What are the relations, if any, between philosophy and literary style? Lang asserts "that the 'literariness' of philosophical writing is not accidental or ornamental but unavoidable--imbedded in that discourse and so also in its substantive questions and proposed solutions". Lang attempts to clarify and support his thesis in discussions of philosophy as literature and philosophy of literature.

Problems of functional style differentiation of modern literary language are considered and analyzed in the article. Taking into account the communicative and pragmatic function, various substyles and sublanguages formed as a result of practical language usage in society are singled out on the example of the scientific style.

The study of film adaptations, particularly those coming from literature, has been growing at a rapid rate during the last years due to the amount of adaptations coming from both mainstream and independent film industries. The focus of these studies though is generally addressed to best sellers where the literary style is clearly adaptable to the screen; however, there are cases where the adaptive process has resulted in an entirely different outcome. Naked Lunch, written by William Burroughs and adapted (...) to screen by David Cronenberg, represents a bold change if compared with other novels turned into films. The purpose of this article is to descriptively analyse the literary style in order to understand how it has been represented and adapted into Cronenberg’s film. The analysis will be performed helped with computer-based tools to support statements, using the novel itself as corpus and adding theoretical ideas from Leech and Short’s perspectives. The results suggest that the author’s corrosive, sexually-fuelled claustrophobic style has been translated following three patterns in terms of adaptation theory, although Burroughs, in the hands of Cronenberg, becomes an almost new classification of adaptation, not only adding literary features to the film, but also distinguishable core moments of the writer’s life to the final product. The analysis conducted encourages the study of other uncommon adaptations from literary authors in order to understand the adaptive process followed by filmmakers. (shrink)

Works of literature represent stories, characters, and events: these are the contents of a work. Often, the contents of literary works are fictional; however, it is just as characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary “voice.” In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone and what consequences this might (...) have for our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art. While I.. (shrink)

The Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx's work results from a failure to understand his mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx's oeuvre, Silva isolates the central elements of his style: the search for an architectonic unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction New Beginnings, or Continuity? Contrasting Readings of the Republic Plato and his Audience, Plato and Socrates.

The ArgumentStylistic analysis of an admittedly speculative scientific article can suggest what is involved in the social act of speculation. Walter Gilbert's influential paper “Why Genes in Pieces?” serves as an example of the conflicting demands of the need to display politeness and the need to display the urgency and excitement of the issues. Socially significant stylistic features emerge in comparison with another paper Gilbert co-authored, where the speculations occur in the discussion section of an experimental report, and in comparison (...) with another, more typical “News and Views” article by another author. The stylistic features include the use of impersonal subjects, the hedging of verbs, the unusual uses of the present tense, and the reliance on repetition, rather than conjunctions or pronouns, for textual cohesion. Later references to the article assimilate it to various lines of research without suggesting its speculative style. (shrink)

ExcerptUses and Abuses of Criticism The memorialization of past events and persons as part of a shared cultural heritage was a fundamental obsession of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist historians. Historical memory always involves a certain imaginary component; however, as Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, fictional constructs are all the more prevalent in depictions of the past that gravitate to the monumental or heroic. Writing in the midst of German unification in the early 1870s, Nietzsche critiqued oversimplified narratives that foreground exceptional national-historical (...) events. This “monumentalist” mode of history narrates a “chain … [of] great moments in the struggle…. (shrink)

Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination. By Tamara T. Chin. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 94. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 363. $49.95, £36.95, €45.00.

Style: A Queer Cosmology considers artists and critics whose work defines style as that which eludes paraphrase or social scientific categorization; rather, they show style to be the attributes that make us all more like ourselves and less like each other.

Two recent texts join the field of research on the Oulipo writing group. The End of Oulipo?: An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement is a slim volume, mostly comprising two essays and a preface. Authors Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito contribute one essay each, in which they address some of the issues that have arisen with the present-day Oulipo. Cécile De Bary’s Une nouvelle pratique littéraire en France: Histoire du groupe Oulipo de 1960 à nos jours is almost as brief, (...) and assesses the Oulipo in terms of its evolution from experimental workshop to literary group.The Oulipo, or “Ouvoir de littérature potentielle” is now over fifty years old. It was founded in November 1960 by novelist... (shrink)

This essay studies some of the poetic devices employed by Osundare to project social commitment and vision in Songs of the Marketplace. It examines how the poet’s deployment of style makes his poetry more accessible to a larger audience than that of his predecessors. Like the oral traditional performance, his poetry employs rich Yoruba oral literary devices in a way that is unique and glaringly innovative. Osundare’s radical poetic style has a clearly defined concept and role. It is also (...) central to the resolution of the polemics of governance and politics in society. The pervasive theme of the collections remains a serious concern for hope out of the decadent situation that has eaten deep into the fabric of our social existence. (shrink)

One challenge involved in integrating so-called ‘non-Western’ philosophies into ‘Western’ philosophical discourse concerns the fact that non-Western philosophical texts frequently differ significantly in style and approach from Western ones, especially those in contemporary analytic philosophy. But how might one bring texts that are written, for example, in a literary, non-expository style, and which do not clearly advance philosophical positions or arguments, into constructive dialogue with those that do? Also, why might one seek to do this in the first place? (...) This paper addresses these questions by means of a case study involving the Daoist classic, theZhuangzi.L’un des défis posés par l’inclusion des soi-disant philosophies «non-occidentales» dans le discours de la philosophie «occidentale» a trait au fait que plusieurs textes philosophiques non-occidentaux diffèrent de façon significative, en termes de style et d’approche, des textes occidentaux, principalement ceux issus de la philosophie analytique contemporaine. Comment établir un dialogue constructif entre des textes écrits de façon littéraire, qui n’ont pas l’allure d’un exposé et qui n’avancent pas clairement des positions ou des arguments philosophiques et des textes qui, au contraire, prennent la forme d’un exposé avançant des positions ou des arguments? Pourquoi, de prime abord, voudrait-on ouvrir un tel dialogue? Cet article pose ces questions par le biais de l’étude du cas du classique taoïste, leZhuāngzǐ. (shrink)

In this paper I review four texts in which Aristotle comments on Empedocles ' writing style. I show that Aristotle thought that Empedocles was a fine poet. That is fine, if a poet is what you want.

Arthur Danto numbers among the few contemporary philosophers whose writing is really a pleasure to read. Although rarely recognized, the source of that pleasure is Danto’s humor. His philosophical writing is consistently comic. Of course, the humor is obviously not of the knee-slapping variety. Yet it is pervasively playful.Danto will introduce a thought experiment and then explore it in several directions. Unlike many other contemporary philosophers, he is not stingy in laying out his examples. Whereas it is customary for most (...) other philosophers to sharpen their thought experiments like arrows in order to hit their target while carrying no wasted verbiage, Danto elaborates his, often.. (shrink)

The notion of double consciousness, as a characterization of black subjectivity, is basic to Ménil’s critique of the alienated “mythologies” of Antillean life and its self-exoticizing literature. Double consciousness renders cultural identity deeply problematic. But it has other, more positive, manifestations, closer to a Bakhtinian idea of dialogism. Thus he praises Césaire’s use of irony as a dual voice. Ménil’s valorization of complexity and ambiguity in literature, against the simple naturalism favoured by the Communist Party but which he insists is (...) not a truly Marxist position, is thus linked to his view of the necessary “doubleness” of Antillean consciousness. Conversely, the simplicity of folklore can offer a basis for cultural identity, but not for good literature. Although Ménil emphasizes the importance of Antilleans reclaiming their history, this is less about discovering one’s roots than providing a dynamic grasp of one’s ever-changing place in a social reality governed by the Marxist dialectic. “Double consciousness” precludes the comforts of fixed identities, but it is a dialectical, not a tragic condition. (shrink)

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The volume (...) includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David... (shrink)

There has been no major critical edition of Velleius with commentary since that of Kritz in 1840. Kritz, who took into account Sauppe's long essay on Velleius of three years earlier, was preceded by Ruhnken, whose commentary appeared in 1779. During the century which followed Kritz's work several valuable editions without commentary were produced, the last of which, by Stegmann de Pritzwald , almost coincided with the essay and bibliography devoted to Velleius in Schanz-Hosius . These two contributions of the (...) thirties remain standard to the present day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Walter Glannon WHAT LITERARY THEORY MISSES IN WITTGENSTEIN Wittgenstein's stock is rising in literary criticism. The market value of expressions such as "language games" and "form oflife" is increasing in that they seem to lend themselves to the notion of interpretive communities endorsed by diose of reader-response persuasion.1 Wittgenstein's style is also apparently at a premium, in light of a recent attempt by a proponent of deconstruction (...) to relate the philosopher's writing to that movement's use of rhetorical strategies in dealing with texts.2 There are affinities between Wittgenstein's repudiation (in the Investigations and the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics) of the metaphysical realism in the Tractatus and die arguments from reader-response critics against the notion of unmediated facts, as well as the rejection of the metaphysics of presence by deconstructionists. All diree oppose the idea that truth and falsity are conferred on our statements about the world by properties independent of diese statements. Insofar as these two critical schools are concerned primarily with language, they share Wittgenstein's aspiration to "bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (PI, I, § 116), for we can arrest the tendency to postulate objective, unmediated facts by "looking into the workings of our language" (PI, I, § 109). Moreover, Wittgenstein avoids psychology which involves the mental faculties. Presumably, this puts him at one with die concerted effort of many critics to rid texts of die author and with it the problem of intentionality. At first blush, then, the relation between Wittgenstein and literary criticism appears to be an attractive one. Yet Wittgenstein's antirealism does not militate against his passion for truth, that is, his intense desire to achieve complete understanding in the areas ofphilosophy that vexed him most.3 Nor does it debar him from thinking about the inexpressible realm 263 264Philosophy and Literature of the mystical, since, despite his concern for language, Wittgenstein never ceased being attracted to "things that cannot be put into words" (TLP, 6.522). This is not at all congenial to die purpose ofliterary theory, which admits ofno such shadowy domain beyond words and our linguistic practices. Indeed, I shall illustrate that Wittgenstein's resdess search for truth, spiritual concerns, and the dialectical structure of his works for the most part put him radically at odds with a critical enterprise whose aversion to truth and penchant for rhetorical analysis and conventions blinds it to both his view of literature and his aim in doing philosophy. I Since die advent of the New Criticism, literary theory has in great measure addressed itself to die discourse ramer than the story in texts. With the focus on literature as a rhetorical construct, more traditional humanistic interpretations have been excised. A more recent development of this shift to the discursive side of diings has been the effort to blur the distinction between literature and philosophy.4 With neidier discipline having a privileged status, both have been reduced to a textual discourse with no lines ofdemarcation, a reduction diat is at variance with Wittgenstein on two counts. First, he compartmentalized literature and philosophy as having distinct purposes: the literary works that interested him were stories ofmoral import; philosophy was to be practiced for the sake of clarity in thought. To the extent diat such clarity, if attainable, pointed toward an ethical dimension that lay beyond the bounds of language, literature and philosophy for him did have a common goal; but the paths leading to it were distinct. Second, and more importantly, Wittgenstein had no concern for the discourse of the literature diat he read. Rather, it was the moral import of the stories that attracted him. Most noteworthy on this score were the writings of Tolstoy, who had a profound influence on Wittgenstein's view oflife, and Dostoevsky.5 Wittgenstein often recommended Tolstoy's Twenty-three Tales to his friends, and while a schoolmaster in Lower Austria from 1920 to 1926, he constantly read The Brothers Karamazov, doing so aloud on one occasion in die presence of the village priest. He was especially impressed with Dostoevsky's character the Elder Zossima, "who could see into people's hearts and direct diem" (Rhees... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to assess the nature and proper context of Grotius's imitation of Tacitus. It starts by establishing how the Tacitean style is characterised in the literary criticism around 1600. It then explores the qualities of Grotius's imitation from both the seventeenth-century and the modern perspective. It concludes that Grotius's imitation shows Tacitus's style in a characteristically seventeenth-century mirror, in that it emphasises Tacitean syntax, brevity and choice of words , as well as political edge (...) and iudicium, but overlooks the narrative and structural qualities of the longer lines of composition in Tacitus's works, that are recognised in modern interpretations. (shrink)

The notion of double consciousness, as a characterization of black subjectivity, is basic to Ménil’s critique of the alienated “mythologies” of Antillean life and its self-exoticizing literature. Double consciousness renders cultural identity deeply problematic. But it has other, more positive, manifestations, closer to a Bakhtinian idea of dialogism. Thus he praises Césaire’s use of irony as a dual voice. Ménil’s valorization of complexity and ambiguity in literature, against the simple naturalism favoured by the Communist Party but which he insists is (...) not a truly Marxist position, is thus linked to his view of the necessary “doubleness” of Antillean consciousness. Conversely, the simplicity of folklore can offer a basis for cultural identity, but not for good literature. Although Ménil emphasizes the importance of Antilleans reclaiming their history, this is less about discovering one’s roots than providing a dynamic grasp of one’s ever-changing place in a social reality governed by the Marxist dialectic. “Double consciousness” precludes the comforts of fixed identities, but it is a dialectical, not a tragic condition. (shrink)

The modern concept of ‘style’ – from which ‘stylistics’ is derived, a discipline that witnessed the quarrel between Linguistics and Literary studies in the 20th century – has inherited from Ancient Rhetoric its substance and was largely used as a direct translation from the Latin concept ‘_elocutio_’ and also as a translation for Greek concepts, such as ἑρμηνεία, λέξις and φράσις. There are still some other concepts that seem intimately connected to ‘style’, for instance ‘_ornatum_’ and ‘_decorum_’. Considering that (...) classical references of ‘style’ present themselves essential to write the history of this modern concept, this paper seeks to present a catalog of ancient concepts that have found in ‘style’ their traditional translation, as well as attempting to build a short history of each of these translation paths. (shrink)

Obviously, subject is what is said, style is how. A little less obviously, that formula is full of faults. Architecture and nonobjective painting and most of music have no subject. Their style cannot be a matter of how they say something, for they do not literally say anything; they do other things, they mean in other ways. Although most literary works say something, they usually do other things, too; and some of the ways they do some of these things (...) are aspects of style. Moreover, the what of one sort of doing may be part of the how of another. Indeed, even where the only function in question is saying, we shall have to recognize that some notable features of style are features of the matter rather than the manner of the saying. In more ways than one, subject is involved in style. For this and other reasons, I cannot subscribe to the received opinion that style depends upon an artist's conscious choice among alternatives. And I think we shall also have to recognize that not all differences in ways of writing or painting or composing or performing are differences in style. Nelson Goodman, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has written The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction and Forecast; Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols; Problems and Projects; and numerous articles. Logic and Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson Goodman was published in 1972. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Metaphor as Moonlighting" , "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" , and "The Telling and the Told". (shrink)

The modern concept of ‘style’ – from which ‘stylistics’ is derived, a discipline that witnessed the quarrel between Linguistics and Literary studies in the 20th century – has inherited from Ancient Rhetoric its substance (figures and tropes) and was largely used as a direct translation from the Latin concept ‘elocutio’ (especially in Demetrius’ treatise De elocutione [Περὶ ἑρμηνείας]) and also as a translation for Greek concepts (usually indirectly), such as ἑρμηνεία, λέξις and φράσις. There are still some other concepts (...) that seem intimately connected to ‘style’, for instance ‘ornatum’ and ‘decorum’. Considering that classical references of ‘style’ present themselves essential to write the history of this modern concept, this paper seeks to present a catalog of ancient concepts that have found in ‘style’ (in English and French) their traditional translation, as well as attempting to build a short history of each of these translation paths. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Literary Method of Urban Design: Design Fictions Using FictionAlan Marshall (bio)For students of design the world over, there’s usually nowhere near enough time in the school year to build a prototype of each and every single innovative idea that pops into one’s head—let alone to test them all in the social world or the marketplace. To speedily explore as many innovations as possible, students are sometimes encouraged (...) to follow an alternative pathway, to create “design fiction.” Intended to exist only on paper or the screen, a “design fiction” is not really destined for the real world.1 As a learning technique, it allows for a significant degree of technical experimentation as well as the imagining of new social arrangements. Many design experts see this “free-for-all” method as rather annoying and untrustworthy—more art than science. Yet for the most creative students, it serves to liberate them from the various constraints of their discipline. My own peculiar process of “design fiction” is what I call the “Literary Method of Urban Design.” I will come to this method in a moment.Last year, I was invited by the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany, to contribute artworks for a special exhibition entitled “Ways to Utopia: Life Between Desire and Crisis” (running from April 1, 2023—January 29, 2024).2 [End Page 560] This exhibition is a celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus’s first architectural product: a modern suburban family home in the city of Weimar called the Haus Am Horn. Built in 1923 the Haus Am Horn ushered in the Bauhaus style, a streamlined functional elegance presented in clean, bright, hopeful hues.3 Beyond just style, though, the house was proffered up in utopian terms. Its Bauhaus creators suggested that such a home could be mass-produced on an industrial scale cheaply and efficiently to provide elegant living to every single family in Europe, be they rich or poor. In its first iteration, the Staatliches Bauhaus was a high-spirited, playful, future-oriented, and socially aware fine arts and architecture school that ran from 1919 to 1933 in Weimar, then Dessau, then Berlin. However, its liberalism and experimentation away from traditional teaching and practice invited scorn from conservatives and from the Nazi Party. The former took the Bauhaus school’s funding away; the latter shuttered it for good. Despite the closure of the building, the Bauhaus style transformed design across the world as former teachers and ex-students applied Bauhaus principles and approaches in new settings. The old Bauhaus school has since been resurrected, with the opening of Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and the Bauhaus Museum, with locations in Weimar and Dessau.A few years back, Skyhorse Publishers published a book of my own “design fictions” depicting real-world cities set far in the future, each presented in utopian terms.4 Because of this, the Bauhaus approached me to help them celebrate their centennial anniversary by displaying my utopian urban designs in their museum. However, to convey the centenary theme of the exhibition, they requested exactly 100 different artworks of 100 different urban utopias portraying 100 different real-world cities set 100 years in the future. At the time, I had only produced eighty such works over the preceding decade. However, since the exhibition was to include masterworks by Bauhaus design greats like George Muche and Alma Buscher, I did not want to fall short. To make the “century” in quick time, I pushed ahead by deploying my own peculiar “Literary Method of Urban Design.”5 This method comprises three steps:1. Select a city.2. Select a literary work.3. Design the future of the selected city, based upon the themes of the selected literary work.[End Page 561] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Future London. By the author, inspired by More’s Utopia (1516).When I used this method for the first time with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as the literary base, a curator at the Museum of London was tickled enough to include it in an exhibition about the future of London.6Since then, the utopian spark has flowed through many of... (shrink)

Literature has been dealing with modern work and its psychological and social consequences through two kinds of narrations: verismo/realism and symbolism. Jack London wrote incredibly penetrating pages from a psychological viewpoint with a veristic prose; Kafka widened the reflection with his symbolism and, particularly, through dreamlike parables. Kafka was not a passive and absent-minded employee. Recent studies on his working documents have shown considerable passion and professional competence. This expertise was poured into his literary works about work and organizations (...) with a direct knowledge. Kafka's symbolist style has been very effective in changing the way to see organizations. The writer particularly realized the growth of the exceeding population in recent years and could grasp the workers' psychology and deeper aspects when they face their superfluity and expulsion from the world of work. More specifically, Kafka was able to analyze psychological surrender to superfluity, which is mainly expressed with a specific form of “mental emptiness,” already described by London. (shrink)

The study of Plato's style as a writer has hardly kept pace with the study of his thought as a philosopher. Obviously he stands apart as the one original thinker in classical antiquity who also gives expression to his thought in a finished literary prose; and obviously his prose is worth studying for its own sake. What I would here suggest is that the close and continual relationship between the style and the content of his work may serve, in (...) various aspects, to elucidate his argument; and, further, that at certain points his style itself has a direct connexion with his philosophic thought. (shrink)

This paper considers Achebe's No Longer at Ease in terms of its modest canonical fortunes and its peculiar formal construction. The paper argues that the novel's urban setting is produced through an emergent and local noir style, that this setting indexes the increasing centrality of the city in late colonial African life, and that it formally responds to the success of Achebe's rural Things Fall Apart and its problematic status as a paradigmatic African text. The paper suggests that No Longer (...) at Ease 's foreign and local horizons of interpretation, as symptoms of an ongoing imperial world-system, are internalized and symbolically resolved by the novel's instantiation of Lagos as chronotope. The paper's methodological intervention offers a hermeneutics of literary setting through which to elaborate the relationships between form, literary institutions, and material conditions in the postcolony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading Style In DickensRobert AlterIt is a sad symptom of the devolution of literary studies and of our culture’s relation to language that it should at all be necessary to explain that style is crucial to the experience of reading. As the language of literature has been variously designated a mask for ideology, an expression of the “poetics of culture,” or a medium of communication not different in (...) kind from menus and graffiti, the academic study of literature in many cases seems to have lost the essential sense that style has its unique enchantments, and that those enchantments can often be a privileged vehicle of insight, even of vision. As someone who is temperamentally a rationalist, I do not want to sound mystical, but I find it an empirical fact as a reader that great writers are able in a variety of surprising ways to tap into occult connections between words and social, historical, psychological, or moral realities. Saul Bellow has aptly stated this commingling of uncanny insight and deep satisfaction that style can give its readers:A small clue will suffice to remind us that when we hear certain words—“all is but toys,” “absent thee from felicity,” “a wilderness of monkeys,” “green pastures,” “still waters,” or even the single word “relume”—they revive for us moments of emotional completeness and overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences. 1A novel is a whole world reconstituted through words. Style in a novel is that world’s very air which we breath (I shall presently cite a rather literal illustration of this principle in Dickens), the rhythm of relation [End Page 130] of the represented objects and personages, the depth of field in which they are seen. When we read style in Dickens, or in any other novelist, we of course are reading all sorts of other things at the same time—plot, character, moral dilemma, historical predicament, and so forth—but we can see all these in their full complexity only if we attend to the illuminating play of style.Despite the great length of his major novels, Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with delectation, with occasional pauses to reread a choice passage, because he is one of the most inventive and vigorous stylists in the whole range of English literature. Style, as we know, has many facets, and Dickens’s powerful rhythms, his supple patterns of alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric insistence he often favors, the cunning interplay of different linguistic registers he sometimes introduces, are all worthy of attention. But he is above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare, and what I want to concentrate on here is how I focus as a reader on Dickens’s use of figurative language, and what it reveals to me about the world of his novels.Dickens is one of those novelists who is preeminently a rhetorical performer, and so there is a good deal of self-conscious display of virtuosity, sheer exuberant verbal high jinks, in his writing. The high jinks are there for the reader to enjoy—in historical context, to keep the reader’s interest from one monthly serial to the next—but as Dickens grows in mastery and gravity, they are more and more a means of what Bellow calls unearthing buried essences. Let me glance quickly at the operation of style in a passage from Dombey and Son (1848), an approximate midpoint in Dickens career, and then consider more closely the visionary power of his prose at two moments in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1861). Here is the description in chapter thirteen of the company office of Dombey and Son as its august proprietor enters:The wit of the Counting-House became in a moment as mute as the row of leathern fire-buckets hanging up behind him. Such vapid and flat daylight as filtered through the ground-glass windows and skylights, leaving a black sediment upon the panes, showed the books and papers, and the figures bending over them, enveloped in a studious gloom, and as much abstracted in appearance, from the world without, as if they were assembled at the... (shrink)

Richard Harland provides a lucid account of all the major movements in literary theory up to the late 1960s. In a lucid and accessible style, he unfolds a comprehensive "story" of literary theory in all its manifestations. Because contemporary literary theory depends heavily upon European thinkers, the book has an international focus, and its coverage extends from philosophers to social theorists to linguists. Harland explains the essential principles of each theoretical position, looking behind particular critical judgments and (...) interpretations in order to convey a core grasp of underlying positions. (shrink)

Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. (...) In this article I argue against this claim. Although various nonepistemic notions of coherence figure in literary criticism, the epistemic concept has a mirror image in the literary–critical concept of thematic coherence. Moreover, evidence from literary criticism suggests that thematic coherence can be valuable from a literary-evaluative standpoint because it can be valuable from an epistemic standpoint, in particular by enhancing the credibility of a work's themes or author. My analysis of the notion of thematic coherence thus provides novel support for literary cognitivism, the view that a work's literary-aesthetic merits can depend on its epistemic merits. (shrink)

In this expansive and provocative new work, Michael Dango theorizes how aesthetic style manages crisis--and why taking crisis seriously means taking aesthetics seriously. Detoxing, filtering, binging, and ghosting: these are four actions that have come to define how people deal with the stress of living in a world that seems in permanent crisis. As Dango argues, they can also be used to describe contemporary art and literature. Employing what he calls "promiscuous archives," Dango traverses media and re-shuffles literary and (...) art historical genealogies to make his case. The book discusses social media filters alongside the minimalism of Donald Judd and La Monte Young and the television shows West Wing and True Detective. It reflects on the modernist cuisine of Ferran Adrià and the fashion design of Issey Miyake. And, it dissects writing by Jenifer Egan, David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith. Unpacking how the styles of these works detox, filter, binge, or ghost their worlds, Crisis Style is at once a taxonomy of contemporary cultural production and a theorization of action in a world always in need of repair. Ultimately, Dango presents a compelling argument for why we need aesthetic theory to understand what we're doing in our world today. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's thera­peutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that iden­tifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and un­derstanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in (...) his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuro­science to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher’s chains of rea­soning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletch­er’s book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher’s rhetor­ical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher’s book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers. (shrink)

The literary scene of Kant’s day goes unmentioned by philosophical commentators. Yet some of its salient features have a clear relation to his problems and positions, not demonstrably causal in every detail, but too close overall to be coincidence in the random sense. Kant’s critical view of society and his establishing of an independent aesthetic realm parallel the themes, and the arguments in self-defence, of contemporaneous radical writing; his discussion of how to exemplify ethical arguments bears on the general (...) Enlightenment problem of how to embody abstractions persuasively, while his theoretical and practical difficulties over written style have consequences for the reception of his own work, and were responsible for divisions among writers of the day who might otherwise have made common cause. All this adds a valuable dimension to our understanding of both Kant’s aesthetics and his time. (shrink)