This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's _How to Do Things with Words_, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as (...) examples and imaginary dialogues that forestall potential objections. _How to Do Things with Words_ is not the triumphant establishment of a fully elaborated theory of speech acts, but the story of a failure to do that, the story of what Austin calls a "bogging down." After an introductory chapter that explores Austin's book in detail, the two following chapters show how Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in different ways challenge Austin's speech act theory generally and his expulsion of literature specifically. Derrida shows that literature cannot be expelled from speech acts—rather that what he calls "iterability" means that any speech act may be literature. De Man asserts that speech act theory involves a radical dissociation between the cognitive and positing dimensions of language, what Austin calls language's "constative" and "performative" aspects. Both Derrida and de Man elaborate new speech act theories that form the basis of new notions of responsible and effective politico-ethical decision and action. The fourth chapter explores the role of strong emotion in effective speech acts through a discussion of passages in Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Austin. The final chapter demonstrates, through close readings of three passages in Proust, the way speech act theory can be employed in an illuminating way in the accurate reading of literary works. (shrink)

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

Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements makes a timely, compelling, and important intervention in the philosophical literature on poverty and global justice, and improves our understanding of the nature and extent of responsibilities of variously situated agents towards the poor. Deveaux’s focus on poor-led social movements emphasizes that effective poverty reduction requires building up the collective capacities of the poor to engage in joint collective action to oppose and dismantle unjust structures. This approach politicizes poverty and provides (...) a powerful refutation of some previous approaches that primarily formulated responses to global poverty to consist in mere charity to lighten the poor’s deprivations, or top-down solutions imposed by technocrats and other development experts. Deveaux then extends the concept of solidarity to characterize the political responsibility of the nonpoor, which consists of acting in political solidarity with poor-led organizations and movements. It is this latter move to extend the concept of solidarity to characterize poor-nonpoor cooperative activities that I question in this commentary. When the concept of solidarity, understood as identification-based joint action, is stretched to encompass cooperation between all those who may act together to resist, oppose, and dismantle the structures of domination and oppression that constitute poverty, there is the danger of obscuring the alienation and oppositional social positions that attend conditions of structural injustice. To acknowledge the limits and dilemmas of solidarity practices between the poor and nonpoor is perhaps a sober reminder of one of the major costs of living in conditions of structural injustice. (shrink)

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

In this book, James Boyd White shows how texts by some of our most important thinkers and writers—including Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela, and Lincoln—answer these questions, not in the abstract, but in the way they wrestle ...

Communication and interaction today happen in simply one mouse click away. Language and self-expression do not only develop as a recognized tool for oneself but is an avenue for others’ re-expression and identification. Through using Twitter, the elaboration of social interaction becomes easier and accessible. It becomes the primary method of doing things together and establishes a shared meaning that becomes the common ground of understanding by individuals and groups alike. The study aims to analyze the tweets of Kris Aquino, (...) known as the Philippines’ Queen of Multimedia using speech act categories of Searle and predict the meaning based on the speech acts committed. The study used content analysis for it represents systematic and objective means of describing and quantifying phenomena. The results showed that most tweets contained the ‘assertive’ label which refers to ‘those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not’. Further, her influence as a public figure contributed to the forceful implication of realizing the speech act reflected by her readers. Since impression is reality and intention cannot be quantified, what the general audience perceives on a certain person serves to be the truth. Thus, misinterpretation develops due to poor judgment on the elucidation in the tweets of the posters, readers and vice-versa. Keywords - Sociolinguistics, speech act theory, Twitter, micro-blogging, SNS, qualitative, content analysis, Philippines. (shrink)

The principle that physicians should always act in the best interests of the present patient is widely endorsed. At the same time, and often within the same document, it is recognised that there are appropriate exceptions to this principle. Unfortunately, little, if any, guidance is provided regarding which exceptions are appropriate and how they should be handled. These circumstances might be tenable if the appropriate exceptions were rare. Yet, evaluation of the literature reveals that there are numerous exceptions, several (...) of which pervade clinical medicine. This situation leaves physicians without adequate guidance on when to allow exceptions and how to address them, increasing the chances for unfairness in practice. The present article considers the range of exceptions, illustrates how the lack of guidance poses ethical concern and describes an alternative account of physician obligations to address this concern. (shrink)

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide in Literature education paying particular attention to how this was reinforced by New Criticism and Poststructuralist Criticism as these were key movements that have had a significant (...) influence on the teaching of Literature in schools. More importantly, I argue that such a divide exemplified the different goals of the West, in which Literature education originated as a platform for the cultivation of taste, and Postcolonial countries, in which the subject was utilized as a political tool for colonization resulting in acts of mimicry and subversion among colonized subjects. In the second part of the paper, I apply third space theory to disrupt the aesthetic-political divide. I discuss the need to create third spaces in Literature classrooms that are critical, inclusive, negotiated and ethical allowing students to engage with aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of literature. (shrink)

In literary aesthetics, the debate on whether literary fictions provide propositional knowledge generally centres around the question whether there are authors’ explicit or implicit truth-claims in literary works and whether the reader’s act of looking for and assessing such claims as true or false is an appropriate stance toward the works as literary works. Nevertheless, in reading literary fiction, readers cannot always be sure whether the author is actually asserting or suggesting a view she expresses or presents because of the (...) artistic and imaginative nature of the work. In this essay, I shall argue that in addition to asserting and suggesting, authors make use of a third way of conveying knowledge by their works: they invite the reader to genuinely or extra-fictionally contemplate unasserted thoughts or viewpoints to a given issue, or they offer hypotheses or provide the reader fictional material for constructing a hypothesis. The aim of this essay is to examine this rather unanalyzed but extremely wide grey zone: the author’s act of ‘contemplating’ and the cognitive value of its products which I shall call ‘literary hypotheses.’. (shrink)

This article describes how female managers with physical impairment negotiate their relationships in the workplace. It locates discussion of physical impairment and disability within an Interactional Model of Disability. Drawing on 20 interviews, this research identifies the factors that are central to the experience of female managers with disability in the workplace, including power, passing, and surface acting. When dealing with others who had power over them, the leaders adopted approaches such as passing, in an attempt to minimize the visibility (...) of both their impairment and their disability. This involved the leaders using surface acting to present an optimistic demeanor even when their actual feelings were very different. It will be argued that the use of surface acting and the reliance on passing begins to explain why people with disability are invisible in the workplace leadership literature and why this is damaging to diversity agendas in organizations. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain (...) thinking activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Woman's Thought Runs Before Her Actions":Vows as Speech Acts in As You Like ItWilliam O. ScottAbout a decade ago Susanne Wofford discussed As You Like It from the viewpoint that Rosalind uses a "proxy," her guise as Ganymede, in uttering "the performative language necessary to accomplish deeds such as marriage." 1 Thus Wofford complicated and qualified the success-oriented assumptions about performative usage of language as envisioned in Austin's (...) speech-act theories. 2 Her starting point was that (as Austin himself said) these performative usages don't have the same kind of force if they are included in a play; and so she proposed to take Rosalind's uses of vows as playful, both theatrically and personally. Her notion of the proxy, which raises questions too about the binding force of the speech act through the identity and tactics of the speaker, is especially apt in describing exactly what Rosalind does. Understandably Rosalind's performative manqué may be a prelude to the perfected form. Another complication suggests itself if one is going to attend to niceties of language usage: given that for Austin a performative procedure is founded on conventions of language, shouldn't one also examine such linguistic forms historically? For this play the most relevant form to consider historically is the vow.The precise formulation of vows, in espousal or marriage (both legally enforceable in church courts), was very important in early-modern England. One may wonder, then, what the formal requirements of [End Page 528] vows were, how much the analysis of them resembled and diverged from modern speech-act philosophy, and how the vows functioned. And one might ask such questions both about this play and about real-life practice. A more exact notion of vows may enrich our notions of Rosalind's playfulness with them and broaden our sense of the uses and tactics of performatives; and to the extent that this playfulness contrasts with Rosalind's serious (re)iteration of vows at the end of the play, we should give due weight to Carol Neely's suggestion that much of the pleasure for early-modern audiences lay in the body of the play rather than its conclusion. 3The actual vows between lovers would indeed lend themselves to historicized analysis of the speech acts that constitute them. The early-modern ecclesiastical court judge Henry Swinburne made something like that in his Treatise of Spousals, with his section "By what Form of Words Spousals de futuro are contracted," and similarly on the form of words in "Spousals de praesenti." 4 The implied time of effectiveness in the commitment to marriage is crucial in church law of the time, because it determines whether the vows are, respectively, a betrothal that promises a future marriage, or a present binding (whether inside or outside church) that becomes an instant marriage upon carnal consummation. Both these declarations of commitment are performatives (once reciprocated), and they are normally established by social convention, what Swinburne calls "the Common use of Speech or Custom" (p. 83). Swinburne also concerns himself with what amount to the conditions of "felicity" that are requisite to make the speech valid—for instance, who is allowed to contract spousals (cp. Austin, pp. 14–24).Both of these issues of timing and eligibility are important to Rosalind in the pretense of wedding in Act 4, Scene 1. As it is for Swinburne, the context is important: when Celia as priest asks, "Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind?" his answer "I will" is not good enough for Rosalind until he adds at her direction, "I take thee, Rosalind, for wife." 5 Likewise Swinburne considers at length the arguments whether there is a distinction between "I will" and "I do," and whether the future-sounding verb refers only to the beginning of a process and not its completion (pp. 8–9, 57–61). Though in general he allows the distinction (so that "I will" makes a spousal and "I do" a marriage), one of his exceptions sounds like the question that Celia first puts: "The Man demanding of the Woman whether she will take him to her Husband, she answereth [I will... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Margolis LITERATURE AND SPEECH ACTS The trivial truth that literature employs language has been fastened on regularly and repeatedly to spawn a remarkable variety of misconceptions. Most famously, in the context of aesthetics, it has led to the untenable thesis that all art is language,1 and to the more pointed claim that works of art somehow affirm propositions that may be linguistically rendered and straightforwardly judged (...) true or false. It has also embarrassed a good deal of theorizing about the nature of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic orientation, and has led to preposterous views about the aesthetic status of the literary arts and the exaggerated importance of words in literature. These developments are reasonably well known, partly because they form a venerable portion of the history of aesthetics, partly because the doctrines at stake take so many apparently persuasive guises—even in our own time. There are other views, however, also largely based on the example of literature, that are at once useful because they are corrective of other abuses and are in their turn prone to newer mistakes that bid fair to become fashionable. The ambivalent corrective I have in mind may be marked by the thesis that a work of art is an utterance of some sort. In effect, the thesis stresses the distortion that results from pretending to address art relevantly solely in terms of the palpable properties of some object or product—more or less on the model of examining a perceptually accessible physical object. Attention is required, on the theory, to the act or agency of the artist by which the work is "uttered," in a sense quite close to that in which a forger is said to "utter" a bad check: by this simple strategem, we are led to see that biographical, historical, intentional considerations are instructive about a work of art in an essential way and that the properties of an artwork cannot possibly be restricted to its merely sensory or sensuous features (if indeed, admitting conceptual art, a particular work has any such features at all). The proposal, therefore, is at least a heuristically useful one. Whether it ought also to be enshrined as definitional of 39 40Philosophy and Literature art is another question altogether, qualified partly by its being entirely possible to save the corrections without the thesis, partly by the debatable force of definitions themselves. A rather specialized but utterly misleading and unpromising version of the utterance theory maintains that literature as such, as well as such particularly important distinctions within literature as fiction, poetry, and metaphor, may be perspicuously defined or distinguished in terms of a speech-act model. We must be careful here. The general thesis that the phenomenon of language cannot be adequately analyzed apart from contextual considerations bearing on speakers' intentions, shared assumptions and background beliefs between speakers and hearers, and the actual histories of conversations and the like has now been abundantly confirmed by a variety of theorists—including, prominently, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. P. Grice, John Searle, Keith Donnellan, George Lakoff, and Zeno Vendler. Still, the general concession that familiar syntactic and semantic studies of the phenomenon of language omit an entire dimension of language, as Austin so ably demonstrated, has rather little to say about the distinctions normally debated in the context of literary theory and the appreciation and criticism of literature. (This may well seem paradoxical. The argument has yet to be supplied.) But since the application of the speech-act model to literary analysis shows some tendency to attract advocates, it may be useful to draw explicit attention here to the inherent limitations and difficulties of the enterprise. Obviously, if language must be analyzed at least in part in terms of the context of performing speech acts, it will be impossible to ignore altogether the speech-act dimension of literary utterances. The question remains: what can and what cannot be illuminated by means of the speech-act model? Precisely how restricted a general speech-act model is—that is, one not restricted just to literature—can be seen at a stroke simply by noting that the meanings of sentences (i) cannot be equated with what speakers... (shrink)

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media--Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts is an (...) opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for Parade. Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tiresias ) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung ). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations. Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. (shrink)

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of America’s most powerful statutes, not only in American domestic environmental law, but in American domestic law in general. The first part of the ESA gives us the ‘Findings, Purposes, and Policy’ that underlie the Act. In this prefratory language, it is explicit that the ESA is referring to instrumental aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific values. But J. Baird Callicott and Andrew Wetzler argued that the ESA is also implicitly committed (...) to endangered species having intrinsic value. I argue that the best explanation of the seeming tacit intrinsic value in the ESA is not that such value really is implicit in the ESA; rather, the best explanation is that the ESA is committed to instrumental value with a certain feature that has not been carefully considered in the environmental ethics/philosophy literature before, that of incalculable instrumental value, in this case held by endangered species. (shrink)

What can literary education contribute to moral education? In this article the inherent practical, moral or political, relevance of literature and literary education is defended, which is opposed to a moralist approach to (children's) literature. A much debated danger in literature and the arts, viz. that it gives rise to a flight into a "promised land" instead of having relevance for real life and the real world, can be overcome by bringing to the fore the active part (...) the reader plays in realizing the "world of the work." The classical idea of mimesis (i.e. of art mirroring reality) then makes room for a historicity of reading with an ongoing interplay of the (real) worlds of readers and the (fictive) world of the text. This idea is elaborated on from the point of view of Ricoeur's hermeneutics and from that of Iser's reception aesthetics, respectively. In realizing the world of the work the world of the reader is transcended and opened up towards the possible. In this reconfiguration lies the practical relevance of literature. Books, therefore, do not have to mirror the actual world in order to be morally or politically relevant. It is in the act of reading that the lasting significance of so-called classics is renewed time and time again. (shrink)

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

Book synopsis: The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. (...) Together they testify to the intellectual value of feminism as a radicalizing energy internal to philosophical inquiry. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject. (shrink)

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

The book is about three things. First, how Ancient thinkers perceived humans as like or unlike other animals; second about the justification for taking a humane attitude towards natural things; and third about how moral claims count as true, and how they can be discovered or acquired. Was Aristotle was right to see continuity in the psychological functions of animal and human souls? The question cannot be settled without taking a moral stance. As we can either focus on continuity or (...) on discontinuities, how should natural science draw the boundaries? Moral agents act and react in a world that they see under a certain description, and there is no value free science that can settle what is the correct description. This book asks us to think about where moral justification could come from, and suggests that the supposed ‘moral status’ of the object cannot provide the answer. For the moral status of the object is a product of our own imagination, and once we see that, we also see that there remains the question where we ought to have the will to see it. Furthermore, since the perception of moral truth involves the development of imagination and will, the means to attain it will be better served by engagement with poetry and literature than with enquiries that seek to exclude the engagement of the imagination, or any appeal to the beauty of nature or the love of one's fellow creatures. (shrink)

What, if anything, distinguishes works of fiction such as Hamlet and Madame Bovary from biographies, news reports, or office bulletins? Is there a "right" way to interpret fiction? Should we link interpretation to the author's intention? Ought our moral unease with works that betray sadistic, sexist, or racist elements lower our judgments of their aesthetic worth? And what, when it comes down to it, is literature? The readings in this collection bring together some of the most important recent work (...) in the philosophy of literature by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, John Searle, and David Lewis. The readings explore philosophical issues such as the nature of fiction, the status of the author, the act of interpretation, the role of the emotions in the act of reading, the aesthetic and moral value of literary works, and other topics central to the philosophy of literature. (shrink)

In a paper that recently appeared in this journal, we proposed a model that aims at providing a comprehensive account of our ability to intelligently use tools, bridging sensorimotor and reasoning-based explanations of this ability. Central to our model is the notion of generalized motor programs for tool use, which we defined as a synthesis between classic motor programs, as described in the scientific literature, and Peircean habits. In his commentary, Osiurak proposes a critique of the notion of generalized (...) motor program, and suggests that the limitations of our model can be solved by integrating it with the view that motor programs are generated by a previous mechanical reasoning, independent from sensorimotor knowledge. Here we reply that while on the one hand our reference to Peircean habits gets over the temptation to consider motor programs as fixed internal entities, it also rejects the view, endorsed by Osiurak, that intelligent practice is a mixture of antecedent abstract reasoning and subsequent motor execution. (shrink)

However diverse and even conflicting definitions of world literature may be, there is a consensus in previous scholarship about circulation as a key defining feature. Being circulation modeled and (in)validated by a corpus of statutes, rules, and regulations, the absence of a law-oriented approach to world literature appears completely contradictory. This essay is a first step toward a more sustained treatment of world literature and law. Here I claim that in the late 1830s the history of world (...) literature as mastered by the West started to change as a consequence of the first two international copyright laws in the world––the Prussian Statute of 11 June 1837 and the British Act of 31 July 1838. The Prussian law is discussed in relation to the evolution of the Collection of British Authors of the German firm Tauchnitz between 1841 and 1847 by paying special attention to the case of American writers. The British law, in turn, is discussed in relation to French piracies of works printed in the UK by focusing on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Both laws sowed the seeds of the 1886 Berne Convention, whereby a vast transcontinental geography with a population of over five hundred million people was created for the legal circulation of literary works. (shrink)

Citizens are called upon to become active participants in creating a more sustainable food system. As food citizens, people participate in defining and constructing their food systems according to their needs and values. In food policies, the concept of food citizenship is often left undefined or with reference only to individual activities. In the food citizenship literature, the role of nonhuman agency in constituting food citizenship needs more examination. Here we investigate food citizenship activities in a citizen-led community-supported agriculture (...) group and explore the role of materiality in constituting food citizenship. We ask (1) what is the role of material-discursive arrangements in community-supported agriculture activities, and (2) how does materiality constitute food citizenship? We analyze semi-structured interviews, as well as observation and visual material, using qualitative content analysis. Our findings indicate that materialities, such as the field, time, and body, play a central role in community-supported agriculture activities. With materialities, food citizenship is understood as collective and active doing, aiming to change the food system. Instead of endorsing food citizenship as a human trait or status, we claim that it is more productive to regard it as a phenomenon, produced in intra-action with(in) material-discursive arrangements. Acknowledging nonhuman agency emphasizes the political, collective, and responsible nature of citizenship as well as the power relations behind the constitution of citizenship. We conclude that in food policies more attention should be paid to collective ways of civic participation and to the materiality of becoming a food citizen. (shrink)

New media and technologies such as social media and online platforms are disrupting the way businesses are run and how society functions. This article advises that scholars consider the morality of new media as an area of investigation. While prior literature has given much attention to how social media provides benefits, how it affects society generally, and how it can be used efficiently, research on the ethical aspects of new media has received relatively less attention. In an age where (...) matters such as violence, hate crimes, fake news, etc. are increasingly pervasive, we need to address the role of online technology in aiding or limiting such negative acts. In this regard, this article uses the canvas of a terror attack that was facilitated by online technology to bring to light pressing social and ethical issues in the use of new media. I draw upon 264 news articles focusing on the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacks to piece together how the attack was orchestrated and focus on technology-enabled facets of the event. I stir discussion on the ethical aspects of technology with regard to online discrimination and highlight business and other stakeholder responsibilities and challenges as technology continues to evolve and pervade our social lives. (shrink)

Samizdat, the underground circulation of unofficial and forbidden literature in the Soviet Union, is an example of how censorship can backfire. Ideological restrictions produced walls of monotony in libraries and bookstores, propelling readers to search for more interesting fare. Sensitive texts on religion, philosophy, human rights, and current events, as well as literary works, passed from hand to hand clandestinely from around 1960 until censorship was abolished in the late 1980s. Von Zitzewitz's study is itself interesting fare, uncovering the (...) workings of samizdat as both a distribution network, comparable to that of print culture, and a social network that developed bonds between people who shared a defined purpose outside the public space. By no means did they all think of themselves as dissenters. For many people who lived ordinary Soviet lives, it was simply that “reading samizdat increased [their] individual feeling of freedom and represented a personal act of resistance.”One merit of this book is its point-by-point comparison of the samizdat distribution network to the print-culture production chain of author-publisher-printer-shipper-bookseller-reader. Samizdat had an analogous chain, in which a text made its way from author to reader through a network of people, each performing a specific function—procuring manuscripts, housing them, typing (or photographing) multiple copies, and delivering copies to readers. There were others who served as compilers, translators, collectors, and even editors and “librarians” (although accepting this designation requires abandoning the notion of a library as a stationary physical repository).Since all participants in the network strove to hide their traces from the prying eyes of the security police, samizdat researchers are hampered by a lack of records and evidence. To help fill the information gap, von Zitzewitz (in collaboration with Memorial's Gennadii Kuzovkin) designed a sixty-three-question survey targeting former samizdat participants and posted online in 2017. Tables display statistics (from the first 122 respondents) on demographics (respondents’ gender, place and decade of birth, and education level) as well as information on which authors, genres, and subject matter were most read. Other survey questions were designed to elicit recollections that help us understand what it felt like to participate in samizdat culture, whether as an author or reader, or in some aspect of acquisition or distribution. The many quotations from the survey responses bring to life the intensity of this activity. Receiving a sought-after text with an injunction to return it (or pass it on) the next day might mean reading all through the night to get through hundreds of pages. And while it is intuitive to think of samizdat as walled off from official culture, this study argues persuasively that they were intertwined. There were plenty of gray areas and fuzzy boundaries, too. One owner of samizdat books had several of them confiscated during a KGB search of his apartment, only to find them later for sale in a bookshop.Having begun as a clandestine, makeshift response to the institution of censorship, samizdat became more sophisticated over time, evolving into an institution itself. It arguably contributed to the perestroika reforms and became unnecessary when censorship was given the heave-ho. Subsequently, samizdat activists who had managed the covert production and circulation of entire journals published full accounts of their activity and the operation of their networks. Von Zitzewitz makes good use of these sources and shows admiration for the role these men played. She notes, though, that their detailed descriptions omit names of any of the typists who gave up their leisure hours and nightly sleep for the pleasure of hammering out multiple carbon copies of forbidden literature, usually for no pay. The word typist, given its lowly connotation in both Russian and English, is unfortunate. Typists were samizdat's printing press, and without their commitment and sacrifice the whole enterprise would have collapsed. Von Zitzewitz suggests that it may never have occurred to the samizdat heavyweights to acknowledge them by name. They were just... women. On the other hand, the menial typist designation had its upside. It seems to have resulted in a shorter prison sentence for at least one of them.Von Zitzewitz argues strenuously that samizdat was first and foremost a social network. If you wanted to get hold of, say, The Gulag Archipelago, you needed to know someone with the connections to help you get it. To call samizdat a social network is, of course, to wade into comparisons with today's online social media networks. Von Zitzewitz notes parallels, but she finds that the differences overwhelm the similarities. Samizdat was a social network, but one that depended on mutual trust. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

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

This gesture tyrannises with the effect of supposition: as though. It is as though or as if there could only ever be one kind of reading, ...

The problem of teaching and learning of Russian language and literature in schools with native language of teaching related to the implementation of the principle of dialogue between cultures. The article draws on the results of the survey of graduates of the two high schools of Kazan: School #2 with teaching in Tatar language and school #37 with teaching in Russian-language. The results of the survey are associated with the problems of bilingualism, multiculturalism and bimentality. Graduates from Tatar language (...) gymnasium are bilingual and fluent in Russian and Tatar languages. 97% of graduates of Tatar gymnasium speak, read and write free in their native language and 96% in Russian. Bilingualism acts in this case like one of the manifestations of inter-ethnic interaction, a particular manifestation of biculturalism. In the National School dialogue of cultures passes through a system of parallel study of both Russian and Tatar languages and literatures: the formation of a bicultural, bilingual, bimental personality able to perceive not only the native culture, but also other culture as the native is taking place. (shrink)

The doctrine of creation out of nothing was conceptually sharpened as the Church Fathers engaged the cosmological views of their opponents. This article discusses the emergence of this doctrine in the second century, focusing on the polemic of Irenaeus against the Gnostics. For Irenaeus, creatio ex nihilo was already a part of the “rule of truth,” which provided a hermeneutical key to the scriptures. Irenaeus also used rational arguments to show that Gnostic cosmologies obscured, rather than explained the origins of (...) the world. A different challenge arose in the fourth century, when Arius began to teach that the Son was created out of nothing, thereby treating the divine act of the generation of the Son analogously to the creating of the world. Athanasius of Alexandria introduced an important distinction by correlating the eternal generation of the Son with the divine essence and the creation of the world with the will of the Father. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction A Little Ontology A Little More Ontology Early Experiences of Literature Reading to Yourself Not Moving Your Lips Other People's Mail A Theory of Language Productions in the Mind The Effect of Words A Musical Interlude Telling Stories Predecessors The Ion Within The Eloquence of Silence Radio Plays Silent Interpretation The Critic's Role Readings as Art The Transparency of the Reading Performance Read it again, Sam Silent Soundings and Silent Performances The Other Ion (...) Literature and Truth The Banality of Literary Truth Gaps and the Afterlife Another Take on the Gaps Doubts Semantic Quibbles Unuttered Conversation And for those without Voices Sight and Sound Parsimony More Parsimony? Reading as Act. (shrink)

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

J.M. Coetzee has unquestionably achieved the status of ‘international author’ within dominant conceptions of world literature: his works circulate widely in both English and translation and have been legitimated by the principal arbitrators of the global cultural industry. He has, however, recently positioned himself as ‘an international author, but in a different sense’; that is, as a writer whose internationalism is achieved through his location in ‘the South’. This article considers how Coetzee’s narratives thematize being ‘international’ in this ‘different (...) sense’. It focuses on the pivotal works of Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life (2002) and the opening chapters of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) while tracking an orientation southward across his oeuvre in allusions to Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges and, in particular, Pablo Neruda as well as in Coetzee’s repeated turn to littoral settings. These settings open to what the article describes as the ‘blue southern hemisphere’, implicating narrative world-making in the geophysical properties and ‘troubled histories’ that constitute the South and recasting the act of writing from ‘the far edges’ into a planetary perspective that contends with the uncanny nature of settler societies in the southern temperate zone. (shrink)

Professionalization and political engagement are usually placed as incompatible in the case of journalism and the mainstream press, resulting in an identification of cultural resistance exclusively with alternative/amateur vehicles. I will use the concept of journalistic field as introduced by Pierre Bourdieu to review these assumptions and to discuss a form of political resistance that acts in one’s own area of knowledge, is not overtly political and whose effects are not immediately accountable for.Drawing examples from my research on two literary (...) newspapers published in the 1950s in Brazil and Uruguay, this paper will focus on the implications of didacticism for literary criticism as a genre of newswriting. The analysis of these newspapers will lead to a reflection on two main issues: a) the conflict between the professionalization and democratization of literature; and b) the definition of resistance as necessarily an action that is against something. The article will reconsider education in journalism as a form of resistance, taking into account its risks of becoming political indoctrination and commercial manipulation, but emphasizing its potential as a way of expanding access to literature. (shrink)

This collection of essays is unlike others in the field of African studies, for it is based on three very precisely delineated focal points: a particular geographical region, the sub-Sahara; specific modes of cultural production, literature and cinema; and a focus on works of French expression. This three-fold approach to exploring the relationships between power and culture in a non-Western environment greatly contributes to making this book unique from a variety of perspectives: African, Francophone and postcolonial studies, as well (...) as cross-disciplinary, cultural, transnational and diasporic studies. Moreover, the book offers deft and innovative analyses that move beyond the rhetoric of crises on the African continent we so very often hear of, so as to present a critical reflection on the subject at hand that is specific to the sub-Sahara and at the same time intimately linked to global culture, economy and politics. The authors' three-fold approach also presupposes that disciplinary compartmentalization increases power conflicts in academia. If only in part, compartmentalization is the result of antagonistic and competitive relations between specialization and multidisciplinary education. This book is thus a modest attempt at presenting an alternative to excessively fixed and homogeneous academic frontiers while considering that disciplinary expertise remains a must. Keeping in mind that an increasing number of scholars in Anglophone Postcolonial studies and Francophone African studies have been attempting for quite some time now to open interstices and build crossroads that can better connect them to each other, keeping in mind that these scholars work at revealing mechanisms by which any antagonistic discourses can mix, influence, act upon or react to one another, this book seeks to take a constructive step in establishing enduring grounds for multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and transnational academic research and collaboration. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Accumulating evidence for the unique social, behavioral, and physical health benefits of positive emotion and related well-being constructs has led to the development and testing of positive psychological interventions to increase emotional well-being and enhance health promotion and disease prevention. PPIs are specifically aimed at improving emotional well-being and consist of practices such as gratitude, savoring, and acts of kindness. The purpose of this narrative review was to examine the literature on PPIs with a particular focus on positive emotion (...) outcomes. We evaluated the evidence on the effects of PPIs on positive emotion specifically, and discussed the range of evidence regarding the relative responsiveness of emotion measures to PPIs in order to gain a better understanding of the specific emotional pathways through which PPIs influence psychological and physical well-being. We conclude with recommendations for best evaluating effects of PPIs on positive emotion outcomes. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order (...) to criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

Background: Humor, both producing and appreciating, underpins positive social interactions acting as a facilitator of communication. There are clear links to wellbeing that go along with this form of social engagement. However, humor appears to be a seldom studied, cross-disciplinary area of investigation when applied to people with an intellectual disability, this review collates the current state of knowledge regarding the role of humor behavior in the social interactions of people with intellectual disabilities and their carers. Method: A systematic review (...) utilizing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines was completed which aimed to explore the current state of knowledge and quality of empirical evidence relating to humor in people with intellectual disabilities. Following this, articles were grouped thematically and summarized. A comprehensive search of four electronic databases (1954–2017) and additional search strategies yielded 32 articles which met the final inclusion criteria. Results: Humor played a significant positive and negative role in the social interactions of people with intellectual disabilities. Research had investigated humor in the classroom and humor expression in different groups including those with autism, Down syndrome, Angelman syndrome, Williams syndrome and Rett syndrome. Few investigations directly studied humor appreciation and comprehension hence themes did not focus solely on humor production/appreciation. Humor comprehension was reportedly supported by gestures. Some groups with intellectual disabilities found non-literal humor (e.g. sarcasm, irony) more difficult to understand which may affect social relationships. Various types of humor were found to be appreciated. The role of humor in relationship development, social facilitation, creativity and stigma had all received some limited attention. Humor also played a role for carer groups in coping with and enjoying the caring role. Research varied in quality with few experimental studies and mainly quasi-experimental and well-conducted qualitative studies. Conclusions: This review revealed the importance of humor behavior in many aspects of the social lives of people with intellectual disabilities. Limited disparate research exists pertaining to humor in this group, suggesting the need for further robust research in this area, including more high quality primary research in the areas of humor production, appreciation, comprehension and stigma. (shrink)