock" by Fredric Brown).3Which of these two stories is the better? The shorter one, Hemingway's story in the first version. Why? Not only because there is not a single superfluous word or, even, a letter or punctuation mark; each word, each mark must be there, each is necessary for the story. Hemingway's six words create or initiate a whole story, actually a universe, of sorrow, bereavement, mourning, solitude, silence, untimely death, despair, loss, and tragedy.4 Thus, each word in this story gets the utmost meaningfulness or significance that a word may have. Hemingway's story shows us a tragic world of dread "in a handful of" six words, each of which is very simple. In contrast, although Brown's story bears a lot of tension and it is quite enigmatic (Who is knocking on the door? God, the Devil, an alien? Or is it simply a hallucination?), it conveys much less in seventeen words than do Hemingway's six. Brown's seventeen words do not create or reveal a world, let alone a universe. They create some tension, perhaps a thrill, possibly an enigma but not a world. There is certainly some puzzle that the reader may attempt to solve, but not much more.Even in this respect, Hemingway's story is more enigmatic: What is the purpose of the sale of this baby's shoes? Is there some hope that what cannot be used for the lost baby will be useful for another, living baby? Or is it the stinginess of the dead baby's parents or relatives? Or is it their poverty that forces them to sell even these little shoes? Or is it their wish not to possess these shoes any longer despite their great significance? Regarding this last possibility, it is more suitable to sell them than to throw them away. In any of these possibilities, the shoes have some value. And the enigma under discussion is certainly tragic in any of these possibilities.In contrast, Brown's story suggests merely a puzzle, not a tragic enigma. Such a puzzle may be found even in pulp fiction, not in fine writing, whereas... (shrink)

Many proponents and opponents of the Corrida de Toros agree in describing the practice as a sacrifice. This surprising agreement is compounded by a further agreement that the sacrificial victim is the bull. In what follows, I contest both points. Beginning with the later, I argue that the victim is not the bull but the torero, especially the matador. Rather than seeing the corrida as the sacrifice of the bull, it is the deferred sacrifice of the torero, and the crowd (...) is on the side of the victim. Moreover, I argue that once the victim status of the matador has been appreciated, it can serve as the foundation for a new interpretation of... (shrink)