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

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed on (...) a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

The 18th-century French political theorist the Baron de Montesquieu described honour as the ‘principle’ – or animating force – of a well-functioning monarchy, which he thought the appropriate regime type for an economically unequal society extended over a broad territory. Existing literature often presents this honour in terms of lofty ambition, the desire for preference and distinction, a spring for political agency or a spur to the most admirable kind of conduct in public life and the performance of great (...) deeds. Perhaps so. But it also seems to involve quite a bit of what the contemporary philosopher Aaron James calls ‘being an asshole’, and the article will explore what happens to Montesquieu’s political theory of monarchy – which is foundational for an understanding of modern politics – when we reverse the usual perspective and consider it through the lens of the arsehole aristocracy. (shrink)

The rise of transrealism in the second half of the twentieth century embellished the literary landscape in America with a new mode of expression that offered new understanding of time, space, identity, and social values and norms. This study situates the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano within this literary context to map out the qualities that distinguish it as a transrealistic fiction. We argue that through innovative coalescence of fantasy and realism, this postmodern novel provides a satirical commentary against (...) the incongruities of the contemporary American society. To analyse the novel, we employ Rudy Rucker’s theorisations of the movement that delineates the transrealist manifesto as a union of realism, fantasy, and science-fiction. The findings reveal that through a satirical representation of the current advancements in technology and their inevitably negative impact on human life and society, the novel provides a dystopian picture of modern life in America. This apocalyptic sentiment is reinforced through a creative convergence of the surreal features of science-fiction, the tropes of naturalistic realism, and the elements of satire that together help to accentuate the deficiencies and ironies of the modern American society as well as the rampant misuse of technology by both individuals and authorities. (shrink)

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

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

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

An examination of the rise in prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model during the late eighteenth century.

Jeffrey Church's book Nietzsche's Culture of Humanity is a flawed but nonetheless significant contribution to the still fairly scant Anglophone literature on Nietzsche's early works. The book argues for two major intertwined theses and a third, less central one. The first thesis is that Nietzsche distinguishes between two types or layers of culture: national culture, which Nietzsche characterizes in §1 of the first essay of UM as "unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a (...) people," and cosmopolitan culture, which consists in the "republic of genius" that stretches across nations and eras. Church's second thesis, advertised in the book's subtitle, is that the early Nietzsche is not as much of an... (shrink)

The history of the concept of “religion” in Western tradition has intrigued scholars for years. This important collection of eighteen essays brings further light to the ongoing debate. Three of the invited participants, W.C. Smith, M. Despland and E. Feil, has each previously written impressive books treating this subject; the last two acknowledged the impact and continuing influence of Smith’s work, The Meaning and End of Religion. An introduction and a recapitulation of Smith’s contribution as a scholar set the stage (...) for a retrospective look at the published literature. Contributors then examine the transformation of words (the classical religio to the modern religion), particularities of religion in nineteenth-century France, Troeltsch’s concept of religion, the study of religion from an Asian point of view and the categorization of “World Religions.” The concluding essays elaborate contemporary anthropological, cross-disciplinary, semiological, deconstructive and psychoanalytical methodological approaches to the concept and study of “religion.” Exploring critically different aspects of the concept and study of religion, these provocative essays typically reflect the methodological pluralism currently existing in the field of Religious Studies. Of interest to scholars and students alike, this collection also contains a complete bibliography of W.C. Smith’s publications. (shrink)

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

Scandals involving celebrities’ moral transgressions are common in both Western and Eastern cultures. Existing literature, however, has been primarily based on Western cultures. We examine differences between South Korea and the United States in consumers’ support for celebrities engaged in moral transgressions and for the brands they endorse. Across six studies, we find that Korean consumers show lower support for celebrities who engaged in moral transgressions. This effect occurs because Korean consumers have a stronger belief that an individual’s competence (...) and morality are interconnected. Thus, Korean consumers are less likely to separate their judgments of celebrities’ morality and competence in professional performance, thereby lowering support for the celebrities. Building on the proposed mechanism, we identify the moderating role of transgression relevance. When a moral transgression is relevant to the domain of the celebrity’s professional competence, the difference in celebrity support between the two countries is attenuated. This difference extends to the support for a brand endorsed by the celebrity transgressor when the brand retains the celebrity endorser, but not when the brand dismisses the endorser. (shrink)

The essay is a phenomenological study of Russian literature as a point of critique of two lifeworlds: the traditional Russian Feudalism with its “decadent” aristocracy, and the modern Western Enlightenment with its values, specifically the “subjective” construction of val-uations of all environment and human activities. Russian writers, from Turgenev all the way to Gogol found themselves between those two worlds and sought an answer which of them answers the existential question of human self-worth as an “eidetic” criterion of (...) all values and life worlds, given in direct awareness. Self-worth does not belong to the world of categories, but is apparent in active commitments, such as being truthful, honorable, other and self respect‒dimensions absent among modern values.El ensayo es un estudio fenomenológico de la literatura rusa como un punto de crítica de dos mundos: el Feudalismo ruso tradicional con su aristocracia "decadente" y la Ilustración occidental moderna con sus valores —concretamente, la construcción "subjetiva" de evaluaciones de todo tipo de ambiente y actividades humanas. Los escritores rusos, desde Turgenev hasta Gogol, se encontraron entre esos dos mundos y buscaron una respuesta que respondiera a la cuestión existencial de la auto-estima humana como un criterio "eidético" de todos los valores y mundos de la vida, dado en conciencia directa. La autoestima no pertenece al mundo de las categorías, sino que se manifiesta en los compromisos activos, tales como ser veraz, ser honorable, respeto propio y ajeno —dimensiones ausentes entre los valores modernos. (shrink)

Many studies demonstrate that finding meaning in life reduces stress and promotes physical and psychological well-being. However, extant literature focuses on meaning in life among the general population in their daily lives. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the mechanisms of how individuals living in life-threatening and stressful situations obtain meaning in life, by investigating the mediating roles of leisure crafting and gratitude. A total of 465 Army soldiers from the Republic of Korea participated in two-wave surveys with a (...) 2-week interval. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that the direct effects between the search for meaning, presence of meaning, leisure crafting, and gratitude were significant, except for the direct relationship between the search for meaning and the presence of meaning, and between leisure crafting and the presence of meaning. We tested indirect effects using a Monte Carlo approach and found that leisure crafting and gratitude sequentially mediated the relationship between the search for meaning and the presence of meaning. Our findings highlight the importance of the motivation behind searching for meaning, the proactive use of leisure time, and gratitude for individuals in stressful situations and controlled lifestyles. Finally, we discuss the implications and limitations of this research and future research directions. (shrink)

In classifications of vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary size and depth have often been separately conceptualized (Schmitt, 2014). Although size and depth are known to be substantially correlated, it is not clear whether they are a single construct or two separate components of vocabulary knowledge (Yanagisawa & Webb, 2020). This issue has not been addressed extensively in the literature and can be better examined using structural equation modeling (SEM), with measurement error modeled separately from the construct of interest. The current study (...) reports on conventional and Bayesian SEM approaches (e.g., Muthén & Asparouhov, 2012) to examine the factor structure of the size and depth of second language vocabulary knowledge of Japanese adult learners of English. A total of 255 participants took five vocabulary tests. One test was designed to measure vocabulary size in terms of the number of words known, while the remaining four were designed to measure vocabulary depth in terms of word association, polysemy, and collocation. All tests used a multiple-choice format. The size test was divided into three subtests according to word frequency. Results from conventional and Bayesian SEM show that a correlated two-factor model of size and depth with three and four indicators, respectively, fit better than a single-factor model of size and depth. In the two-factor model, vocabulary size and depth were strongly correlated (r =.945 for conventional SEM and.943 for Bayesian SEM with cross loadings), but they were distinct. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable (...) - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

Aristocracy of sex -- Industrial aristocracy -- Expertocracy -- Mass and elite politics -- Democratic religion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Matthew S. Santirocco JUSTICE IN SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE Sophocles' Antigone is most often apprehended in terms of conflicts, an approach which the play does indeed invite. The personal clash of Antigone and Creon generates conflicts on many different levels— political (individual or family vs. state, aristocracy vs. democracy), theological (gods vs. men), philosophical (nature vs. law or convention), sexual (woman vs. man), even chronological (young vs. old). However, insofar (...) as no list can ever be so inclusive as the play itself, all such discussions tend by their very nature to be reductionist. And even if a balanced critique were possible at this level, a tragedy is not the sum of abstract conflicts; it is theatre, people in action. Furthermore, the conflict approach encourages us to ask the wrong questions. Although conflict need not imply resolution, critics persist in searching for it. Yet there is no resolution in the Antigone except by death. Similarly, such an approach invites us to ask who is right, Antigone or Creon. But in a very real sense this question misses Sophocles' point. Relevant, perhaps, to versions by Anouilh and Brecht, the question misleads when applied to the ancient play. It is interesting that we oversimplify, for Sophocles' sympathies are more expansive and complex than these modern interpretations of his myth. For all these reasons a valid alternative approach to the play may be to consider it not in terms of the conflicts incarnated in the personalities but rather in terms of one theme in the context of which all the conflicts are played out. The precise issue here, as so often in Greek tragedy, is a philosophical one. As the religious thought of an earlier era was yielding to judicial and political thought, and as older heroic ideals were being supplanted by a rationalistic view of man, tragedy's function in fifth-century Athens was, in part at least, to expose and explore these cultural displacements, either by affirming traditional values and concepts or else by questioning their continued validity. One such concept, perhaps the most recurrent in tragedy, 180 Matthew S. Santirocco181 is justice, dike. Originally a term used to refer to things as they are, dike came also to acquire a normative sense, things as they ought to be. At different times and in different contexts the word can signify custom or usage, law-enforcing authority, penalty, and ofcourse "justice" as a higher standard. Its precise semantic range is wide and fluctuating. Thus tragedy becomes, in a sense, a matter of vocabulary. In the Antigone the characters appeal to justice, but each defines it differently, so that the conflict is not so much between justice and injustice as between one sort of justice and another. The Oresteia of Aeschylus had earlier celebrated the transition from vendetta justice to courtroom justice. The Antigone, however, focuses not so much on the changes in dike as on a question these changes raise, namely the very possibility of dike. The establishment of the law court brought Aeschylus' trilogy to a resolved ending. Sophocles' vision in the Antigone is much more austere. Although he acknowledges the existence of an ideal of justice, he exposes the tensions and ambiguities inherent in it and thereby questions whether that ideal can ever be realized in the lives of men. II A key text concerning justice is contained in one of the choral odes. But can it be trusted? The tragic chorus is not, after all, the mouthpiece of the poet as was the comic chorus in Aristophanes' parabaseis. Nor is it always or necessarily the mouthpiece of the audience, SchlegeFs "ideal spectator." In the Antigone, as elsewhere, the chorus simply constitutes a panel of the population (here, of Thebes) and its perspective on the action is, if not omniscient, not particularly partisan either. Gordon Kirkwood has demonstrated the many dramatic functions of the Sophoclean chorus, including its ambiguities. In the Antigone no fewer than three odes are ambiguous, leaving in doubt the identity of the one who has disturbed order and right (332-75), who has violated the will of heaven (582-625), and whose mind has been perverted by love (781-816). Although the chorus may not be aware of the... (shrink)

This Introduction to a Journal of Consciousness Studies Special Issue on Monist Alternatives to Physicalism summarises some of the basic problems of Physicalism and common fallacies in arguments for its defence that are found in the philosophical and scientific literature. It then introduces six monist alternatives: 1) a form of emergent panpsychism developed by William Seager; 2) a novel introduction to the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead by Anderson Weekes; 3) a review of current developments in Russellian Monism by (...) Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa; 4) an analysis of dual-aspect monism and its relation to quantum mechanics originally proposed developed by Pauli and Jung and given a modern interpretation by Harald Atmanspacher; 5) a form of processing monism that might help to resolve ontological differences in Indian philosophy and psychology between dualist Samkya Yoga and nondualist Advaita Vedanta by K. Ramakrisna Rao; and 6) an account of Reflexive Monism, which, viewed as a global system, can incorporate many of the seemingly opposed “isms” that currently populate Consciousness Studies by Max Velmans. Whatever the fundamental nature of Nature might be, it must have the power to give rise to its observable manifestations. Consequently, all the papers in this issue are concerned to give a “natural” account of the relationships among consciousness, mind, and the material world that is entirely consistent with the findings of science, and they all accept that for a unified understanding, mind, consciousness and the material world must have a common base. The aim of the Special Issue is to contribute to a deeper understanding of that base, and to stimulate novel thinking about its nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 221-223 [Access article in PDF] John J. Conley. The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 222. Cloth, $39.95. The rediscovery of forgotten women philosophers began in the 1970s and has yielded important results by broadening substantially the intellectual history of early modern Europe. In The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers (...) in Neoclassical France, John J. Conley expands even more the corpus of philosophical texts written by women to include five authors whose work has never been considered in this context. Five salonnières, traditionally considered the authors of light literature, are the subject of Conley's book. By expanding the "map of philosophy sites and genres" (159), Conley has looked beyond the university setting and beyond the female philosophers associated with the major male figures of [End Page 221] the period. He argues that the salon produced important female philosophers whose intellectual power was especially revealed in their highly original consideration and discussion of virtue and whose work provides an alternative to the philosophy produced by the canonical male authors of the seventeenth century.As he explores the moral philosophies of Sablé, Deshoulières, Sablière, Vallière, and Maintenon, Conley shows us how the salon promoted experimentation with alternative methods of philosophical analysis. Specifically, the salon produced philosophical arguments that were "characterized more by debate and by epigrammatic commentary than by the lecture and the treatise" (158). It promoted new methods of argument and focused thematically on moral issues.The works of the Jansenist Madame de Sablé rely on the maxime, the literary genre associated most closely with salon culture. In her Maximes, Sablé engages in moral psychology to offer a critique of aristocratic society. She writes about the pride and self-interest that defines this milieu, and she draws a clear distinction between a physical aristocracy (based on blood and rank) and a spiritual aristocracy of the virtuous. For this author, the essential trait of the individual is moral identity, not family or heritage.The poetry and philosophy of Madame Deshoulières is rooted in naturalism and inspired by the works of Lucretius and Gassendi. For her, virtue involves "an ecological reverence for the material world" (49). She addressed the vice and confusion that come from human misconceptions about nature. In particular, the human refusal to accept mortality reflects a broader refusal to accept the materialist nature of human beings. The belief in human superiority and immortality constitutes an attack on nature and explains human efforts to dominate nature. The belief in human immortality in turn raises issues of morality because it produces in humans hubris and the consequent mistreatment of the animal world and material environment. For Deshoulières virtue involves reverence for the material world.With Sablière the ethical person is the "redeemed saint, the sinner freed to a life of charity by the sovereign action of God and summoned to a particular set of moral duties in the midst of austere prayer" (94-95). Her maxims refer ultimately to spiritual abandonment to the will of God, and Sablière combines a deeply mystical piety, shaped by contact with Quietism, and the idea of the sovereignty of God, derived from Augustinian theology. The individual is dependent upon God's grace, and to live a moral life requires serious contemplation and communication with God and pyschological detachment from self, a relationship that springs from God's initiative.La Vallière also interprets virtue in an Augustinian vein, but her approach to virtue does not insist on abandonment of the world. She writes about knowing God through the experiences of repentance and conversion. Her Reflections on the Mercy of God is a dialogue with God on the part of repentent female voice. Her voice is definitely gendered, and she witnesses to God's mercy.Finally, Conley shows us in turn that the salonnières brought to their discussion of virtue an interest in etiquette and manners that derived from the distinctive experiences of women. Here the... (shrink)

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer viable, coherent accounts of ethics? Or are our social and intellectual worlds too fragmented for any broad consensus about the moral life? These issues have emerged as some of the most contentious in literary and philosophical studies. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the reconceptualisations involved in this 'turn towards ethics'. An important feature of this has been a renewed interest (...) in the literary text as a focus for the exploration of ethical issues. Exponents of this trend include Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, the latter a contributor and a key figure in this volume. This book assesses the significance of this development for ethical and literary theory and attempts to articulate an alternative postmodern account of ethics which does not rely on earlier appeals to universal truths. (shrink)

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

Numinous spaces in British literature from William Wordsworth to Samuel Beckett -- Jesus figures in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Edward Albee -- Using Bakhtin's definitions to discover ethical voices in Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy -- René Girard's categories of scapegoats in literature of the American South -- Hopkins's metaphysics of nature as sacred disclosure -- The book of job as mirrored in Hopkins's metaphysics -- Beckett's mythos of the absence of God.

Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 120-123.

Many works of fiction include portraits in their storyworlds. Some of these portraits are themselves fictional, such as the portrait of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel. Others are real, such as the Darnley portrait of Elizabeth I in A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden. When authors invent portraits, they expect us to visualise them. When they refer to real portraits, they exploit our familiarity with how they actually look. Like representations of other real entities in fiction, references (...) to real portraits function to ground the story in the real world. But portraits are more than material entities; they are also representational in their own right. In contrasting the ways real portraits are used in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, I argue that authors can be criticised when they mischaracterise the representational features of real portraits. (shrink)

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

Aims to improve an understanding of the theoretical issues in response to the influence of fiction. Four things in narrative unreliability; Relation between narration in literary fictions and film; Comprehension of narrative essentially a matter of intentional inference; Fictions misdescribed; Asymmetry between literature and film; Ambiguity and unreliability; Implied author and narrator.

An analysis of the treatment of time in literature and its relationship to science and philosophy. Since the consciousness of time seems to the author to have greatly increased in contemporary culture, he refers primarily to such twentieth-century authors as Proust, Joyce and Mann.--A. R.

Relationalität und Selbstdiskursivierung in den lebens -- und Sozialwissenschaften -- Selbstreflexion und Relationalität in der literatur.