In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Of Literary Universals:Ninety-Five ThesesPatrick Colm Hogan1. There is no such thing as human culture or human cultural difference without human universality.1 (A parallel point about understanding human cultural difference was made by Donald Davidson.2) Alternatively, cultural difference is variation on human universality.2. It follows that every area of a culture manifests human universality. (Otherwise, those cultural areas would not exist.) It does not follow that all areas (...) of culture are found in all cultures. The empirical study of literature, an area of some cultures, would not exist if it did not manifest human universality. It does not follow that the empirical study of literature exists in all cultures.3. The presence of verbal art in any given culture—thus the determination of whether verbal art is found in all cultures—is dependent on the investigator's definition of the term "verbal art," not on the presence or absence of a parallel term in the culture being investigated. "Verbal art" is no different from any other term or phrase in this respect. We would not conclude that there is no color orange in a place that does not have a word parallel to "orange" or that there is no astigmatism in societies without ophthalmology—or that the English do not experience ennui or Schadenfreude.On Communicative Speech4. To understand or even isolate verbal art, we must first understand the general purposes and properties of communicative speech.5. Communicative speech aims at producing some mental alteration in an addressee. That change commonly has some direct or indirect action as its desired outcome. For example, suppose I am building [End Page 145] a house with Wittgenstein and I say "Plank!" My aim is to produce a mental change in Wittgenstein that will result in him retrieving a plank and bringing it to me.6. Action commonly involves a set of generative principles for bodily motion or mental deliberation, a set of regulative principles for adjusting the motion or deliberation, and a set of motives for initiating the motion or deliberation.7. Communicative speech, then, commonly aims at fostering emotions and ideas or representations that, in combination, activate and specify generative principles for action in an addressee. (The emotion may be very weak—for example, a mild aversion to being uncooperative.) It may involve regulative principles as well.8. Verbal art—as I am using the phrase—also aims at producing a mental alteration in an addressee. However, that mental alteration is not, in the first place, governed by the overarching goal of effecting a particular actional outcome. Thus it is not designed to engage generative rules for action or to trigger emotions that motivate such action.9. Rather, verbal art is commonly designed to communicate regulative principles for action and to inspire emotions that do not have direct actional outcomes in the case at hand.10. There are two sorts of regulative principles that figure prominently in both ordinary life and verbal art—ethical and prudential. They constitute the thematic or didactic aspect of verbal art, an aspect noted in every major tradition of literary theory—European, South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern/North African.311. Here and in other cases, individual works of verbal art need not share all universal properties or share them all in the same degree.Rather, all cultural traditions have a body of works of verbal art that, as a whole, have these properties.On Emotion12. Any sort of emotion may occur in verbal art. Indeed, verbal art involves all varieties of emotion.13. However, verbal art is not about the addressee himself or herself. Therefore a literary work does not inspire narrowly egocentric emotions in its audience. It inspires empathic emotions.14. Empathic emotion may be a function of situational particularity or of group identity. In situational empathy, we share a person's or character's emotion insofar as we have been in a parallel situation. [End Page 146] The shared feeling is based on emotional memories. In group-identity empathy, we share a person's or character's feelings because we tacitly understand him or her as sharing our identity. This shared feeling is, then... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 202-217 [Access article in PDF] Literary Universals and the Sciences of the Mind Jonathan Gottschall St. Lawrence University The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion, by Patrick Hogan; 302 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, $65.00. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists, by Patrick Hogan; 244 pp. New York: Routledge, 2003, $19.95. I Two (...) recent books by Patrick Colm Hogan deserve attention for all they get right and, to a lesser but important extent, for where they go wrong. Hogan is among the most accomplished members of an expanding group of humanistic scholars who are assimilating and putting to use the most promising models of human potential taking shape in the human sciences. By drawing on theory and research in cognitive and brain sciences, evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cross-cultural anthropology, this group is finally beginning to push literary studies beyond defunct tabula rasa and psychoanalytic theories of human potential that have served as the main foundations for the elaboration of literary theory over recent decades.1 Varieties of hard social constructivism and psychoanalysis have continued to dominate thought in the humanities, despite the fact that those theories have lost all credibility in the human sciences.2 Hogan's books provide a preview of the kinds of theoretical models that will fill the vacuum once literary scholars fully assimilate [End Page 202] the news that stubbornly fashionable constructivist and psychoanalytic theories of human potential are obsolete.In Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts Hogan presents an accessible introduction to the exploration of the arts from the perspective of cognitive science. As a literary scholar, his main concerns are with literature, written and oral, but his conviction that cognitive science can illuminate all of the arts is clearly indicated in examples from painting, music, and film. The writing is pitched at a level appropriate for the general reader, and no prior reading in cognitive science is assumed. The introductory chapters provide an overview of the broad outlines of theory and research in cognitive science to date, and explain the types of problems the arts raise from the perspective of cognitive science. The middle chapters examine aspects of art making and consumption in light of specific issues that have been important in cognitive study. These chapters focus primarily on artistic creativity, metaphor, literary universals, audience response, and literary emotion. The final chapter considers attempts to explain why human cognitive architecture takes the precise form it does, and includes an extended skeptical critique of the source of the most influential explanations: evolutionary psychology. Hogan's critique of evolutionary psychology is important and I will discuss it at length later in the review.Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts will be welcomed by any reader who wants to better understand basic developments in cognitive science and their potential importance to the study of literature and the arts. It is addressed mainly to the uninitiated and is thus suitable for upper-level literary theory and criticism courses. The Mind and its Stories is a more ambitious volume that seeks (1) to clear the way for the reestablishment of a revamped research program in literary universals, (2) to show how literary data bears on important questions in cognitive science and psychology, and (3) to present a specific hypothesis about the proliferation of certain plot structures in world literature.In The Mind and Its Stories Hogan does nothing less than restore the political and intellectual respectability of the study of literary universals. The Mind and Its Stories begins where it must, with a cogent critique of the most common objection to the development of a sustained research program in literary universals: the largely unexamined conviction that the identification of human universals (in literature and other fields) almost necessarily supports doctrines of inequality that justifies one group's domination of others. Hogan exposes the fundamental illogic of this position, which holds essentially that theories of human equality [End Page 203] are too dangerous to entertain because they might serve to prop up... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 450-470 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?Jonathan Gottschall Washington and Jefferson College (JG)Marcus Nordlund * Göteborg University (MN)ITo love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think (...) constantly about him or her, and to discover that one's own life priorities have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.But is this intense emotional experience a universal experience, something that is characteristically and quintessentially human, or is it merely a sociocultural construct that belongs to a particular time and place? On this point there is less agreement, both within and between different academic disciplines. The audacious question we want to raise in the pages that follow is whether literature—or more specifically, a large-scale, multiple-coder content analysis of thousands of folk tales drawn from different parts of the planet—can contribute something to this difficult question about love, culture, and human nature.Let us first look briefly at the theoretical problem that we aim to address. A widespread view among literary scholars and social scientists over the last decades has been that romantic love is a social construction specific to Western culture. This is part of a relentless skepticism [End Page 450] toward assumptions that important categories of human psychology and emotion—romantic and parental love, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—are "natural" rather than constructed. This position is often, if not always, linked to an ideological concern to demystify (or at least problematize) what is perceived as an essentially destructive or oppressive emotion or belief. Taking her cue from Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn Friedman gives no less than ten reasons why it may be problematic for women to fall in love with men. 1Of course, no argument of any kind can be strictly ideological in nature since it always involves empirical assumptions—either explicit or implicit—about the nature of things. For example, the psychoanalyst E. S. Persons opines that the "best evidence that romantic love is not hard-wired into the emotional repertoire of humanity but is a cultural construct is the fact that there are so many cultures in which it is virtually absent." 2 Another frequent argument for love's constructedness has been that "there is no definition that describes love throughout the ages or across cultures." 3In some literary-critical accounts, it is even argued that romantic love is a cultural invention that can be traced back with precision to the courtly troubadour culture of twelfth-century France. 4 According to yet another school, represented by the influential literary theorist Jonathan Culler, "the notion of romantic love (and its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation." 5While the social constructivist position on romantic love typically involves a strong commitment to cultural specificity, a weaker version is held even by some cognitive theorists who grant more to biology and panhuman traits. From the perspective of their communicative theory of emotion, Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley argue that the "components [of romantic love] exist separately in different societies, but their integration into a recognizable complex is a cultural accomplishment [by the West]." 6At the other end of the romantic love continuum we find those who argue that this emotion belongs to a universal human nature: or, more specifically, that it can be attributed to specialised neural circuits whose ultimate purpose is to enhance reproductive success. Not surprisingly, this has been a favorite position among evolutionary psychologists, and it has recently received some support from neuroscientific studies.For example, the neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim to have uncovered a "functionally specialised system" that lights up in fMRI (magnetic resonance) scans of brains whose owners claim to... (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. (...) The book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

This work is typical of the cautious approach to metaphysical problems by the new breed of Oxonian analysts. Unlike Wittgenstein and his early followers, they do not believe metaphysics deals solely with pseudo-problems that will evaporate with a clearer understanding of how ordinary language functions. Rather they believe, as is the case with scientists evaluating various theoretical models, a cost/benefit analysis of the more meaningful solutions philosophers have given to important metaphysical problems will lead to a clarification of the merits (...) and weaknesses of each and hence lend some measure of probability to one's preferential options. This third approach by David Armstrong to the problem of universals falls in this literary genre. As a volume in the new "Focus Series," it is designed to provide case studies of this key philosophical problem for a special clientele or class of students--those advanced undergraduates or philosophy majors in schools where contemporary analytical writings in the Oxford tradition are still the basis of the curriculum. As such it is broader in scope than his two previous works, intended to introduce its readers to views other than his own. Since the neo-metaphysicians that draw their inspiration from Oxford are cautious about the lasting value of their work, still less will their writings be suitable for courses in the history of philosophy or useful for a core curriculum in schools where philosophical analysis is not the dominant orientation. But where that approach to philosophy still prevails, as at Armstrong's University of Sydney, or many other Anglo-American universities, this work will undoubtedly fill a needed gap not covered by other survey courses of a more general nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ancient Quarrel Revisited:Literary Theory and the Return to EthicsJoseph G. KronickThe modern quarrel between theory and practice, like the ancient one between philosophy and poetry, is at once a practical one—at its heart is the question how we should live—and a pedagogical one—who or what is the proper teacher of virtue? Today, the quarrel is between theory and literature rather than between philosophy and poetry, a change (...) that has not been beneficial. The modern complaint against the abstractions of theory reflects a diminution in the quality of the argument. For the ancient Greeks, to ask about the virtuous life was to inquire into what it is to be human, for aretê, which is typically translated as "virtue," but is understood to mean "excellence" or "goodness," meant acting in accordance with what it is to be fully human. 1 The notion that "real issues," as one prominent theorist argues, belong to the realm of action and epistemological and ontological questions to the abstract realm of theory is a simplification of the more serious question of the relation of particulars to universals. It reverses the Platonic and Aristotelian hierarchy that makes thinking the highest form of activity. But something else is going on in this call to action: in denigrating thinking as abstract, it elevates doxa, opinion, in its place. Under the regime of doxa, two things occur: philosophy and poetry are looked upon as useless because utility becomes the criteria for measuring value, and singularity is looked upon with disdain, if it is, indeed, acknowledged at all, because to the extent the world as it appears is common to us all, doxa is not distinct or individual but uniform or the same. Philosophy and poetry share not only the stigma of being deemed useless, but they are dismissed as odd, singular, not common.This essay is concerned with the status of the singular in philosophy [End Page 436] and poetry. The ancient quarrel has not been settled, which may indeed be a good thing because the quarrel keeps alive the question, who is to speak for that which cannot be spoken of, the singular? Silence may be the appropriate response, yet to preserve the experience of that which resists language is the task of philosophy and poetry, hence the quarrel. A long tradition has it that the philosopher seeks universals, while the poet offers particular images of virtue, but at the heart of this argument over ethics is the question of how to account for the singular or unique. To do so, I turn to Socrates, whose singularity remains unaccounted for to this day.Socrates may be said to embody the very problem of the relation between philosophy and literature, for he left us no writings and exists for us primarily through the writings of Plato. Yet there is widespread acceptance of Plato's portrait of him, particularly as to Socrates' method, the elenchus, and his principle of the priority of definitions. However, Socrates' insistence upon the priority of definition is not an example of the philosopher elevating theory over experience but a practical issue involving the care of the self. Furthermore, in ancient Greece, moral and philosophical questions concerning the soul were as much the provenance of poetry as they were of philosophy. The search for truth is a practical matter concerning the conduct of life, but the Platonic philosopher wishes to give a rational account, or logos, that would link conduct to knowledge, whereas the poet's examples are bound to their representations. Nevertheless, to presume that Socrates was seeking a definition of virtue on the grounds that possession of the definition would translate into a good life is an absurdity, for he could never have sought after the knowledge of virtue if his mode of life depended upon the definition rather than on his character. 2The error is to accuse Socrates of placing abstract knowledge before virtuous conduct. When Socrates asks for a definition of the beautiful, for instance, he does not reject the answer, "the beautiful is a beautiful woman," because it confuses a particular with a universal (when compared to the beauty of the gods, the woman is... (shrink)

Literary scholars are generally suspicious of the concept of universals: there are presently no candidates for literary universals that a high proportion of literary scholars would accept as valid. This paper reports results from a content analysis of patterns of characterization in folktales from 48 culture areas, aimed at identifying patterns of characterization that apply across regions of the world and levels of cultural complexity. The search for these patterns was guided by evolutionary theory and (...) the findings are consistent with previous research on patterns of altruism, sex differences in mate preferences, sex differences in reproductive strategy, and differing emphases on male and female physical attractiveness. World literature, especially originally oral literature, represents a vast and neglected repository of information that researchers can use to more precisely map the contours of human nature. (shrink)

"Taken as a trilogy, _consent not to be a single being_ is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of _Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination_ In _The Universal Machine_—the concluding volume to his landmark trilogy _consent not to be a single being_—Fred Moten presents a suite of three essays on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon in which he (...) explores questions of freedom, capture, and selfhood. In trademark style, Moten considers these thinkers alongside artists and musicians such as William Kentridge and Curtis Mayfield while interrogating the relation between blackness and phenomenology. Whether using Levinas's idea of escape in unintended ways, examining Arendt's antiblackness through Mayfield's virtuosic falsetto and Anthony Braxton's musical language, or showing how Fanon's form of phenomenology enables black social life, Moten formulates blackness as a way of being in the world that evades regulation. Throughout _The Universal Machine_—and the trilogy as a whole—Moten's theorizations of blackness will have a lasting and profound impact. (shrink)

In 1966, Laura Bohannan wrote her classic essay challenging the supposition that great literary works speak to universal human concerns and conditions and, by extension, that human nature is the same everywhere. Her evidence: the Tiv of West Africa interpret Hamlet differently from Westerners. While Bohannan’s essay implies that cognitive universality and cultural variation are mutually exclusive phenomena, adaptationist theory suggests otherwise. Adaptive problems ("the human condition") and cognitive adaptations ("human nature") are constant across cultures. What differs between cultures (...) is habitat: owing to environmental variation, the means and information relevant to solving adaptive problems differ from place to place. Thus, we find differences between cultures not because human minds differ in design but largely because human habitats differ in resources and history. On this view, we would expect world literature to express both human universals and cultural particularities. Specifically, we should expect to find literary universality at the macro level (e.g., adaptive problems, cognitive adaptations) and literary variation at the micro level (e.g., local solutions to adaptive problems). (shrink)

Daniel Barenboim, conductor of the Arab/Israeli West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, claims that “everywhere in the world... [Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony] speaks to all people.” But just how universal is Beethoven? Does his music exceed cultural boundaries or is Barenboim’s idea of a “utopian republic,” built, in part, upon Beethoven’s music, just “another Euro-American vision?” In his paper, Mark Whale explores two ways of understanding Beethoven’s music in line with two versions of the “idea of culture” proposed by literary theorist, Terry Eagleton. (...) First, he suggests that our experience of music has to do with its association with the specific cultural “loyalties and allegiances” built into our lives. Second, he argues that there is a mode of musical encounter, one which crosses cultural boundaries, in which we do not simply experience music but actively choose to care about, and to attend to, what we experience. In choosing to attend carefully to Beethoven’s music we discover that it invites and deepens our attention, not only to it, but also to ourselves. (shrink)

I examine a link between forms of argument and aesthetics that occur in "premodem" Westem and non-Western texts so as to build toward a universal theory of knowledge while taking postmodern criticisms seriously. Such a method allows for dialogue across time and space. Specifically, I focus on John Bunyan's "Apology" for the Pilgrim s Progress, published in 1674, and the Tibetan logician Acarya Dignaga's fifth-century treatise Hetucakra. Their claims to tmth proceed through allegory and poetry. This examination does not settle (...) existing debates; it brings a prior question more sharply into focus: In this time of cosmopolitan promise, how should considerations of universalism proceed? (shrink)

The author provides a rich plethora of examples of a heterology, a knowledge of the multiple, which alone is able to recognize the richness of life. Philosophical, sociological and literary analysis of different authors, mainly from the 20th century, are provided.

Against the consensus that Aristotle in the "Poetics" sets out to give tragedy a role in exercising or improving the mature citizen's moral sensibilities, I argue that his aim is rather to analyse what makes a work of literature successful in its own terms, and in particular how a tragic drama can achieve the effect of suspense. The proper pleasure of tragedy is produced by the plotting and eventual dispelling of the play's suspense. Aristotle claims that poetry 'says what is (...) universal' not in order to suggest that poetry achieves anything of the effect of philosophy, but to explain how in creating his plots the poet takes into consideration what, in general, could be expected to happen. Chapter 4 of the "Poetics" is not a theory of mimesis but an analysis of the lowest common denominator of the pleasure we take in fictions. The inevitability or likelihood by which events in the tragic plot are to be connected has an aesthetic rather than a moral function. Doing away with the irrationality of chance and increasing the human intelligibility of the action is not its point; the point is to furnish the plot with the second half of the formula for successful suspense: that events in the plot should happen 'against expectation because of one another'. The first half of the formula is examined under the rubric of peripety or reversal. The formula as a whole describes the pivotal moment when the pieces of the plot suddenly fit with a configuration that only in retrospect can we see to have been falling into place all along. Pity and fear are the emotions on which Aristotle focusses because they are the emotions engaged by the tightening-towards-release of literary suspense. And the pleasure of catharsis is the pleasure of that release. (shrink)

Against the consensus that Aristotle in the "Poetics" sets out to give tragedy a role in exercising or improving the mature citizen's moral sensibilities, I argue that his aim is rather to analyse what makes a work of literature successful in its own terms, and in particular how a tragic drama can achieve the effect of suspense. The proper pleasure of tragedy is produced by the plotting and eventual dispelling of the play's suspense. Aristotle claims that poetry 'says what is (...) universal' not in order to suggest that poetry achieves anything of the effect of philosophy, but to explain how in creating his plots the poet takes into consideration what, in general, could be expected to happen. Chapter 4 of the "Poetics" is not a theory of mimesis but an analysis of the lowest common denominator of the pleasure we take in fictions. The inevitability or likelihood by which events in the tragic plot are to be connected has an aesthetic rather than a moral function. Doing away with the irrationality of chance and increasing the human intelligibility of the action is not its point; the point is to furnish the plot with the second half of the formula for successful suspense: that events in the plot should happen 'against expectation because of one another'. The first half of the formula is examined under the rubric of peripety or reversal. The formula as a whole describes the pivotal moment when the pieces of the plot suddenly fit with a configuration that only in retrospect can we see to have been falling into place all along. Pity and fear are the emotions on which Aristotle focusses because they are the emotions engaged by the tightening-towards-release of literary suspense. And the pleasure of catharsis is the pleasure of that release. (shrink)

The rise of world literature is the most noticeable phenomenon in literary studies in the twenty-first century. However, truly well-known and globally circulating works are all canonical works of European or Western literature, while non-European and even "minor" European literatures remain largely unknown beyond their culture of origin. World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon argues that world literature for our time must go beyond Eurocentrism and expand the canon to include great works from non-European and (...) "minor" European literatures. As much of the world's literature remains untranslated and unknown, the expansion will be an exciting process of discovery. By discussing fundamental questions around canon, circulation, aesthetic values, translation, cosmopolitanism and the literary universal, Zhang Longxi proposes a new and liberating concept of world literature that will shape world literature worthy of its name. This book speaks for a more inclusive idea of world literature, and shows students and scholars alike that all the literary traditions, particularly non-European traditions, will be able to make important contributions and expand the canon of world literature. (shrink)

Jerzy Braun (1901–1975) began as a scout activist, in subsequent years he became known as a politician, poet, prose writer, playwright, screenwriter, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian. In the inter-war years he founded and edited the periodicals Gazeta Literacka [Literary Gazette] and Zet, he also headed the Hoene-Wroński Society which propagated the thought of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Under the Nazi occupation he founded and headed the underground organization Unia grouping Poland’s leading intellectuals. Unia propounded a universalistic program of (...) integrating nations and states whose outlines Braun had laid down before the war. Braun’s unionism theory, in which he strove for a harmonious combination of national and universal ideas, was based on 19th-century concepts developed by, among others, Bronisław Trentowski, August Cieszkowski and, of course, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Imprisoned by the communists after the war, in the 1960s Braun attended the Vaticanum II sessions as an unofficial ecumenism expert. (shrink)

In this article, an anthropological definition of literature is attempted. Since all communities seem to have some kind of literature (including its simple forms: myth, folktale, fable, proverb, and song), literature is claimed to be a human universal. Hence, literary discourse should be added to the four basic discourses that Habermas has pointed out and discussed; namely, theoretical, practical, historical, and technical discourses. Five characteristics of literary discourse are pointed out here: fictionality, poeticity, inquisitoriality, poetic licence, and contemplation. (...) It is not claimed that every text that is classified as literary necessarily contains all five features, but a vast majority of them do. Finally, it is argued that literary discourse is special because it redefines Habermas' four so-called ‘universal-pragmatic validity’ claims: understandability, truth, normative rightness, and sincerity. These claims are not altogether suspended, but they are given new meanings and attenuated in literary discourse. (shrink)

Jerzy Braun (1901–1975) began as a scout activist, in subsequent years he became known as a politician, poet, prose writer, playwright, screenwriter, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian. In the inter-war years he founded and edited the periodicals Gazeta Literacka [Literary Gazette] and Zet, he also headed the Hoene-Wroński Society which propagated the thought of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Under the Nazi occupation he founded and headed the underground organization Unia grouping Poland’s leading intellectuals. Unia propounded a universalistic program of (...) integrating nations and states whose outlines Braun had laid down before the war. Braun’s unionism theory, in which he strove for a harmonious combination of national and universal ideas, was based on 19th-century concepts developed by, among others, Bronisław Trentowski, August Cieszkowski and, of course, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Imprisoned by the communists after the war, in the 1960s Braun attended the Vaticanum II sessions as an unofficial ecumenism expert. (shrink)

This article explores the dream of the universal library in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Theodicy, Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. This is a story that, though often mentioned, is underexplored in both literary and intellectual histories. Scholars have overlooked the dream of the total library perhaps because this theme appears in works that transcend literary, aesthetic, and philosophical genres. I argue that the dream of the total library morphs from Leibniz’s assured (...) hierarchy of knowledge in which God is at the apex to Borges’s and Wenders’s more anxious post-enlightened epistemic regimes in which knowledge, decentered and leveled, becomes data, or worse, noise. The fantasies of textual omniscience can change our understanding of our European genealogies of knowledge and information theory more broadly. Taken together, their dreams of a total library constitute a central episode in the great romance of the pursuit of encyclopedic knowledge. In a world awash in a superabundance of signs and symbols and systems, they ask: How does the human mind orient itself? What Ariadne’s thread can it grasp? What possibilities of free will lie therein its imaginary infinite stacks? (shrink)

French existentialism is commonly regarded as the main impetus for the universal significance that Kafka gained in postwar France. A leading critic, Marthe Robert, has contended that this entailed an outright rejection of interest in the biographical, linguistic and historical dimension of Kafka's writing in order to interpret it as a general expression of the human condition. This article will consider this claim in the light of Sartre's original conceptualization of a dialectic of the universal and the particular in the (...) intercultural mediation of the work of art. The notion of a 'true universality' proposed by Sartre as a defence of Kafka during the 1962 Moscow Peace Conference will allow for a reassessment of Robert's criticism in a paradoxical reversal of terms: it is precisely the inevitable loss of context and the appropriation within one's own particular situation which allow the literary work to elucidate a foreign historical context and thereby gain a wider significance. Rather than a universal meaning of the work, Sartre's concept points to literature's potential to continually release specific meanings in new contexts. (shrink)

Recent literature on the Young Hegelians attests to a renewed appreciation of their philosophical and political significance. Important new studies have linked them to the literary and political currents of their time, traced the changing patterns of their relationships with early French socialism, and demonstrated the affinity of their thought with Hellenistic theories of self-consciousness. The conventional interpretative context, which focuses on the left-Hegelian critique of religion and the problem of the realisation of philosophy, has also been decisively challenged. (...) Ingrid Pepperle emphasizes instead the centrality of practical philosophy, notably Hegel's dialectic of objectification, arguing that Bruno Bauer in particular derives from this a doctrine of autonomy with politically revolutionary implications. (shrink)

Resumen La literatura universal, se encuentra poblada de arquetípicos que comparten una condición de desamparo y marginalidad, siendo la literatura realista de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX la que constata y da cuenta de su condición. En un mismo sentido, también la Biblia presenta un sinnúmero de personajes similares, marcando un punto de inflexión al llamarlo bienaventurados. Así pues, el presente estudio bíblico-literario, se centra en el arquetipo de la “viuda pobre”, sosteniendo dicha ficción literaria es una clave interpretativa (...) de la realidad, a la luz de la teoría literaria de la Estética de la Recepción. El articulo estudia la “viuda pobre” como un imaginario cultural y estableciendo la recepción de dicho imaginario en los cuentos “El Chiflón del diablo” y “El pago” del escritor chileno Baldomero Lillo, demostrando cómo el dialogo entre cultura y Biblia representa un aporte a la comprensión de determinadas ficciones literarias como categorías antropológicas.Universal literature is crowded by archetypical characters who share abandonment and marginalization conditions, being second half 19,h century realistic literature that confirms and exposes those conditions. In that sense, The Holy Bible presents a number of those characters. Resides, it highlights a turning point, hence, The Beatitudes point out: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. Thus, the following biblical-literary study, centered in the “Poor widow” archetype, aims to the establishment of literary fiction as interpretative key of reality, under Wolfgang Iser Aesthetics Reception's theory as its methodology. The objective aims to postulate “Poor Widow” as a Cultural imaginary, and finally to establish the reception of that imaginary within the stories “El Chiflón del Diablo” and “El Pago” by the chilean writer Baldomero Lillo, demonstrating that the dialog between culture and The Holy Bible represents a contribution to some literary fiction s as anthropological categories. (shrink)

This article undertakes a critical analysis of the work of Gisèle Sapiro, with reference to sociology of literature. From 1999 (Sapiro, 2014a), Sapiro has developed the Bourdieusian research tradition, amplifying especially Bourdieu’s theory of crisis. Focusing on the antagonisms between literary “prophets” and “priests”, she has drawn on a rich sample of 184 writers to elucidate the struggles inherent in World War II between writers from different field positions and literary habitus. Further, her historical analyses of the ethical (...) commitments of nineteenth century writers via a fresh microsociology of literary trials (Sapiro, 2011) has reminded us of the importance of popular poets in articulating the suffering of the subordinate classes. Her most recent book (Sapiro, 2018) has expanded on her earlier themes, whilst identifying the recuperation of certain 1930s’ fascist worldviews within contemporary literature. This article notes that there is a telling divergence between Bourdieu and Sapiro on the issue of interests behind disinterestedness, exemplified in the case of Zola. On this issue, Sapiro’s reading (Sapiro, 2011) is found convincing. Finally, the dialectic of avant-garde consecration and routinisation is questioned as a universal structure. It is suggested that certain avant-garde – the Harlem Renaissance, for example – did not undergo swift consecration or routinisation, although this contention deserves greater research. The paper concludes by showing that Sapiro’s conception of writers’ responsibility owes its origins less to Sartre than to the Durkheimian/ Bourdieusian notion of the expertise of the “specific intellectual”. It welcomes Sapiro’s concern for literature as a potential force for social change. (shrink)

Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is willing to read (...) a literature that might not be a rewriting of Hegel , and if the negative knowledge of recent theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non-Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western scholar’s claim to mastery of things African, albeit motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take into account the distance between themselves and African culture, and who read African literature only in function of their own cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains: “We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation—this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.”2 1. See J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou, Introduction à l’étude du roman négro-africain de langue française , p. 9.2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , p. x. Christopher L. Miller, Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University, is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French . He is working at present on a study of francophone black African literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research grant. (shrink)

Resumen: En la era del cientificismo, no es sorprendente revivir la visión realista de Lukács de la literatura. Aunque algunos estudiosos han criticado su visión holística, a juzgar por la preocupación por la realidad de la vida humana y la crítica de la realidad social, su visión realista de la literatura es exactamente lo que los tiempos necesitan. En el contexto del postmodernismo, cuando se critica su visión universal e ideológica del pueblo, se ignora la utilidad de esta visión universal (...) para lograr los efectos realistas de la crítica literaria basada en la visión universal irracional. Su "realismo" no es lo mismo que la "imitación" del realismo clásico, ni la "reproducción" del realismo crítico. La creación artística, incluida la literatura, no es solo una simple adhesión a la realidad social, sino un reflejo de la realidad social histórica general a través de prototipos. (shrink)

With references to the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, this book offers a critical investigation into such epic issues as the end of art and the inherent laws of literature's evolution, while conflating the two into one major argumentation. The book proceeds from Hegel's claim of "the end of art" to tackle the universal yet essential problem of literature: its legitimacy in a sociological sense. It invests Bourdieu's sociological terms -- power, capital, habitus, field, etc. into the (...) study of literature and art while taking on other theoretical enquiries, particularly the Marxist exploration into ideology, as well as aspects of economics and communication studies. This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of the sociology of literature, cultural studies, and those with specific interests in Chinese literature, literary and art theory. (shrink)

El presente trabajo se propone describir e interpretar, en una primera etapa, los mecanismos de canonización literaria de obra y autor en una comunidad cultural específica, la latinoamericana. El caso estudiado es el del escritor argentino Manuel Puig y su obra. La relación interactiva entre contexto cultural, institucionalidad y sistemas de significado social y valoración permite modelar una descripción e intento de explicación de las relaciones de significado entrañadas en la constitución de los repertorios literarios canonizados, sus criterios de selección, (...) su naturaleza ideológica y la manera en que las prácticas sociales asociadas a este proceso se constituyen por un número variable de prácticas discursivas. Para ello se analiza un conjunto ilustrativo de eventos comunicativos y sus instancias textuales, donde se articulan los cánones literarios y sus efectos culturales: posicionamiento, valoración estética, iconización de autor y de discurso, influencia profesional, tematización crítica y académica, entre otros. Se estudia, por tanto, un caso de integración canónica: la del escritor argentino Manuel Puig en el canon literario de habla hispana y el canon literario universal de fines de siglo y se establece un plano de interacción con los parámetros de construcción canónica de la generación previa, la del llamado “boom literario latinoamericano”. This paper aims to initially describe and interpret the mechanisms of work and author’s literary canonization in a specific cultural community, Latin America. The case studied is that of Argentine writer Manuel Puig and his work. The interactive relationship among cultural context, social institutions and systems of social and evaluation meaning allows a description and attempted explanation of the imbued meaning relations in the constitution of the canonized literary repertoires, their selection criteria, ideological nature and the way in which social practices associated with this process are formed by a variable number of discursive practices. To do this, we analyze an illustrative set of communicative events and their textual instances, through which the literary canon and cultural effects are articulated: positioning, aesthetic appreciation, author and discourse iconisation, and professional influence, critical and academic thematization, among others. Thus, we study a case of canonical integration by the Argentine writer Manuel Puig into Hispanic and universal literary canon at the end of the century, and set up an interaction with the parameters of canonical construction from the previous generation, the so-called “Latin American literary boom”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.3 (2006) 92-114 [Access article in PDF] A Global Art System: An Exploration of Current Literature on Visual Culture, and a Glimpse at the Universal Promethean Principle—with Unintended Oedipal Consequences Art Education 11-18: Meaning, Purpose And Direction, edited by Richard Hickman; New York, Continuum; 2nd edition, 2004; 176 pp. Global Visual Culture within a Global Art System I have harbored misgivings about the term (...) "visual culture" for several years. Having read Hickman's book with its collection of notable scholars in art and design education, those misgivings turned into qualified acceptance of "visual culture"—so long as it is understood as a global visual culture within a global art system. The ten chapters presented in Hickman's book clearly explore the notion of visual culture in the context of generating an expansive and appropriate canon of art distinctly relevant to our postmodern, multicultural, multidimensional classroom of multiple intelligences.1 And so, art and design education for the twenty-first century must perform three essential functions: one, it must color the classroom with signs of global human pictorial and textual expressions; two, it must attempt to comprehend an immeasurable universe through creative, scaled-down explorations of the phenomenal world all of humanity is subject to; and three, it must open up the Blakeian doors of perception,2 while remaining free of emotional, educational, social, political, or religious ideological bonds. In this light, Hickman's Art Education 11-18 (2004), is a must read for art and design educators currently bogged down in old curriculum, and a must read for educators who incorporate new pedagogical literature easily into their new curriculum. And I say must read because we are on the verge of a revolution in visual art history and education—immersed in it, struggling to make sense of our beloved classical canon of art, and struggling to come to grips with a strangely foreign, beautifully alien, semeiotic reality we call (vaguely) "visual culture." It is a visual culture and history from the north, east, and south. Not just from the west.Key innovative educational issues addressed in these chapters are (respectively) using the dynamic nature of art to expand the curricula (Richard Hickman); the collapse of cultural borders (Lesley Burgess and Nicholas [End Page 92] Addison); a balanced cultural history of the world (Colin Grigg); recognizing art and recognizing visual culture (Howard Hollands); a range of visual cultures and literacy (Darren Newbury); using computer technology as a pathway to a new art and visual culture (Andy Ash); critical study and analysis (Michele Tallack); hand-making as a universal link to nature and art (Rachel Mason); spirituality in the process of art creation (James Hall); and cross-cultural heritage toward a new canon of art (Hickman).I will review each chapter as it pertains to current literature exploring popular pedagogical terms like "visual culture," "postmodernism," "pluralism," and "radicalism" and (more importantly) as it fits into a global system of art and culture. In addition, I suggest another term ("cosmopolitanism"—to identify the viable gay and lesbian aesthetic and culture) not that they are necessarily different, but they are indeed relevant and operate from a fresh literary and historical perspective. Then, I will illustrate how a new, postmodern canon of art must be linked to global visual culture and art in order to expand the concept of visual culture. Thus, I see two tasks before me: the first task is to inventory the philosophy, pedagogy, and meanings within each of the ten chapters in Hickman's Art Education 11-18; and the second task is to integrate key pedagogical ideas highlighted in each chapter as a method of generating a meaningful, holistic, integrated direction for art and design education in the twenty-first century. Integrating Art and Design Education Art is a design process. All subject regimes, D. N. Perkins suggests, are a design process.3 This may seem too obvious now after all these years since the publication of Knowledge... (shrink)

This lecture presents the text of the speech about the Alfredian project and its aftermath delivered by the author at the 2008 Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It explains the details of King Alfred's programme of mass education and to deliver near-universal literacy in English, and evaluates the impact of Pastoral Care on English literature.

Euclid in the Rainforest combines the literary with the mathematical to explore logic--the one indispensable tool in man's quest to understand the world. Mazur argues that logical reasoning is not purely robotic. At its most basic level, it is a creative process guided by our intuitions and beliefs about the world.

This paper offers a literary and ideological deconstruction of the Bhāgavata Purāa; it traces the Purāa's formation through the convergence of the Vedāntin, the Aesthetic and the Vaiava traditions, and argues that it is the doctrine of Pariāma which underlies the treatise. I first examine the Bhāgavata Purāa's literary components; the roots of these are traced back historically to the Vedānta and Ālvār traditions, and the Bhāgavata Purāa's nature as an opus universale, representing an all Indian cultural 'melting (...) pot', is highlighted. The paper then looks at the relations of Vaiavism and dramaturgy, both historically as well as theologically, and argues that the Bhāgavata Purāa was traditionally read as a drama. It proceeds to decipher the aesthetic theory underlying the Bhāgavata Purāa, and argues that it is Bharata's dramaturgical rasa theory. Within the rasa tradition, Abhinavagupta 's and Bhoja's positions are highlighted and compared through three seminal points and it becomes apparent that the Bhāgavata Purāa's underlying aesthetic theory is close to the Pariāma doctrine of Bhoja where gāra is considered to be the supreme rasa. As Bhoja's date is no doubt later than the Bhāgavata Purāa's it is assumed that the Bhāgavata Purāa was influenced by one of Bhoja's predecessors. The paper ends by reinforcing this analysis by highlighting a later tradition which had actually accepted this point of view and that is the Gauiya Vaiava tradition. (shrink)

The essays gathered here demonstrate and justify the excitement and promise of cognitive historicism, providing a lively introduction to this new and quickly growing area of literary studies. Written by eight leading critics whose work has done much to establish the new field, they display the significant results of a largely unprecedented combination of cultural and cognitive analysis. The authors explore both narrative and dramatic genres, uncovering the tensions among presumably universal cognitive processes, and the local contexts within which (...) complex literary texts are produced. Alan Richardson's opening essay evaluates current approaches to the study of literature and cognition, locating them on the map of recent literary studies, indicating their most compelling developments to date, and suggesting the most promising future directions. The seven essays that follow provide innovative readings of topics ranging from Shakespeare (Othello, Macbeth, Cymbeline, The Rape of Lucrece) through Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, to contemporary authors Ian McEwan and Gilbert Sorrentino. They underscore some of the limitations of new historicist and post-structuralist approaches to literary cultural studies while affirming the value of supplementing rather than supplanting them with insights and methods drawn from cognitive and evolutionary theory. Together, they demonstrate the analytical power of considering these texts in the context of recent studies of cultural universals, 'theory of mind, ' cognitive categorization and genre, and neural-materialist theories of language and consciousness. This groundbreaking collection holds appeal for a broad audience, including students and teachers of literary theory, literary history, cultural studies, and literature and science studies. (shrink)

Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers--have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of contemporary literary theorists investigates the intersection of literature and philosophy, analyzing the emerging preferences for practice over theory, particulars over universals, (...) events over structures, inhabitants over spectators, an ethics of responsibility over a morality of rules, and a desire for intimacy with the world instead of simply a disengaged knowledge of it. (shrink)

This paper gives two complete and elementary proofs that if the speed of light over closed paths has a universal value c, then it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of light is c. The first proof is an elementary version of a recent proof. The second provides high precision experimental evidence that it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of light has a universal value. We (...) also discuss an old incomplete proof by Weyl which is important from an historical perspective. (shrink)