In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionEthics and Interdisciplinarity in Philosophy and Literary TheoryMark Sanders (bio)Two questions—the first calls for information, the second for justification. What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy? In other words, does an interdisciplinarity exist? Second, what reasons might literary theorists have, or have they had, to (...) be aware and take stock of developments in philosophical ethics? That is to say, what might be gained from interdisciplinary work? A third question emanates from the first two: where a cross-disciplinary engagement with philosophy has taken place, has there occurred any transformation of literary theory? I hope to show in what follows that, when we consider ethics in literary theory, no less than in philosophy, it is necessary to attend both to method within each discipline and to the nature of relations between them.The first of my questions begs the question of what contemporary philosophy is. Literary theorists entering into ethics have tended to draw on the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray, and more recently that of Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou. If the last has, in a spirit of polemic, professed to displace the "other" in the name of the "Same,"1 the dominant paradigm, when it [End Page 3] comes to ethics, remains one of alterity and difference. There are fundamental reasons why this should be the case: operating in figural language, literature, or the literary, differs from itself in response to an other. To borrow, translate, and adapt an Afrikaans term from the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach,2 literature engages in a process of andersmaak, of other-making or making-other: in making-other and, in so doing, inventing others, it makes itself other. Literature is an other-maker. It is to this activity that literary theory must attend. That is why it is natural for it to turn to ethics—not only the nexus Lévinas-Derrida and the other thinkers mentioned above, but also, for instance, to psychoanalysis: what may have begun as the teasing out of hidden meanings (the received idea is that this is what psychoanalysis and literary criticism share) has, following Lacan's "return to Freud," evolved into a consideration of the ethics of psychoanalysis in the context of reading and listening [see, for example, Felman and Laub].Literature may be an other-maker, and reading may be exemplary in the topoi of current theory for responsibility before the other,3 but it is not clear that literary theorists have been equal to setting this responsibility to work fully when it comes to responding to philosophy. There has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy—where, in recent decades, in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory. The pólis in question is, however, no longer only the nation-state; the politics that engages political thought is transnational and global. Whether or not a given thinker subscribes to the idea of world citizenship, the horizon for thought is cosmopolitan.PhilosophyAlthough thinkers have continued to enter into basic questions in ethics,4 the writings of Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, Iris Young, Seyla Benhabib, and others attest to a shift from ethics to politics powerfully influenced by John Rawls (1921-2002)—notably in A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993)—and the ensuing criticisms of these works. As the weight of the North American debate has moved from liberal multiculturalism and minority rights [see Taylor et al.; Ackerman; Kymlicka; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference] toward transnationality and globalization, Rawls's more recent critics have come to view his assumption of the nation-state as the basic context of analysis—even in The Law of Peoples (1999), which is devoted to international relations—as a limitation to his thinking of justice.5 These changes in emphasis are a clear sign of how the effects of globalization have begun to draw a response from political theorists.Links between ethics and political... (shrink)

The book presents a comprehensive account of Shusterman's principal philosophical ideas concerning pragmatism, aesthetics, and literary theory (including such themes as interpretation, aesthetic experience, popular art, and human embodiment ...

Karl Popper’s philosophy of science provides a foundation for a theory of literary interpretation that avoids the pitfalls of contemporary theories. This study outlines the approach and applies it to challenging works from the Gospel of Mark to Patrick Modiano.

Though hints of increasing interest can be discerned here and there within contemporary aesthetic theory, as a whole, pragmatist aesthetics is still very much situated at the outskirts of philosophical aesthetics. Richard Shusterman is basically the only figure who has tried to develop a more systematic aesthetic theory based on pragmatist ideas, and while his work has been addressed and its value acknowledged in various parts of contemporary theory, its impact on what could be called the har...

Redrawing the Lines,the first book to focus on that interaction, brings together ten essays by key figures who have worked to connect literary theory and philosophy and to reassess the relationship between analytic and Continental ...

This collection presents a sort of counter-history or counter-genealogy of the globalization of French thought from the point of view of scholars working in the UK. While the dominating discourse would attribute the US as the source of that globalization, particularly through the 1966 conference on the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man at Johns Hopkins University, this volume of essays serves as a reminder that the UK has also been a principal motor of that globalization. The essays (...) take into account how French thought and literary theory have institutionally taken shape in the UK from the 70s to today, highlight aspects of French thought that have been of particular pertinence or importance for scholars there, and outline how researchers in the UK today are bringing French thought further in terms of teaching and research in this twenty-first century. In short, this volume traces how the country has been behind the reception and development of French thought in Anglophone worlds from the late 70s to the present. (shrink)

This volume forms part of the series of the Princeton Studies in Humanistic Scholarship in America, under the general editorship of Richard Schlatter. Uitti's exposition of theories of language and literature from ancient Greece to contemporary America is oriented toward the proposal for a coordination of studies of language and literature in a sort of modern trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. In the first part of the book, the author concentrates on Platonic "symbolic" and Aristotelian "analytic" ideas about language, (...) and then traces these two currents throughout the Middle Ages, paying special attention to Priscian, Anselm, Abelard, Petrus Hispanus, Dante, and the grammatica speculativa. He then brings the survey up to modern times, examining Descartes, the Port-Royal grammar, Du Marsais, Diderot, and Rousseau. Condillac and Coleridge are treated in detail as representing two modern theories of expression/communication, the one analytic and linguistic, the other synthetic and aesthetic. The second part of this work deals with a history of both linguistics and of American literary criticism, stressing I. A. Richards' descriptivism, new critic theories of metaphor and irony, and Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature. Uitti singles out Roman Jakobson as being most prophetic in outlining future cooperation of linguistics and literary theory, and in this light analyzes various papers in Style and Language, in particular C. F. Voegelin's and Michel Riffaterre's. This survey of the contemporary American scene points to the fact that ours is a sign-oriented culture, and that recent studies in linguistics and in literary criticism of the poetics type have been sharing the same philosophical assumptions. The author thinks that language and literature studies would function best in the future as disciplines united in the broad matrix of cultural process, and using linguistic categories. He thus shares an oft-expressed hope for a cumulative literary "science," in which individual studies are oriented toward the broader construct. This book is addressed to the nonspecialist, but the expert will profit from Uitti's generous style which opens up new vistas on every page.--C. M. R. (shrink)

The principle aim of this book is to explore the relationship between contemporary literary theory and analytic philosophy. The volume addresses this issue in two ways: first, through four exchanges between, on the one hand, proponents of avant-garde literary theory and, on the other, proponents of analytic philosophy (or of related literary critical positions); and second, through three cross-disciplinary essays on the relationship in question. Central topics in the volume include Self, Ethics, Interpretation, (...) Language and characterisations of 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy. (shrink)

Uitti traces here the gradual dissociation of linguistics from both literary theory and the history of literature with the intention of pointing out theoretical aspects of this development and of attracting interested workers in other disciplines. His aim is ‘… to examine the interaction of several methods, the clarification of various materials, and the status of both methods and materials …’. This examination is pursued in three chapters.

There is currently great anxiety among literary critics and theorists about literary criticism’s loss of identity, both as an identifiable, coherent discipline with a recognizable set of problems and as a body of authoritative and well-founded convictions about literature and its history. Part of the reason for this anxiety is that everything that was until recently considered relatively unproblematical has now been rendered problematical. The hermeneutic of suspicion emerges as an interpretative strategy, pitting itself against the hermeneutic of (...) belief; radical indeterminacy of meanings challenges the certainty of traditional epistemology which authorized the objectivity of meaning, text, and context; and the whole of the Western metaphysical tradition is “inscribed” in any piece of writing which undermines the traditional notions of canon-formation, evaluation, and responsible criticism. Traditional literary theory assumes literary works to be structures of determinate meaning accessible by objective critical procedures. It is this assumption, and along with it a number of critical practices, which are challenged by the contemporary interest in the indeterminacy of meaning. In deconstruction, the thesis of indeterminacy takes its most radical and thoroughgoing form, so that all modernist critical stances from new Criticism to phenomenological, psychoanalytical, structuralist, marxist, and reader-response criticisms are put into question. This renders the scene of contemporary criticism and its theory highly volatile, since every theoretical claim or critical practice has become vulnerable to the deconstructive critique, even if this critique itself requires some form of certainty to question any critical theory or practice. (shrink)

This article brings together feminist literary theory and law by approaching a number of U.S. Federal cases on sex equality in light of the work of the renowned feminist literary critic Naomi Schor, and shows that literary theory constitutes an under-explored resource for feminist legal critique. Schor’s writings constitute a sustained rumination on the relationship between reading and feminism. Drawing on writings on language and the body by key French feminist theorists, Schor advances a method (...) of interpretation which she terms, provocatively, ‘clitoral reading’, and which focuses on the place of details relating to women’s bodies and desires within literary and cultural discourses. In the course of her career, she analysed texts from domains as diverse as literature, philosophy, visual art, the history of fashion, and photography. I will demonstrate that her work can make a valuable contribution to legal studies by using it as an interpretative lens to re-examine U.S. Federal court judgments. (shrink)

Comparative political theory is at best an embryonic and marginalized endeavor. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory generally involves a rehearsal of the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx. Only rarely are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to transgress the canon and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe in the direction of genuine comparative investigation. Border Crossings presents an effort to remedy this situation, fully (...) launching a new era in political theory. Thirteen scholars from around the world examine the various political traditions of West, South, and East Asia and engage in a reflective cross-cultural discussion that belies the assumptions of an Asian "essence" and of an unbridgeable gulf between West and non-West. The denial of essential differences does not, however, amount to an endorsement of essential sameness. As viewed and as practiced by contributors to this ground-breaking volume, comparative political theorizing must steer a course between uniformity and radical separation--this is the path of "border crossings.". (shrink)

By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way they provided a framework for thinking about and organising experience, Dr Patey ...

This thesis explores and describes the comic features of Samuel Beckett’s prose works. It explores fundamental questions about Beckett’s humour. On the one hand, it investigates the nature of humour, and, on the other, it investigates what counts as humour in Beckett. This twofold investigation requires ‘attuning’ philosophy and literary criticism, where questions and tools of each discipline mutually sharpen and refine each other. Chapter 1 evaluates philosophical accounts of humour and identifies Incongruity Theory as the (...) class='Hi'>theory offering the best account of humour. According to this theory, a necessary and not sufficient condition for comic amusement is the perception of an incongruity. Chapter 2 starts exploring what counts as humour in Beckett by examining where comic incongruities are located. By doing so, this chapter puts the Incongruity Theory to the test, and, evaluates the analytical tools ordinarily used in describing humour. This exploration uses Ruby Cohn’s seminal description of Beckett’s humour as a springboard. This chapter individuates a comic layer which Cohn’s description has overlooked – the ‘comic of language acts’. Chapter 3 analyses Beckett’s texts in order to describe the comic devices that depend on the performance of language acts. In order to do so, the discussion makes use of Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts. As a result, this chapter develops a set of tools able to capture ‘the comic of language acts’, a comic layer which crucially shapes Beckett’s writing. Chapter 4 demonstrates how to make use of the set of tools developed in Chapter 3 by examining three key works of Beckett – More Pricks than Kicks, Watt, and Molloy. This examination leads to the individuation of three movements at the level of illocutionary acts – ‘twists’, ‘convolutions’, and ‘oscillations’ – which are informative of Beckett’s writing and of the experience of reading these works. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Absence of the Ethical Reflective Equilibrium Straightness and Surprise Perception and Method Perception and Love Literary Theory and Ethical Theory.

Martin argues that literary studies remain mired in the anomalies of a linguistic methodology derived from early 20th-century language philosophy, a view challenged not only by theoretical physics, but also by compelling advances in philosophic semantics.

Ecofeminist philosophy and literary theory need mutually to enhance each other's critical praxis. Ecofeminism provides the grounding necessary to turn the Bakhtinian dialogic method into a critical theory applicable to all of one's lived experience, while dialogics provides a method for advancing the application of ecofeminist thought in terms of literature, the other as speaking subject, and the interanimation of human and nonhuman aspects of nature. In the first part of this paper the benefits of dialogics (...) to feminism and ecofeminism are explored; in the second part dialogics as method is detailed; in the third part literary examples are discussed from a dialogical ecofeminist perspective. (shrink)

Knowledge, Robert Rowland Smith remarks, is "derived by inference from specific cases in respect to a general order."1 The meaning of a literary work—our knowledge of it in that sense—is determined, according to this model, by the relationship between these two categories: between the "specific case" and the "general order." To gain knowledge of a text would be to understand what it means; and to understand what it means, one needs to negotiate from the particular to the general—thematically, contextually, (...) generically, intertextually, linguistically, rhetorically. But in this essay I argue that such a negotiation may be understood to generate serious difficulties when it comes to literary texts since, as Susan... (shrink)

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

Contemporary literary theorists of the deconstructionist bent have often complained about a gulf between philosophy and literary criticism, and they have issued plaintive pleas to bring the two disciplines into closer contact, even if not into complete union. Thus Geoffrey Hartman in his famous deconstructionist manifesto complains: “The separation of philosophy from literary study has not worked to the benefit of either…. If there is the danger of a confusion of realms, it is a danger (...) worth experiencing.”. (shrink)

A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for (...) example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies. (shrink)

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

This collection of articles from both distinguished and emerging authors working at the intersections of philosophy, literary theory, media, and technology does not intend to fix new moral rules. Instead, the volume explores the ethos of digital environments, asking how we can orient ourselves in them and inviting us to renewed moral reflection in the face of dilemmas they entail.

As the title of this volume indicates, its focus is medieval literary theory and criticism, primarily "the tradition of systematic commentary on authors both sacred and profane, Latin and vernacular, 'ancient' and 'modern', from around 1100 until around 1375". Of necessity the contents are selective, but represent an extensive range of writing. This includes introductions to textual exposition on canonical authors, as they provide a theoretical framework for literary theory in terms of the "Aristotelian four causes"; (...) a prologue to the Sic et non of Peter Abelard; theorizing about the use of language which takes place outside a commentary per se, as in the theological treatises of Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent; and a letter by Dante in which he speaks "in the capacity of commentator". (shrink)