Showing papers in "Mln in 1980"

Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato.

Abstract: This book is a virtual case study in the application of hermeneutical principles to illuminate philosophical texts. The book contains translations of eight of Gadamer's best known essays on Plato...These studies, spanning a period of almost fifty years, are important not only for what they have to say concerning Plato, but also for what they reveal about the development and insightfulness of Gadamer's hermeneutical theory of interpretation...[He] aims at dialogue with Plato and achieves it."-Jeremiah P. Conway, International Philosophical Quarterly "A remarkable felicitous set of translations."-Martin Warner, Times Higher Education Supplement "Gadamer is among the most eminent followers of Heidegger and rather more accessible that most. It is therefore a service to have these eight essays on Plato, dating from 1934 to 1974, translated competently into English."-Choice "May be the best introduction to Gadamer yet published in this country."-W.G. Regier, Modern Language Notes

Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso

Abstract: One of the characteristic features of a romanzo like the Orlando Furioso is the recurring interruption of the narrative strands that make up its interwoven plot. In order to keep developing these strands in each canto, or eventually to unite some of them, Ariosto is regularly compelled to abandon one strand and take up another. The need for such interruptions becomes particularly apparent when one realizes that two strands cannot be brought together until the events in one have caught up with the events in the other. In Canto VIII, for example, when Angelica is about to be sacrificed to the Orca on the island of Ebuda (VIII. 66-68), the episode must be interrupted before the monster devours its prey since none of the protagonists who might rescue Angelica is yet in a position to do so. In fact the outcome of her dire predicament has to remain suspended until the end of Canto X when Ruggiero's aerial travel eventually brings him to remote Ebuda in time to save the damsel from her plight. To be sure, Ariosto does not just interrupt a strand of narrative because its sequel depends on the development of another. His shifts of narrative within a canto are also prompted by his predilection for varietd, one of the governing artistic principles of his poem. Whenever, in fact, the narrator explains or justifies his shifts it is almost always on the grounds that varieta calls for such transitions. Here, for example, near the end of Canto XIII is how Ariosto explains the shift from Bradamante's search for Ruggiero in the enchanted palace to the start of Agramante's offensive against Charlemagne:

An Imperial Message: The Relays of Desire

Abstract: Kafka's fiction often confronts its critics with a collapsed or collapsing center of authority, a dead or powerless father, who condemns those in his orbit to a circuitous ruin. No one or nothing is in control; no one has the power to authorize. And yet all the subjects still seem to be controlled and continue to work. This paradox of inertia and ceaseless activity, of masterlessness combined with continued servitude, is the central feature of one of Kafka's most interesting parables, "Eine kaiserliche Botschaft." Michel Foucault's description of certain texts as heterotopias is particularly relevant for Kafka's parable, because it names the possibility of a text or system composed of disconnected infrastructures, a text made up of asymmetric parts which can only work or operate provided there is a condition of disorganization or entropy, a mechanics of resistance, frustration, dysfunction.1 Kafka's texts, like the heterotopias Foucault describes, display this kind of perverse operating procedure whose economy is initiated by the collapse of the center, often represented as the death of the father, and having clear Oedipal aspects. It is in the Oedipus complex that we might locate the mechanism of resistance (the "machine desirante," to appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal term) that at once accounts for the absent father and makes possible the work of his subordinates in the shadow of his absence.' The Oedipal situation is responsible for at once an imposition of its regulatory apparatus over the father, its "symbolic" content in the Lacanian sense, which results in the slaying of the father, and a suffering of guilt and loss of control that such an absence of the father inaugurates. What we must realize is that such a complex or mechanism of desire does not serve so much to inhibit or limit Kafka's writing to a simple principle, a constellation or dynamic which in itself becomes a substitute for the center effaced within the text, but that such a complex is an entropaic principle of disper-

The Pickpocket: A Study in Tradition and Allusion

Abstract: "On ne se baigne pas deux fois dans le meme fleuve," disait le philosophe Heraclite. Pourtant, ce sont toujours les memes qui remontent! Aux minmes heures, ils passent gais ou tristes. Vous tous, passants de la rue Ravignan, je vous ai donne les noms des defunts de 1'Histoire! Voici Agamemnon! Voici Madame Hanska! Ulysse est un laiter! Patrocle est au bas de la rue qu'un Pharaon est pres de moi. Castor et Pollux sont les dames du cinquikme.... (Max Jacob, "La Rue Ravignan" Le Cornet a des)

The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800

Abstract: A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Darnton's history of the \"Encyclopedie\" is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of \"histoire du livre,\" and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization. In tracing the publishing story of Diderot's \"Encyclopedie,\" Darnton uses new sources--the papers of eighteenth-century publishers--that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict. The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas, ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in which the Enlightenment had flourished. Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn without reference to this work. Darnton has written an indispensable book for historians of modern Europe.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann": Reflection and Romantic Irony

Abstract: The German Romantics never tired of extolling the virtues of chaos and confusion. "Diese kunstlich geordnete Verwirrung, diese reizende Symmetrie von Widerspruchen, dieser wunderbare ewige Wechsel von Enthusiasmus und Ironie"-these attributes constituted for Friedrich Schlegel the signs of genius in works by Cervantes and Shakespeare. Tieck favored a literary genre he designated as the Naturmdrchen, a fairy tale that confuses the imagination to the point of poetic madness. And Novalis felt that chaos must forever threaten to shatter the illusion of order in art.' Of all the German Romantics, E.T.A. Hoffmann perhaps most successfully translated the theoretical pronouncements of his colleagues into literary practice. He persistently asserted his right to exercise the power to confuse, though perhaps not always to his advantage. A person whose mind doesn't grow dizzy reading Prinzessin Brambilla simply doesn't have a mind, Heine noted with characteristic dry wit.2 Of Hoffmann's many tales and novels, none became the target of harsher critical attack than "Der Sandmann."

Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the Problem of Mimesis

Abstract: Darwin's evolutionary theory crossed disciplinary boundaries from the moment of its publication, to exert a revolutionary impact on political theory, economics, and particularly the social histories of Marx and of the Social Darwinists. Less well known is the genealogy of Darwin's influence in the realms of philosophy and art, where we may trace him as the author of a theory of imitation that reverses the Aristotelian aesthetic by showing life itself to be mimetic under certain conditions. Furthermore, the theory of imitation derived by Nietzsche, and subsequently Kafka, from Darwin preserves its political teleology, and therefore functions as a secular and vitalistic complement, if not alternative, to Rene Girard's religious and psychological neo-Hegelian theory of imitation.' If Aristotle writes in the Poetics, "imitation is natural to mankind from childhood on: Man is differentiated from other animals because he is the most imitative of them,"2 Darwin discovered that in the world of nature both plants and animals "practice" mimicry or imitation in the interest of protective adaptation to ensure the survival of their species: Insects often resemble for the sake of protection various objects, such as green or decayed leaves, dead twigs, bits of lichen, flowers, spines, excrement of birds, and living insects; but to this latter point I shall hereafter recur. The resemblance is often wonderfully close, and is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves. The caterpillars which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed, offer an excellent instance of a resemblance of this kind.3

A Question of Genre: Plato's Symposium as Novel

Abstract: Consider these three descriptions of Plato's Symposium from Stanley Rosen's Plato's Symposium, J. E. Raven's Plato's Thought in the Making and M. Bakhtin's Discourse in the Novel, which reveal the widely varying estimates of the Symposium: 1. "The Symposium is a framed account by recollection within a framed account by recollection. This first frame establishes the seriousness of the entire work."'

Der Satz der Gattung: Friedrich Schlegels poetologische Umsetzung von Fichtes unbedingtem Grundsatz

Abstract: "Nichts ist noch gesagt." Ich zitiere diesen Satz aus den nachgelassenen Fragmenten von Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel selbst setzt ihn in Anfuihrugszeichen. Das kann bedeuten, dal3 er ihn aus einem anderen Text zitiertaus einem, den er selbst geschrieben hat; aus einem, der von einem anderen stammt-; es kann auch bedeuten, dal3 er als Aussage einer Person in einem projektierten Werk notiert wurde oder dal3 er nach seiner Niederschrift durch Anfuihrungszeichen relativiert werden sollte... .Uber Status und Funktion dieses Satzes lIa3t sich nicht entscheiden, weniger noch uiber seinen semantischen Gehalt. "Nichts ist noch gesagt"-das mag schlicht bedeuten, dal3 noch nichts oder nichts Entscheidendes gesagt worden sei-zum Beispiel zu einem bestimmten Thema wie Die Gattung-und dal3 von der naheren oder ferneren Zukunft noch Etwas zu erwarten sei; es kann auch bedeuten, Nichts sei eben noch gesagt worden-bevor