Literary Interpretation

(Dall'introduzione del volume) Nel terzo capitolo Simone Ghelli si lancia nell’impresa di ipotizzare un percorso di lettura leviano di cui non è dato trovare riscontri filologici precisi, ma che è tuttavia percepibile “nell’aria” e nelle opere del torinese. Si tratta di una risonanza con il pensiero filosofico di Pierre Bayle e della sua riflessione sulla sofferenza nell’orizzonte speculativo di Levi, il quale tornò sovente a meditare sul problema del male e sulla spinosa questione dell’assenza di Dio e dell’impossibilità di fornire (...) una giustificazione della vita e del mondo. Ghelli arriva così a sostenere che «la posizione di Levi esprime una profonda consapevolezza filosofica, una concatenazione non casuale di concetti e argomenti riconducibile a una tradizione ben precisa: quella dell’ateismo moderno». (shrink)

The play's the thing,"1 Hamlet says in act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare's finest tragedy. Hamlet is referring here to the forthcoming performance of The Mousetrap, the play that he has asked the newly arrived players to perform that evening in the presence of his mother and uncle. "The play's the thing," Hamlet says, "Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King". But it is not confirmation of his uncle's guilt as the murderer of his father that Hamlet really needs (...) or ultimately receives from this piece of theater he has asked be performed but rather the clarification and redemption of his own confused and violent psyche.Hamlet is a character who spends the first two acts of Shakespeare's play alternately... (shrink)

That George Eliot was deeply interested in Spinoza is well known. She translated part of Benedict de Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as early as 1842, and completed a full translation of the Ethics by 1856. This might lead one to think that in her novels, Eliot applied the insights of Spinoza by showing them at work in the lives of her characters. Indeed, a number of commentators have made this assumption in depicting the relationship between Eliot and Spinoza.1 Other commentators have (...) taken Eliot to be extending Spinoza's thought, adapting and transforming it in sympathetic ways.2 Unfortunately, however, these views are deeply mistaken.I say "deeply mistaken" because the differences between Spinoza and... (shrink)

The most disturbing gift that Disgrace presents to its readers is the hushed resolve with which Lucy Lurie emerges from her rape to reaffirm her way of life. To consider that way of life, the reader is first invited to align oneself with David Lurie's initial normative reading of his daughter's rape; but then, in a second important step, to join in the change of mind by which David overcomes this initial blindness. Imagine what accepting the invitation to take both (...) of these steps demands of the reader: Will you let yourself undergo a change of mind with David to resee Lucy as resolute and proactive? Will you allow yourself to think along with Lucy that horrific violence does not demand retaliation?Descriptions of... (shrink)

Intentionalism, it has been remarked, just won't go away.1 The idea that the meaning of a literary work is determined by the intentions of its author remains appealing and deeply entrenched in most people's thinking,2 in spite of ever-new waves of resistance. I do not wish to resume the discussion of the overall plausibility of intentionalism. Nor will I take a stand in the discussion of its different varieties, like actual versus hypothetical intentionalism.3 My interest lies in exploring the different (...) ways in which intentions might determine literary meaning, and the different kinds of meaning that may be found in a literary work. I contend that proponents of intentionalism have been insufficiently attentive to... (shrink)

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm."The John Donne of "A Valediction: Of Weeping" prefers the picture to the real. For Donne and for Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he is aligned in this essay, the preference principally involves issues of control. As Sartre writes, "It's not enough that a certain picture which I have in mind should exist; it is necessary as well that it exist through me."1 While the more conventional predilection for the virtual over (...) the actual assumes the durability of art, Donne's sequential portraits in the poem confirm, as Sartre puts it, that "man's relation with being is that he can modify it". The vanishing... (shrink)

I am not certain that I know what I am trying to describe or how to identify it. It is something that happens or perhaps does not happen in Shakespeare's characters, something about how they think, in particular how they think or do not think at a critical moment of decision or change. I am referring to Shakespeare's policy and practice of conspicuous omission, calculated evasion, silent avoidance—to something that Shakespeare does not give us, a reticence or restraint about the (...) thinking of a character that we might have expected to see revealed. Sometimes I am inclined to say that what I am describing is inadvertent, inevitable. But then I am led back to concluding that what is there is there because Shakespeare... (shrink)

Jules Brody argues that Aristotle's usage of hamartia in The Poetics is best understood in terms of its literal meaning, "missing the mark," rather than in the broader, familiar sense of "tragic flaw." Hamartia is a morally neutral non-normative term, derived from the verb hamartano, meaning "to miss the mark," "to fall short of an objective." And by extension: to reach one destination rather than the intended one; to make a mistake, not in the sense of a moral failure, but (...) in the nonjudgmental sense of taking one thing for another, taking something for its opposite. Hamartia may betoken an error of discernment due to ignorance, to the lack of an essential piece of information.1 Or, as S. H. Butcher would have it:... (shrink)

I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.A pen is a machine to think with.The writer engages the world not only by living in and reflecting it but also by two dynamic processes, one sensory/motor, the other social. The former involves cycles of writing, reading what has been written, responding to it, and writing again; the latter involves writing, reading to an audience, responding to their reactions, and writing again. Dynamic processes involving brain (...) and world, via perception and behavior, have been of great interest to philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists in recent decades. In contrast to classical cognitive science, enactivism proposes... (shrink)

This is certainly true for every translation, because every translation must necessarily accomplish the transition of the spirit of one language into that of another.We all know who and what Creon was. He was a tyrant—a proto-Nazi, according to French playwright Jean Anouilh. He was not even the same person in Sophocles's three Theban plays, according to translator H. D. F. Kitto.2 He was Antigone's uncle, her mother's brother. He was a symbol of the transition from a "rule of tradition" (...) to a "rule of law" in ancient Greece, according to political scientist Catherine A. Holland.3 We also all know what those terms mean—tyrant, the same person, uncle, brother, rule of tradition, rule of law.... (shrink)

οὕτω τὸ τοῦ κάλλους ῥεῦμα πάλιν εἰς τὸν καλὸν διὰ τῶν ὀμμάτων...

It is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.Having taken the Romagna in 1502, Cesare Borgia, the Italian nobleman and model for Machiavelli's political treatise The Prince, soon learned how unruly the newly acquired province was. Armed robbery, theft, impudent nepotism, imprecise law, and the racket made by the rebellious common people—all of this demanded the introduction of some kind of order. Messer Ramiro d'Orco, a thirtysomething, dynamic, decisive, resolute, and morally (...) incorruptible man, seemed to be the ideal candidate for the position of governor of the disobedient province. With the protection and consent of the prince, he introduced a strong rule of law that... (shrink)

Pessimism distilled: Happiness is possible, but evil; unhappiness is likely, but futile.Very little is known of the bastard called Zobel Blake. We know he is the only person of record, bastard or otherwise, ever to be called by that name, and that his primary claim to historical significance lies in the fact that he was the very last man to languish to his death in an American debtors' prison. That such a distinction should befall an otherwise obscure man is not (...) surprising; that this notable death took place in New Orleans, however, in the year 1867, more than two decades after debtors' prisons had been formally abolished both by the U.S. Congress and by the state of Louisiana, might well wrinkle one's brow.Most of... (shrink)

Students in the humanities have found Antigone intriguing ever since she was cast as the focal character in Sophocles's much contemplated tragedy. Antigone is enigmatic, to be sure; until comparatively recently, most interpretations of her focused on her role in the context of the tragic series of events unfolding in the play. These accounts relied heavily on her portrayal by Hegel, as representing the prepolitical ties of kinship coming into conflict with the ascending authority of the state.Richer life was breathed (...) into the 2,400-year-old play, however, by Jacques Lacan in his 1960 lecture "The Essence of Tragedy."1 As a result, over the past several decades an intense interest has developed in the persona of... (shrink)

Postmodernism, in spite of its exaggerations and myopias, has left us with many gifts, including two strains of the critical tradition that struggle to reconcile with each other. Those strains grow from two undeniable truths: that the self can never occupy the space of the other, nor can the self extricate the other from its nature. Given the conflict between these truths, the postmodern resistance to metaphysics can never be quite as rigorous as it imagines, since the self, as inextricable (...) from what it can never be, must be an object of faith, its origin and agency rooted in an eclipsed otherness beyond our capacity to witness or understand. A sense of this eclipse, acknowledged or not, haunts the contradictions... (shrink)

We see our fathers naked, we men.Among the more poignant moments of Stanley Cavell’s 2010 autobiography Little Did I Know are those in which young Cavell works to find words to break the silence that hung between himself and his father. In one exchange, seven-year-old Cavell’s aimless remark about speckled chocolate wafers was met with a savage retort and marked the moment when Cavell became certain his father wanted him dead—or rather, not to exist at all. Cavell was tormented both (...) by his father’s utterances and punishing silences, and it is little wonder Cavell developed a lifelong preoccupation with responsiveness and failures of responsiveness. Here, too, we see the roots of Cavell’s... (shrink)

From philosophy of science, epistemology, and ethics to political philosophy and philosophy of mathematics, Philip Kitcher has made outstanding contributions to every philosophical discipline. With Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, he continues his journey into philosophy of literature he undertook back in 2007 with his book Joyce’s Kaleidoscope. Written in his clear, precise, and occasionally almost poetic style, Deaths in Venice is not only an inspiring new interpretation of Thomas Mann’s famous novel Death in Venice but (...) also a rich insight into the connection between philosophy and art, that is, literature and music. Original and thought provoking in his treatment of this much discussed... (shrink)

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.Increased interest in the experience of space in literature in recent decades has resulted in numerous commentaries on such topics as colonial space, geographical space, gendered space, liminal space, psychic space, and signifying space. (...) In fact, Con Coroneos suggests that Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation”1 considers as many as forty different types of space.2Conrad studies have not been silent during this... (shrink)

This essay explores a modern American poem—its verse form, imagery, diction, and rhythm, and, in particular, its cultural echoes, resonances, and overtones. I examine the poem’s explicit invocation of Apelles and crow mythology, but I also show that the implicit context from which it arises, and the one that allows it to speak with the great- est fullness and power, is work that Shakespeare wrote or published between 1606 and 1609. This context allows us to see that, at the heart (...) of the poem, lies the Shakespearean and Platonic analogy between the creation of children and the creation of intellectual work. (shrink)

Many of us read works of fiction passionately not only because of their entertainment value or for their aesthetic inventiveness but also because we feel that they enrich our understanding of ourselves and the world. This is where there seems to be an important resemblance to philosophy. A number of fictional works can be legitimately called “philosophical” because they are thought provoking about issues that works of philosophy explicitly deal with. However, as the hot debate concerning truth through literature or (...) literature’s cognitive value indicates, it is notoriously hard to pin down what it means to “enrich understanding” or what counts as “thought-provoking content.” Even if it is granted that literature... (shrink)

Leavis’s turn from a preoccupation with poetry to a preoccupation with the novel in the second part of his career has long been recognized. There is a consensus that he had a wonderful feeling for the textual particularity of poetry, the way that a poem is not just its paraphrasable content, in that the meaning is carried by the movement, rhythm, tone, and tempo of the speaking voice. Poetry intended for the eye and print reading only passed him by. It (...) is not surprising, then, that when Leavis’s concern turned from poetry to the novel, he wanted to assimilate the novel as much as possible to poetry. He preferred to think of the novel as a “dramatic poem” and claimed... (shrink)

“To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality.”1The main title of this article departs from a statement made by Andrew Cross in the chapter he wrote for The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, “Neither Either nor Or: the Perils of Reflexive Irony,” which must surely suggest a tantalizing read for anyone familiar with the writings of Italo Svevo. In his chapter, Cross posits Søren Kierkegaard’s theorizing of irony as “not just a verbal strategy, but a way of life.”2 (...) It is, of course, commonly accepted that Kierkegaard’s writing is characterized by various forms of intentional and self-conscious verbal indirectness, some of which will be explored in this article. But beyond irony as a speech... (shrink)

In the latter part of the eigthteenth century, philosophers faced a problem with respect to moral freedom. They were concerned not only with an account of how one could be free in the Newtonian system of nature but also with how it might be possible to represent that freedom. The imagination provided an answer. The imagination, thought to have limitless potential through aesthetic experiences and judgments, provided the bridge between our abstract, intellectual understanding of the world and the conditions of (...) our morality. In constructing a system of knowledge, the possibility of moral freedom set the rational limit to our abstract, intellectual understanding of the world.1 For Immanuel Kant, this possibility of... (shrink)

Wittgenstein as Shakespearean critic. Because Wittgenstein’s commentators agree that Shakespeare is the world’s greatest ever playwright, they have to account for those few remarks of his that may suggest a negative evaluation of Shakespeare as a poet. But these remarks can also be used to reveal that Shakespeare is a poet of a kind uniquely different to the majority of those whom Wittgenstein admired. This view is central to John Middleton Murry’s interpretation of Shakespeare and Keats. In a more positive (...) light, he echoes those remarks of Wittgenstein that are often assumed to embody a critical devaluation or “misunderstanding” of Shakespeare’s work.Recent commentators: Wolfgang Huemer and William Day. If we were... (shrink)

Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say. … But he displays it to us in a dance, not naturalistically.In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that ethics cannot be put into words. This does not mean he thought ethics could not be made manifest; and indeed I will suggest that Wittgenstein took the best manifestation of ethics to be in aesthetics, and more specifically literature. Literature uses words in such a way as to allow ethics to show itself. It (...) does this, I suggest, through perspicuous presentations, though of a different kind than those of philosophy. Wittgenstein takes us some way toward fleshing out the literary nature of perspicuous presentations, but not far enough. To do this, I will... (shrink)

My title question has something of the feel of a book club discussion starter, but it has further-reaching implications for understanding Mrs. Dalloway than might first appear. Consider two more mainstream interpretive questions. First, Virginia Woolf's novel places extensive cognitive and aesthetic demands on its readers and thereby participates in the famous "difficulty" of much high-modernist literature. Any interpretation should explain why Woolf thought such a challenge to the capacities and expectations of the reader was necessary or conducive to her (...) purposes. Second, it is an obvious, perhaps the most obvious, feature of the work that it takes the name of a character for its title. That puts Clarissa... (shrink)

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of an essay you have almost certainly read, if you took any class on literary theory in the intervening half-century. The essay in question is “The Death of the Author,” by a brilliant French thinker named Roland Barthes. Barthes had wonderfully illuminating things to say about the structure of narrative, realism, Proust, Racine, photography, and billboards. When he turned his thoughts to authorship, however, his touch temporarily deserted him, and the essay that resulted is (...) a huge mess, full of unclear claims, weak arguments, and logical contradictions. This generates a double mystery: how did a theorist so smart end up saying such silly things? And—even more... (shrink)

Herman Melville was so estranged from the religious beliefs of his time and place that his faith was doubted during his own lifetime. In the middle of the twentieth century some scholars even associated him with nihilism. To date, however, no one has offered a detailed account of Melville in relation to Nietzsche, who first made nihilism a topic of serious concern to the Western philosophical tradition. In this essay, I discuss some of the hitherto unexplored similarities between Melville’s ideas (...) and Nietzsche’s reflections on and reactions to the death of God and the advent of nihilism in the West. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

In recent years, some prominent scholars have been making a surprising claim: examining literary texts for hidden depths is overblown, misguided, or indeed downright dangerous. Such examination, they’ve warned us, may lead to the loss of world Heidegger warned of (Gumbrecht), to the world-denying metaphysics Nietzsche warned of (Nehamas), or to the suspicious form of hermeneutics Ricoeur warned of (Best, Marcus, Moi). This paper seeks to suggest that, though the concerns are understandable, there’s ultimately nothing to worry about. The fact (...) that Nietzsche himself happily used metaphors of surface and depth suggests that they are not, in fact, metaphysically fraught. The fact that it’s possible to appreciate surfaces at the same time as depths means that there’s no real danger of losing the world. And as for depth-talk turning us into suspicious hermeneuts, that would happen only if we made two fallacious assumptions: first, that all depths are meanings; second, that all hidden features are in a text by accident. But since plenty of authors hide things deliberately, and since what’s hidden often has nothing to do with propositional content, both assumptions are profoundly mistaken. Meanwhile, the surface/depth metaphor is the only thing that adequately captures the phenomenology of reading, especially when it comes to misdirection-based, hermetic, enigmatic, ironic, or satirical texts, where special activity on our part prompts a sudden leap to a radically different mode of understanding. And unlike its rivals, the surface/depth metaphor reflects a real asymmetry: depths explain surfaces, but not vice versa; surfaces are available without depths, but not the other way around. We need the metaphor, and we need to stay open to hidden depths as we read. As long as we don’t come in with terrible assumptions, nothing bad will happen to us, and plenty of good things will. It’s perfectly safe to go back in the water. (shrink)

Plato’s character Socrates is clearly a sophisticated logician. Why then does he fall, at times, into the most elementary fallacies? It is, I propose, because the end goal for Plato is not the mere acquisition of superior understanding but instead a well-lived life, a life lived in harmony with oneself. For such an end, accurate opinions are necessary but not sufficient: what we crucially need is a method, a procedure for ridding ourselves of those opinions that are false. Now learning (...) a method is a very different business from learning a set of ideas. It requires not just study but practice, and practice is precisely what Plato’s dialogues, thanks to the layer of irony between author and protagonist, make possible. If we have a predisposition for detecting and are interested in resolving conflicts within a set of beliefs—if, that is, we instinctively posit logical consistency as a desideratum in life—then we stand to learn, when we read the dialogues, not only what to think but also, and far more importantly, how to think. (shrink)

Scientists have complained about the inconsistency and politics of academic publishing for hundreds of years. Among the explanations offered are that evaluators lack time and use shortcuts, that they lack the expertise to judge things properly, that they can't put aside personal biases and we must hide the names of authors, and that they are conscientious instead of creative and cannot judge new ideas. All of these are actually wrong. As a literary analyst, I spent the last ten years independently (...) studying this same problem in book and movie production. I've found that the human decision-making apparatus doesn't work the way we think, and the solutions based on this misunderstanding could never have solved the problem. In this paper, we present the first method that actually can, which is a technique adapted from computer hacking, as well as a new view of how our brains make choices. (shrink)

A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.

‘Tales of dread’ is a genre that has received scant attention in aesthetics. In this paper, I aim to elaborate an account of tales of dread which effectively distinguishes these from horror stories, and helps explain the close affinity between the two, accommodating borderline cases. I briefly consider two existing accounts of the genre – namely, those of Noël Carroll and of Cynthia Freeland – and show why they are inadequate for my purposes. I then develop my own account of (...) tales of dread, drawing on two theoretical resources: Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’, and Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic. In particular, I draw on Freud to help distinguish tales of dread from horror stories, and I draw on Todorov to help explain the fluidity between the genres. I argue that both horror stories and tales of dread feature apparent impossibilities which are threatening; but whereas in horror stories the existence of the monster is confirmed, tales of dread are sustained by the audience’s uncertainty pertaining to preternatural objects or events. Where horror monsters pose an immediate, concrete danger to the subject’s physical well-being, these preternatural objects or events pose a psychological threat to the subject’s grasp of reality. (shrink)

The prevailing tendency in interpreting Macbeth is to presume that if something seems not to fit the play, then our job as readers or audience members is to figure out how it actually does fit. By contrast, in this paper I take a less-deferential approach to interpretation, arguing that the famous speech in Macbeth, act 5, scene 5, was not written for the play in which it appears.2 Like the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, the "tomorrow" speech in (...) Macbeth is known to us before we read or see it. But unlike the shower scene, the tomorrow speech does not make perfect sense in context. This may sound ridiculous, but only because scholars tend to put Shakespeare on a pedestal and look for complicated... (shrink)