In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 57-74 [Access article in PDF] An American Novelist in the Philosopher King's Court Thomas P. Crocker I MORAL PHILOSOPHY has languished long within the confines of something like the following purported dilemma: either moral discourse is the discourse of principles and rules rationally grounded, or moral discourse is the discourse of passions and personal preferences, clothed in the garments of rational justification. Alasdair (...) MacIntyre's disquieting suggestion—that our language of moral debate is nothing more than the "simulacra of morality"—provides a grim outlook for moral philosophy. 1 Indeed, when moral inquiry is conducted in terms of ethical theory, without independent grounds upon which competing arguments can meet, philosophical discourse, embedded in competing theories, seems to be only so much cacophonous clamor, rationally convincing no one except those who already accept the terms employed by their own theory. One way to avoid this philosophical effluvium produced by moral philosophy is to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein in rejecting the very terms upon which it is made (the distinction between the particular perspective and the universal standpoint), recognizing that moral inquiry begins from where we already are—the everyday world in which we find ourselves.Towards the end of avoidance here, I wish to add to this simmering background of ethical discord Mark Twain's story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 2 Twain's controversial voice provides a place for moral thinking unavailable through strictly theoretical discourse. 3 And reading Huck and Jim's story through the philosophical avoidance of Wittgenstein's latent ethical thought provides the transformative possibility of seeing the domain of the ethical in a new light. 4 [End Page 57]Although Twain boldly states at the beginning of his novel that "persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished," 5 he does show us without the need of theory or dogma how a change in one's way of seeing is intertwined with a change in one's way of living; this connection between ways of seeing and ways of living makes possible a kind of moral transformation that characterizes the change in Huck's perception of Jim, from that of a slave to that of a friend. This moral conversion is much like the perceptual transformations that Ludwig Wittgenstein considers in his discussions of "noticing an aspect," 6 in which a shift in what one sees is connected to the background against which the perceptual object is seen and to the ways in which one is prepared to respond to it. When confronting perceptual ambiguity, as in the case of Jastrow's ambiguous duck/rabbit figure, one looks to the context and background to clarify what one sees, just as one does with semantic ambiguity. In coming to see in one way or the other, nothing is explicitly stated, nothing is put into argumentative form. And in Twain's narrative, we are not given arguments for why we should see Jim as human, nor does the narrative recount Huck's confrontations with moral arguments; rather, through his interactions with Jim, Huck is shown Jim's humanity, his friendship, and we, the readers, are shown the possibility of a moral transformation that is not determined by or grounded in rules or philosophical arguments.The moral realist might agree that such a transformation could be motivated in ways other than rational arguments, but to be legitimate, it must be possible to reconstruct the transformation according to rational considerations. The ability to "get behind" the transformation in some justificatory way is what I am denying here (as is Wittgenstein); for what one finds when one "gets behind" is another situated language game that is itself not open to question (though it could be if we direct our attention towards it). There is no final "getting behind" the things we do and the situations in which we do them, and hence there is no final justificatory argument one can give—as Wittgenstein famously says, "If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am... (shrink)

Several years before the recent French-American diplomatic squabble, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, arguably America’s two greatest novelists, wrote major works of a markedly anti-French tenor. Indeed, both Ravelstein and The Human Stain, with their disparate griefs against the French, share a remarkably similar plot: against a back-drop of Gallic treachery, a courageously conservative academic, condemned to death by his sexual excesses, asks, before dying, a novelist friend to write the story of his life. Framed by a consideration of (...) an idiosyncratic work of American sculpture that appears to depict the sexual servicing of Abraham Lincoln and an evocation of the career of William Bullitt, Freud’s collaborator on a study of Woodrow Wilson and America’s ambassador to Paris during the fall of France, this essay offers a reading of both novels and raises the question of American sanctimony and the price France may be expected to pay for it. (shrink)

This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

The essays explore virtually all of Johnson's writings: each of his novels, his numerous short stories, the range of his nonfiction essays, his many book ...

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)

Analyzes the ways in which four contemporary novelists depict the rebel and the world that rejects him. Bibliogs.

The still astonishing expansion of the American university since World War II has transformed the nation's intellectual and cultural life in myriad ways. Most intellectual historians familiar with this period would agree, I suppose, that among the conspicuous changes is the sheer increase in the size and diversity of intellectual and cultural activity taking place on campuses across the country. After all, we know that colleges and universities that employ us also provide full- and part-time academic appointments to novelists, (...) poets, playwrights, filmmakers, choreographers, composers, classical and jazz musicians, painters, photographers, and sculptors, even though most of them probably began their careers with little or no desire to join us in the halls of academe. This now widespread employment practice has decentralized the nation's literary and artistic talent. It also has made for a manifold increase in degree-granting programs in writing and the creative arts. One example will suffice here. When World War II ended, there were a small handful of university-based creative-writing programs. Over the course of the next thirty years, the number increased to fifty-two. By 1985, there were some 150 graduate degree programs offering an MA, MFA, or PhD. As of 2004, there were more than 350 creative-writing programs in the United States, all staffed by practicing writers and poets, many of whom now also hold advanced degrees in creative writing. (shrink)

In this thesis, I examine recent proposals for the creation of African and Native American forms of Indigenous philosophy and show how the discussions and debates in these fields challenge the disciplinary boundaries of modern Academic Western philosophy. With regard to African philosophy, I critique the debates in the Anglophone literature, teasing out those aspects of the debates which pose substantial epistemological challenges to mainstream [Western] philosophy, focusing, in particular, on assumptions about the intersections between philosophy, culture, science, and (...) universality which manifest themselves in the Euro-traditional critiques the "Professional" school philosophers make of the Afri-traditional approach of the "Ethnophilosophy" school philosophers. Looking at the works of such "Ethnophilosophers" as Kagame, Mbiti, Wright, and Gyeke and the critiques made of them by "Professional" school philosophers such as Wiredu, Bodunrin, Oruka, and Appiah, I present and critique both sides of the universal European argument, the literacy argument, the objective individual male argument, and the logical-scientific vs. magical-religious arguments, highlighting the epistemological implications of each. With regard to Native American Philosophy, I discuss recent proposals being made by Native American academic philosophers, and also do a philosophical analysis of traditional Native American culture as expressed in a variety of Native-authored sources. I argue, based on the works of Native authors, that three main methodological problems condition the formulation of Native American philosophy, namely 'problems of conquest,' 'problems of translation,' and 'problems of identity' and that each of these problems manifest as epistemological problems. I then go on to make proposals for five possible beginning points for the formulation of Native American philosophy by identifying themes which recur in the works of philosophers Deloria, Cordova, and Hester; traditional sages such as Black Elk, and Lame Deer; critical theorists such as Warrior, Guerrero, Gunn-Allen, Durham, and Forbes; and novelists Silko and King. I argue that both African and American forms of Indigenous philosophy provoke a reevaluation of many of the epistemic frames heretofore assumed to be universal in modern academic philosophy. (shrink)

This essay supplies an historical review of black thought (from the Civil War forward) in the American South. Its emphasis is upon the biography of figures born in the region, whether resident or exile, concentrating on three foundational actors: Booker Washington, Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells. Significant strands of later thought are seen as largely derived from the latter two. The thematic anchor of this review is ‘resistance and nonviolence’, involving (1) a primary focus on equal rights, (2) a (...) derivative focus on emancipation and desegregation, (3) exploration of nonviolence as a mode of resistance to oppression, (4) exploration of liberative violence, and (5) a larger concern with the appropriate type and degree of integration/separation implicit in or consistent with an equal rights regime. Douglass and Wells are cast as attending to sub‐themes (1) and (2).This essay is designed to fit within the larger framework of the collection, in which the religious leaders Howard Thurman and Martin King are allocated to sub‐theme (3), the novelist Richard Wright to (4), and the lawyers Thurgood Marshall, Barbara Jordan and Fred Gray to (5). The future challenge to black thought is assumed to lie in deeper reflection on (5), with a view to locating an ever more perfect balance between ‘nation’ (the ethnic community of Afro‐America) and ‘state’ (the US federal government). (shrink)

From the days of discovery, when America was for Europeans more dream than reality, to our own days of disillusionment and faltering hope, poets, philosophers, historians, novelists, and theologians have drawn on religious themes and images to express the meaning of their encounter with America. Here, in more than one hundred selections, is the record of their quest for a New World metaphysics -- a spiritual vision or ultimate idea of order expressive of the American experience.

The recently published Cambridge Companion to Spinoza contains a fine essay by Pierre- Francois Moreau on Spinoza’s reception and on his influence during the more than three hundred years that have passed since his death. In Moreau’s twenty-five page article we find a brief paragraph on the novelist George Eliot and half a sentence on Ed Curley. There is not another mention, at all, of any other philosopher from an English-speaking land since the seventeenth century – nothing on how Spinoza’s (...) ideas were received in England, North America or Australia. Not a word on any influence that Spinoza might have had on later thinkers in those countries. (shrink)

George Lippard’s 1845 best-selling novel, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, provides insight into utopian longing in the United States during an era of uncertainty following a major economic crisis. Published in the wake of a banking panic, it portrays class hostilities stemming from notions that the poor were bearing the brunt of economic hardships caused by bad decisions on the part of wealthy investors. Lippard was a serial novelist and social activist who ultimately used his fiction-writing (...) success to two key ends. First, he founded the Brotherhood of the Union, an early U.S. labor organization. Second, he founded The Quaker City Weekly, a newspaper published from 1848 to 1850 that focused on .. (shrink)

Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. However, it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history (...) of the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously. (shrink)

Vous cherchez un point commun entre Les Simpson et le Tea Party, Angelina Jolie et Alan Greenspan, Mad Men et Dirty Dancing, le fondateur de Wikipedia et l'administration Reagan, ou encore Vladimir Poutine, Queer as Folk et Donald Trump? Il y en a un : Ayn Rand. Quasiment inconnue en France, Ayn Rand est pourtant considérée aux Etats-Unis comme l'auteur du livre "le plus influent après la Bible". Romancière, philosophe et chantre de l'ultra-libéralisme, Ayn Rand a offert une mythologie au (...) capitalisme, celle de l'entrepreneur comme surhomme et de l'égoïsme comme vertu ultime. Stéphane Legrand combine les ressorts de l'essai et du récit pour analyser sa pensée et ses romans les plus marquants, qui font d'elle une pièce essentielle à la compréhension du monde contemporain. Il brosse le portrait captivant de cette émigrée russe "bigger-than-life", qu'on a pu qualifier d'"ultime drogue de passage vers une vie de droite", et dont le destin n'a rien à envier à ses fictions les plus rocambolesques. (shrink)

Gathers interviews with John Gardner from each period of his career, and offers a brief profile of his life and accomplishments.

Memoirs of a twenty-year relationship between the author and Ayn Rand, who was his friend, mentor, lover, and enemy. No index. No bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The relationship between Rand and Branden changed over eighteen yaears from student and teacher, to friends, to colleagues, to lovers and finally antagonists.

The American novelist Walker Percy (1916-90) considered himself a "thief of Peirce", because he found in the views of C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, an alternative approach to prevailing reductionist theories in order to understand what we human beings are and what the peculiar nature of our linguistic activity is. -/- This paper describes, quoting widely from Percy, how abduction is the spontaneous activity of our reason by which we couple meanings and experience in our linguistic expressions. This (...) coupling of personal creativity and cultural tradition makes it possible to bridge the gaps between persons and cultures. (shrink)

Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than 25 million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. In spite of the popular interest in her ideas, or perhaps because of it, Rand’s work has until recently received little serious attention from academics. Though best known among philosophers for her strong support of egoism in ethics and capitalism in politics, there is an increasingly widespread awareness of both the range (...) and the systematic character of Rand’s philosophic thought. This new series, developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The first volume starts not with the metaphysical and epistemological fundamentals of Rand’s thought, but with central aspects of her ethical theory. Though her endorsement of ethical egoism is well-known—one of her most familiar essay collections is _The Virtue of Selfishness—_the character of her egoism is not. The chapters in this volume address the basis of her egoism in a virtue-centered normative ethics; her account of how moral norms in general are themselves based on a fundamental choice by an agent to value his own life; and how her own approach to the foundations of ethics is to be compared and contrasted with familiar approaches in the analytic ethical tradition. Philosophers interested in the objectivity of value, in the way ethical theory is virtue-based, and in acquiring a serious understanding of an egoistic moral theory worthy of attention will find much to consider in this volume, which includes critical responses to several of its main essays. (shrink)

Not In Sisterhood investigates an important transitional moment in the history of U.S. women's writing : the uneasy shift from the 19th-century model of the "lady author" to some new but undefined alternative. The careers of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, together with that of their friend and peer Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, reveal several different strategies for negotiating this unknown terrain. While Gale made her feminist politics an integral part of her (...) successful novels and plays, Wharton and Cather publicly denied any interest in gender issues or social reforms. Not in Sisterhood shows how the complex intersections of literary and social politics that shaped the world of Wharton, Cather, and Gale are still at work in today's feminist reconstructions of literary history. (shrink)

Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures the (...) ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel. (shrink)

Explores the theories of democratic individualism articulated in the works of the American transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey, and African-American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison.

In The Empire Strikes Back, African American actor Billy Dee Williams turned the trio into a quartet as Lando Calrissian. Novelist and social activist Alice Walker coined and defined colorism as the “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same‐race people based solely on their color,” according to Kimberly Jade Norwood and Violeta Solonova Foreman. For Norwood and Foreman, colorism is concerned with the lightness and darkness of skin tone, with preference given to whiteness. Colorism in the United States took root (...) during the period of slavery, when “coalescence of needs, beliefs, justifications, and practices had the effect of placing white skin at a premium and dehumanizing black skin.” Jennifer Bloomquist writes that there is “a protracted history of Whites creating Black caricatures,” which includes “underdeveloped Black characters” in American entertainment. Boyega overlooks the presence of culture and the representation of other races and ethnicities throughout the Star Wars films and even throughout the various television series. (shrink)

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although (...) he lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art. (shrink)

The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than twenty-eight million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. Despite her popularity, Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism has received little serious attention from academic philosophers. _Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge_ offers scholarly analysis of key elements of Ayn Rand’s radically new approach to epistemology. The four essays, by contributors intimately familiar with this area of her work, discuss (...) Rand’s theory of concepts—including its new account of abstraction and essence—and its central role in her epistemology; how that view leads to a distinctive conception of the justification of knowledge; her realist account of perceptual awareness and its role in the acquisition of knowledge; and finally, the implications of that theory for understanding the growth of scientific knowledge. The volume concludes with critical commentary on the essays by distinguished philosophers with differing philosophical viewpoints and the author’s responses to those commentaries. This is the second book published in Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, which was developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society to offer a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks to foster scholarly study by philosophers of the philosophical thought and writings of Ayn Rand. (shrink)

Three figures in the American Reformed tradition—the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the theocentric ethicist James Gustafson, and the biocentric poet Robinson Jeffers—treat the perception of beauty as the framework of moral discernment in ways that seem particularly significant for ecological ethics. Their work makes vividly concrete dimensions of Calvin's theology of creation that have been the subject of increasing theological attention over the past twenty-five years. By focusing on receptivity to natural beauty, their approach suggests a reorientation of the Christian (...) ecological conversation that would root responsibility in grateful awe rather than stewardship, and would substitute graced responsiveness for obligation. This shift away from duty, sacrifice, and self-denial has the prophetic potential to inspire life-way changes that have been hard to effect through caustic critiques of wasteful materialism or exhortations to just regard for generations as yet unborn. (shrink)

Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The "Accursed Share "provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, (...) and cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology. The three volumes of "The Accursed Share" address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." In the second and third volumes, "The History of Eroticism" and "Sovereignty", Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. "The History of Eroticism" analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. In the third volume, Bataille raises the ethical problems of sovereignty, of "the independence of man relative to useful ends.". (shrink)

The interdisciplinary French-American thinker René Girard (1923-2015) has been one of the towering figures of the humanities in the last half-century. The title of René Girard's first book offered his own thesis in summary form: romantic lie and novelistic truth [mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque]. And yet, for a thinker whose career began by an engagement with literature, it came as a shock to some that, in La Conversion de l'art, Girard asserted that the novel may be an “outmoded” (...) form for revealing humans to themselves. However, Girard never specified what, if anything, might take the place of the novel. This collection of essays is one attempt at answering this question, by offering a series of analyses of films that aims to test mimetic theory in an area in which relatively little has so far been offered. Does it make any sense to talk of vérité filmique? In addition, Mimetic Theory and Film is a response to the widespread objection that there is no viable “Girardian aesthetics.” One of the main questions that this collection considers is: can we develop a genre-specific mimetic analysis (of film), and are we able to develop anything approaching a “Girardian aesthetic”? Each of the contributors addresses these questions through the analysis of a film. (shrink)

Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, (...) and cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology. (shrink)

This essay deals with American fiction between the early 1850s, when Hawthorne and Melville produced their best work, and the first novels of Howells and James in the early 1870s. The familiar notion that this was the period of transition from pre-Civil War Romanticism to postwar Realism tells us nothing in particular about it. Yet we need some historical frame in which to place both of the later efforts of Hawthorne and Melville and the apprentice work of the next (...) generation of novelists. To this end, I propose to examine a few examples of the popular fiction that held at least quantitative dominance of the field. Hawthorne and Melville believed that the unprecedented sales of a new kind of stories by women writers contributed significantly to the loss of audience they both suffered in the early 1850s; and not only Howells and James but also Mark Twain showed in their early careers an unacknowledged attraction toward the procedures of the popular novelists along with a conscious effort to escape from them...the type of best-seller that appeared in the 1850s was an accidental creation rather than the result of conscious contrivance on the part of either authors or publishers. In fact, it caught the publishers by surprise. According to the author's sister , Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World was rejected by "almost all the leading book firms in New York," and the manuscript was returned with the comment "Fudge!" written on it by a reader for Harper's. Miss Warner, a thirty-one-year-old spinster, was the daughter of a once prosperous New York lawyer who had fallen into financial difficulties. The story resembles Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre to the extent that its heroine is an orphan exposed to poverty and psychological hardships who finally attains economic security and high social status through marriage. But the American writer places much more emphasis on the heroine's piety, and the book sets an all-time record for frequency of references to tears and weeping.Henry Nash Smith, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, received the John H. Dunning prize and the Bancroft Award for hisVirgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. He has also written Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, and Popular Culture and Industrialism. (shrink)

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Curious American readers seeking new, up-to-date information and analyses will find in Paths to Contemporary French Literature a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the worldas great literatures. This critical panorama of contemporary French literature introduces (...) English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers, John Taylor offers a compelling insideras view. (shrink)

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in the French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Some might argue that even well-read Americans are ignorant about what is happening in European literature generally. Certainly, there has never been so few translations of foreign books in the United States, or so little coverage of foreign writers. Curious (...) class='Hi'>American readers need new, up-to-date information and analyses about what is happening elsewhere. Paths to Contemporary French Literature is a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the world's great literatures. This critical panorama of contemporary French literature introduces English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets, many of whom are still little known outside of France. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers, John Taylor offers a compelling insider's view. Their pioneering essays included in this book offer incisive analyses of the ideas motivating current writing and delve into a writer's or poet's entire output. Although some names may be familiar, the reader obtains fresh reappraisals of their seminal work. Especially noteworthy, however, are Taylor's lively introductions to many other key writers who either have not yet crossed the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic. Combating the notion that French literature is overtly intellectual, inaccessible, or interested only in formal experimentation, Taylor shows that many French writers are instead acutely inquisitive about the outside world, shrewd observers of reality, even very funny. Although not conceived as a "reference book," the volume possess some qualities of a reference work: a good bibliography, reliable dates and biographical facts. (shrink)

Feminist activist, novelist, literary critic, bio-ethnographer, legal autodidact, and political writer: Rebecca West was a 20th-century phenomenon. She was also a lifelong critic of communism’s appeal to the intelligentsia. Communism, West claimed, was attractive to three groups of intellectuals outside the Soviet bloc: a minority of scientists who viewed politics as merely a sum of technical problems to solve; the emotionally devastated for whom communism was a means of mental reorientation; and a déclassé segment of the middle class who envisaged (...) communism as a means of material and status advancement. I examine West’s three explanations for communism’s allure, and then proceed to evaluate her account. My assessment is both empirical, using sociological data on American and European communist parties, and methodological, examining the techniques of West’s style, a mix of novelistic empathy and unmasking political partisanship. This mixture I consider fatal because while the novel, like historical interpretation, allows a generous understanding of human agents, unmasking tends towards caricature and denunciation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Against Ethical CriticismRichard A. PosnerOscar Wilde famously remarked that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” He was echoed by Auden, who said in his poem in memory of William Butler Yeats that poetry makes nothing happen (though the poem as a whole qualifies this overstatement), by Croce, and by formalist critics such as (...) Cleanth Brooks, a doyen of the New Critics, who insisted that edification was the function of religion but not of poetry. 1 George Orwell, though himself a didactic novelist, was of this view as well, 2 and it is one that most critics adopt when the issue is censorship. I accept Wilde’s thesis—the creed of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake—if understood to mean that the moral content and consequences of a work of literature are irrelevant to its value as literature; or as the critic Helen Vendler has put it, that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.” 3 This is not to deny that reading can have consequences, including moral and political ones. Information affects people’s outlook and behavior, and reading is a source of information. Imaginative literature conveys ideas, opinions, and information, often with great power. Think of the role that novels by Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Dostoevsky (The Possessed), Conrad (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes), Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four), and, of course, Solzhenitsyn played in exposing the horrors of anarchism and communism. Of A Passage to India it has been said that “as an account of the social conditions of British India it was powerful enough to have influenced events.” 4 Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is thought to have incited federal regulation of food processing; and few doubt the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on the abolitionist cause. [End Page 1]At the core of the aesthetic tradition, which I shall be defending in this essay particularly against its opponents in the “law and literature” movement, are three theses. First, immersion in literature does not make us better citizens or better people. One might be able to pick out some works of literature that would have such an effect because of the information they convey or the emotional state they induce, but they would constitute a skewed sample of literary works. Second, we should not be put off by morally offensive views encountered in literature even when the author appears to share them. A work of literature is not to be considered maimed or even marred by expressing unacceptable moral views; by the same token, a mediocre work of literature is not redeemed by expressing moral views of which we approve. The proper criteria for evaluating literature are aesthetic rather than ethical. Third, authors’ moral qualities or opinions should not affect our valuations of their works.The insistence, in short, is on the separation of the moral from the aesthetic—but with two qualifications. Some literature has little interest or value apart from the didactic and for it the proper criticism is didactic. And the separation of moral from aesthetic values is not a rejection of the former. The aesthetic outlook is a moral outlook, one that stresses the values of openness, detachment, hedonism, curiosity, tolerance, the cultivation of the self, and the preservation of a private sphere—in short, the values of liberal individualism.The counter tradition in literary criticism to the aesthetic originates with Plato and insists upon the importance, in some versions to the near or even total exclusion of anything else, of the ethical or political content and effects of works of literature, and less commonly of the author’s own morality. Martha Nussbaum, for example, deems Greek tragedies and Anglo-American realistic novels a part of moral philosophy. 5 Reading novels, she argues, “develops moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent.” 6 Wayne Booth, disagreeing with his illustrious... (shrink)

During John Dewey's lifetime, one public opinion poll after another revealed that he was esteemed to be one of the ten most important thinkers in American history. His body of thought, conventionally identified by the shorthand word "Pragmatism," has been the distinctive American philosophy of the last fifty years. His work on education is famous worldwide and is still influential today, anticipating as it did the ascendance in contemporary American pedagogy of multiculturalism and independent thinking. His University (...) of Chicago Laboratory School thrives still and is a model for schools worldwide, especially in emerging democracies. But how was this lifetime of thought enmeshed in Dewey's emotional experience, in his joys and sorrows as son and brother, husband and father, and in his political activism and spirituality? Acclaimed biographer Jay Martin recaptures the unity of Dewey's life and work, tracing important themes through the philosopher's childhood years, family history, religious experience, and influential friendships. Based on original sources, notably the vast collection of unpublished papers in the Center for Dewey Studies, this book tells the full story, for the first time, of the life and times of the eminent American philosopher, pragmatist, education reformer, and man of letters. In particular, _The Education of John Dewey_ highlights the importance of the women in Dewey's life, especially his mother, wife, and daughters, but also others, including the reformer Jane Addams and the novelist Anzia Yezierska. A fitting tribute to a master thinker, Martin has rendered a tour de force portrait of a philosopher and social activist in full, seamlessly reintegrating Dewey's thought into both his personal life and the broader historical themes of his time. (shrink)

Overview * Part I: Introduction * Philip Appleman, Darwin: On Changing the Mind * Part II: Darwin’s Life * Ernst Mayr, Who Is Darwin? * Part III: Scientific Thought: Just before Darwin * Sir Gavin de Beer, Biology before the Beagle * Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population * William Paley, Natural Theology * Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Lamarck, Zoological Philisophy * Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology * John Herschell, The Study of Natural Philosophy (...) * William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology * Alfred Russel Wallace, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type * Part IV: Selections from Darwin’s Work * The Voyage of the Beagle * o Chapter I. St. Jago-Cape de Verd Island o Chapter XVII. Galapagos Archipelago * On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and On the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection * o I. Extract from an unpublished Work on Species, by C. Darwin, Esq.... o II.of Letter from C. Darwin, Esq., to Prof. Asa Gray, Boston, U.S., dated Down, September 5th, 1857 * An Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species, previously to the : Publication of This Work The Origin of Species * o Introduction o Chapter I. Variation under Domestication o Chapter II. Variation under Nature o Chapter III. Struggle for Existence o Chapter IV. Natural Selection o Chapter VI. Difficulties on Theory o Chapter IX. On the Imperfections of the Geological Record o Chapter XIII. Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs o Chapter XIV. Recapitulation and Conclusion * The Descent of Man * o Introduction o Chapter I. The Evidence of the Descent of Man from Some Lower Form o Chapter II. On the Manner of Development of Man from Some Lower Form o Chapter III. Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals o Chapter VI. On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man o Chapter VIII. Principles of Sexual Selection o Chapter XIX. Secondary Sexual Characters of Man o Chapter XX. Secondary Sexual Characters of Man-continued o Chapter XXI. General Summary and Conclusion * Part V: Darwin’s Influence on Science * THE VICTORIAN OPPOSITION TO DARWIN * o David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics o Adam Sedgwick, Objections to Mr. Darwin’s Theory of the Origin of Species o Sir Richard Owen, Darwin on the Origin of Species o Fleeming Jenkin, Review of the Origin of Species * VICTORIAN SUPPORTERS OF DARWIN * o Joseph Dalton Hooker, Flora Tasmaniae o Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Relations of Man to the Lowe Animals o Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology o Alfred Russel Wallace, The Debt of Science to Darwin * DARWIN AND THE SHAPING OF MODERN SCIENCE * o Scientific Method in Evolution o National Academy of Sciences, Evolution and the Nature of Science o Richard Dawkins, Explaining the Very Improbable o Lewis Thomas, On the Uncertainty of Science o Noretta Koetge, Postmodernisms and the Problem of Scientific Literary o Richard Dawkins, Science and Sensibility o The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis o Peter Bowler, The Evolutionary Synthesis o The Human Genealogy o Adam Kuper, The Chosen Primate o Ian Tattersall, Out of Africa Again... and Again? o Stephen Jay Gould, The Human Difference o Punctuated Equilibrium o Stephen Jay Gould, [On Punctuated Equilibrium] o Niles Eldredge, The Great Stasis Debate o Rethinking Taxonomy o Kevin Padian, Darwin’s Views of Classification o David L. Hull, Cladistic Analysis o Kevin Padian and Luis M. Chiappe, Cladistics in Action: The Origin of Birds and Their Flight o Evolution as Observable Fact o James L. Gould and William T. Keeton with Carol Grant Gould, How Natural Selection Operates o Peter r. Grant, Natural Selection and Darwin’s Finches o John A. Endler, Natural Selection in the Wild * Part VI: Darwinian Patterns in Social Thought * COMPETITION AND COOPERATION * o Richard Hofstadter, The Vogue of Spencer o Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth o Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid o Martin A. Nowak, Robert M. May, and Karl Sigmund, The Arithmetics of Mutual Help * NATURE AND NURTURE * o Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis o Stephen Jay Gould, Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determination o Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh, The New Creationism: Biology under Attack * EVOLUTION AND GENDER * o Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible o Nancy Makepeace Tanner, On Becoming Human o Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Descent of Woman o James Eli Adams, Woman Red in Tooth and Claw * EVOLUTION AND OTHER DISCIPLINES * o Edward O. Wilson, [On Consilience] o Randolph H. Nesse and George C. Williams, Evolution and the Origin of Disease o Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works o Steve Jones, The Set within the Skull * Part VII: Darwinian Influences in Philosophy and Ethics * John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy * Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Natural Selection as an Algorithmic Process * Michael Ruse Darwinian Epistemology * Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics * Julian Huxley, Evolutionary Ethics * Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, The Evolution of Ethics * Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals * Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue * Part VIII: Evolutionary Theory and Religious Theory * MAINSTREAM RELIGIOUS SUPPORT FOR EVOLUTION * o Pope John Paul II, Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences o Central Conference of American Rabbis, On Creationism in School Textbooks o United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Evolution and Creationsim o The Lutheran World Federation, [Statement on Evolution] o The General Convention of the Episcopal Church, Resolution on Evolutionism and Creationism o Unitariuan Universalist Association, Resolution Opposing "Scientific Creationism" * FUNDAMENTALIST CREATIONISM * o Eugene C. Scott, Antievolution and Creationism in the United States o The Scopes Trial o Thomas McIver, Orthodox Jewish Creationists o Harun Yahya, [Islamic Creationism] o Seami Srila Prabhupada, [A Hare Krishna on Darwinian Evolution] o Institute for Creation Research, Tenets of Creationism o Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism o Thomas J. Wheeler, Review of Morris o Richard D. Sjolund and Betty McCollister, Evolution at the Grass Roots o Richard D. Sjolund, [Creationism versus Biotechnology] o Betty McCollister, [The Politics of Creationism] o Molleen Matsumara, What Do Christians Really Believe about Evolution? o National Center for Science Education, Seven Significant Court Decisions Regarding Evolution/Creation Issues * PERSONAL INCREDULITY AND ANTIEVOLUTIONISM * o Richard Dawkins, [The Argument from Personal Incredulity] o Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial o Eugenie C. Scott, Review of Johnson o Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box o Robert Dorit, Review of Behe o Michael Ruse, Darwin’s New Critics on Trial * SCIENTISTS’ OPPOSITION TO CREATIONISM * o American Association for the Advancement of Science, Forced Teaching of Creationist Beliefs in Public School Science Education o American Institute of Biological Sciences, Resolution Oposing Creationism in Science Courses o National Association of Biology Teachers, Statement on Teaching Evolution o National Academy of Sciences, Frequently Asked Questions about Evolution and the Nature of Science * FUNDAMENTALIST CREATIONISM AND THE VALUE OF SATIRE * o Michael Shermer, Genesis Revisted: A Scientific Creation Story o Philip Appleman, Darwin’s Ark * Part IX: Darwin and the Literary Mind * DARWIN’S LITERARY SENSIBILITY * o Charles Darwin, Autobiography o L. Robert Stevens, Darwin’s Humane Reading o George Levine, Darwin and Pain: Why Science Made Shakespeare Nauseating o Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots * DARWIN’S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE * o Lionel Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets o George Levine, Darwin among the Novelists o Joseph Wood Krutch, The Tragic Fallacy o Herbert J. Muller, Modern Tragedy o Philip Appleman, Darwin-Sightings in Recent Literature. (shrink)

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number (...) of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance. (shrink)

To compare a novel to a work of philosophy is, admittedly, a risky exercise in analogy. When the novelist is Lawrence and the philosophical text is the ponderous and dialectical Being and Nothingness, such a comparison may seem willfully perverse and peculiarly open, insofar as it deals with Lawrence's great theme of sexuality, to his anathema of "sex in the head." Furthermore, modern criticism, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has tended to be wary of critical approaches that lean on notions (...) that are not derived from literature itself - a tendency that is being reinforced these days by the structuralist insistence on the "literariness" of the Text. Now, despite its metaphorical statement as a form of dramatic "gesture," Sartre's book is very definitely not a work of literature. T.H. Adamowski, associate professor of English at Erindale College, the University of Toronto, has written articles on English, American, and French literature. This essay is part of a larger study on progress on Lawrence's "sexual poetics.". (shrink)

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number (...) of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Denying the Body? Memory and the Dilemmas of History in DescartesTimothy J. ReissIn an essay first published in The New York Review of Books in January 1983, touching her apprenticeship as writer, the Barbadian /American novelist Paule Marshall described the long afternoon conversations with which her mother and friends used to relax in the family kitchen. She recalled how they saw things as composed of opposites; not torn, (...) but completed and made whole by them.Theirs was not a Manichean brand of dualism that sees matter, flesh, the body, as inherently evil, because they constantly addressed each other as “soully-gal”—soul: spirit; gal: the body, flesh, the visible self. And it was clear from their tone that they gave one as much weight and importance as the other. They had never heard of the mind/body split. 1This closing claim is surely less than self-evident. Whether or not the companions had heard of the mind/body split depends on the meaning given to the verb “hear.” Certainly it was embedded in their language, however much the phrase “soully-gal” might recombine its parts.Did the split come from Descartes and early European debates, linguistically colonizing all those who came within its sphere—Africans, Barbadians, Brooklynites? Did it come from a Christian heritage, with its haggling over bodily mortality and immortality of soul? Who knows? A first point is that it is still an everyday experience, deeply buried in language and so in the ideas, feelings, and meanings expressed in language. A second point is that the post-Cartesian debates—to simplify for a moment with an overly heavy [End Page 587] hand—were and are themselves but a variant within a much longer received wisdom. Nonetheless, such wisdom is now bound to that variant, which, willy-nilly, does give one set of parameters to a common experience—at least, to that of those of us who dwell under Western hegemonies. It gives them also, no doubt, to many who live within them at once less clearly and more contentiously.I would like to offer a further powerful instance here, simply to emphasize what and how much is at stake in the questions to be addressed. It occurs in a writing by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, his Palace of the Peacock. First in a tetralogy, this novel recounts something like a journey away from a life of colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression towards a hoped-for rebirth in “fulfilment and understanding.” 2 Early on, the harsh protagonist, Donne, mocks the narrator, his mysterious “double” and “brother,” Dreamer, who has remarked their distance from “the folk.” “Is it a mystery of language and address?” asks Donne. Slightly bewildered, Dreamer struggles to suggest that the obstacle is less of language than of a deeper disjunction:“it’s an inapprehension of substance,” I blurted out, “an actual fear of the substance of life, fear of the substance of the folk, a cannibal blind fear in oneself. Put it how you like,” I cried, “it’s a fear of acknowledging the true substance of life. Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,” I declared, “must demonstrate the unity of being, and show...” I had grown violent and emphatic... “that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance....” 3Recovery of unity might become a way to defeat political and historical violences. In the next novel in the sequence, one of two self-indulgently whining characters, accused of pining for a woman who has run away to seek education, explodes: “I don’t believe you can begin to see how some body like they born seeking for mind.” 4 For peoples of the colonized Americas, imbued with “the great civilization of the American Indian,” this urge, Harris then wrote in a critical essay, was simply the personal form of a social and political necessity to recover still-living elements of a culture for which “matter truly bore the imprint of genius,” refusing “the taboo of spirituality removed from sensuous direction.” 5 Recently, Harris has worried this... (shrink)

On one thing the whole world seems to agree: Globalization is homogenizing cultures. At least, a lot of countries are acting as if that’s the case. In the name of containing what the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood calls “the Great Star-Spangled Them,” the Canadian government subsidizes the nation’s film industry and requires radio stations to devote a percentage of their airtime to home-grown music, carving out extra airplay for stars such as Celine Dion and Barenaked Ladies. Ottawa also discouraged Borders, (...) the American book superstore, from entering the Canadian market out of fear that it would not carry enough Canadian literature. The French government spends some US $3 billion annually on culture and employs 12,000 cultural bureaucrats in an effort to preserve its vision of a uniquely French culture. Spain, South Korea and Brazil place binding domestic-content requirements on their cinemas; France and Spain do the same for television. Until recently, India barred the sale of Coca-Cola. (shrink)

My purpose in this essay is to describe and define the ways in which Afro-American women intellectuals, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, theorized about the possibilities and limits of patriarchal power through its manipulation of racialized and gendered social categories and practices. The essay is especially directed toward two academic constituencies: the practitioners of Afro-American cultural analysis and of feminist historiography and theory. The dialogue with each has its own peculiar form, characterized by its own (...) specific history; yet both groups are addressed in an assertion of difference, of alterity, and in a voice characterized by an anger dangerously self-restrained. For it is not in the nature of Caliban to curse; rather, like Caliban, the black woman has learned from her behaviour of her master and mistress that if accommodation results in a patronizing loosening of her bonds, liberation will be more painful. Hazel V. Carby is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is the coauthor of the Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain and the author of Uplifting as They Write: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. (shrink)

Nott, a novelist, poet and writer on philosophy and criticism, examines current Anglo-American philosophers and finds them too parochial in that they analyze language scientifically and by doing so limit the scope of philosophy. The real problems are endless moral ones in Nott’s estimation, and they have been ignored by analysts who have concentrated on what we say not on what we do or ought to do. She believes that philosophy is a humane study which cannot help being ethical (...) and social. The development and direction of philosophy as being critical are acceptable if the criticism is concerned with metaphysical concepts and the structure and use of language in a way that is not abstract and syntactical. A reference is made on Chomsky’s Aspects by Nott who reveals her inability to comprehend the philosophical implications of deep structure analysis. Peirce in his relativistic approach to truth and knowledge, however, is singled out because truth as he analyzed it was not a collection of certainties but a function of belief inside a human world of common meanings. An inquiry, we are told, is valid if it moves toward a logical method of science. With this approach emphasis is placed on knowing rather than what is to be known provided the knower represents our common capacity for arriving at judgments on which we agree. The pragmatism of Peirce gives us a natural concrete expansion to our concepts. Understanding means understanding part of our world in a pragmatic sense as opposed to the analytic approach that does not concern itself with the world. In the concluding chapter, Nott states that the present day philosophical act has been narrowly circumscribed and by implication wrongly defined. The philosopher does not want to commit himself to practical opinions nor write a comprehensive treatise on the human situation. Nott ends by saying that the philosopher must examine his environment and the distinctness of the human person. Unfortunately, Kathleen Nott has not considered the complexities of human existence nor has she made an attempt to consider them seriously as seen by her rejection of philosophers who attempt to define the complexities of human existence.—G. D. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass’s socio-political narrative is explored through an existential lens, arguing that Douglass is contesting the proposition that essence precedes existence. Douglass, through his fight with Covey, a white ‘slave breaker’, and his escape to freedom, affirms his existence as being for it-self over and against the reduction of his existence to that of being in-itself. Drawing from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who was greatly influenced by the phenomenological and politico-praxic work of Black novelist Richard Wright, it is (...) argued that Douglass disrupts the power/knowledge regime of white American slavery, exercising his existential capacity for transcendence. Examining whiteness as a species of what Beauvoir calls ‘the serious man’, it is argued that whites within Douglass’s text are in a state of flight, performing their whiteness as ‘the serious man’, that is, where whiteness is accepted as an unconditioned state of being. Douglass’s narrative depicts whiteness as a flight from freedom ; for his very act of protestation against whiteness demonstrates that whiteness is not an objective, hypostatized thing, but a performative choice that sustains white hegemony. (shrink)