Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2012"

On the Experientiality of Stories: A Follow-up on David Herman's "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance"

Abstract: Reading a narrative text is or provides an experience. In this article, I attempt to reconcile this common claim about reading with the intentionalist model of narrative David Herman has presented in his “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance” (2008). I do so by developing two lines of argument. First, taking my cue from Daniel D. Hutto’s philosophy of mind, I argue that two organisms can participate in a joint attention scene only if they are capable of sharing an experience. Thus, if we endorse Herman’s view that, through narrative texts, authors draw readers’ attention to some features of a storyworld, we must also account for how authors and readers can share an experience. I deal with this problem by tracing a (primarily heuristic) distinction between basic, embodied experience and linguistic, conceptual experience. At the level of basic experiential responding, I draw on psycholinguistic research to argue that both the production and the reception of narrative texts are grounded in embodied simulations. At the linguistically mediated level, I apply Dennett’s conception of consciousness as a “Joycean machine” to the experiences provided by narratives, adding that these experiences can be shared by authors and readers because they are narratively constructed. Second, I address the question of interpretation, which I distinguish from both the understanding of linguistic meaning and the reconstruction of the storyworld: interpretation is concerned with the “aboutness” of a work, and touches on what Stein Haughom Olsen (1987) has called the “human interest” questions. It is because of its openness to human experience that interpretation cannot be fully subsumed under the intentionalist model of our engagement with stories. At this level, readers are not required to comply with the author’s instructions: they are free to relate the experience they have undergone while reading a story to their own past experiences, and draw their conclusions as to what the story is “about.” This is why the experientiality of stories — i.e. the experiential “feel” they create — can be said to bridge the gap between Herman’s intentionalist model and interpretation.

The Biology of Social Class: Habit Formation and Social Stratification in Nineteenth-Century British Bildungsromane and Scientific Discourse

Abstract: Analyzing how mid- to late-nineteenth-century Bildungsromane as well as scientific and philosophical texts conceive of society and the process of socialization, this essay supplements existing studies of Victorian liberalism and the British concept of “character” as Bildung . It traces the interest in the body and physiological processes – the nexus of biology and society that Bildungsromane have always been concerned with, while also emphasizing the nineteenth-century tension between voluntarism and determinism that was partly resolved in favour of scientific materialism and biological determinism at the fin-de-siecle . Concentrating on how three related areas of nineteenth-century biological research and thinking – the science of anthropometry, physiological theories of habit formation, and the ideas of organic memory and degeneration – are represented, subverted, or reimagined in Bildungsromane and Anti-Bildungsromane by, among others, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, the essay suggests that social stratification, a vision of society as fragmented into distinct social classes, is at the core of these mid- to late-nineteenth-century novels of development and their negotiation — and subversion — of cultural and biological models of individual and collective identity. Special emphasis is given throughout to the novels’ representative strategy of differential embodiment.

Evasion and the Unsaid in Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills

Abstract: Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills (1982) details the thoughts of Et- suko, the protagonist, and her conversations with her younger daughter Niki in England as she recalls her past life in Japan and endeavors to resolve her feelings over her older daughter Keiko's suicide. The cen- tral frame of her reminiscences involves her friend Sachiko, who lived in a shack on the wasteground of Nagasaki with her daughter Mariko. Although Etsuko has already warned that her memory has "grown hazy with time" (41), her narrative reliability is suddenly breached in a casual slip near the end when she conflates Mariko with Keiko, recalling herself telling Mariko that they will "come straight back" (173) if she does not like their new home abroad, and scolding her in a tone inconsistent with how she would address another woman's daughter when Mariko insults her new stepfather (172). Soon after, Etsuko again seems to confuse the two girls, telling Niki about a cable-car ride she took with Keiko (182) at a time when she was still pregnant with her. Critics have focused on this as an interpretive problem, asking whether Sachiko and Mariko are real characters "onto whom Etsuko can project her own guilt for neglect- ing and abusing Keiko" (Shaffer 21) or if they are simply fantasy figures through which Sachiko acts as Etsuko's "split-off bad self," intended to prove that Etsuko "was not such a bad mother after all" (D'hoker 157). Kazuo Ishiguro moved with his parents to England as a small boy and has remained there. Western commentators have persistently identified his style as Japanese, and Eastern critics have claimed that he has "lost his Japaneseness" (Jaggi 170), criticizing him for depicting an "artificial Japan" as full of stock images as Madame Butterfly (Lewis 23). Calling himself an "international writer" (Wong 2000: 7), Ishiguro has voiced frustration over being pigeonholed as a Japanese author. Some of his later novels such as The Unconsoled (1995) are perhaps deliberately set in ambiguous locations (Lewis 9), and Ishiguro has complained about critics who assume that the settings of his books are "key to the work" (Jaggi 160). A Pale View of Hills is set in a specified geographical place and historical time, but the main setting is not a physical location but

Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives (review)

Abstract: Diderot is forced “to confront the potential uselessness of his text for the reader,” but receives the following consolation prize: “even an unfruitful mental effort may serve to increase the reader’s admiration for the inventor [of the stocking machine], for Diderot himself, and by extension for the entire enterprise of the Encyclopédie” (120). Fortunately, the deconstructive experiment is discontinued in Stalnaker’s next chapter, a study of poetic encyclopedism, namely the genre of descriptive poetry, best known for its use of elaborate circumlocutions to avoid naming things directly, its use of imitative harmony or onomatopoeia, notably Jacques Delille’s “art of painting with sounds” (139), and its use of lengthy prose notes to clarify the poetic circumlocutions. Even though it may be said to have failed as an Enlightement genre, descriptive poetry paved the way not only to Romantic poetry but also to modern conceptions of poetry by confronting “the gap between poetic language and our [modern] knowledge of the world” (148). T. S. Eliot’s copious footnotes to “The Wasteland” (1922) come to mind as an example of Enlightenment annotation. This interesting study of poetic encyclopedism is done in Stalnaker’s usual scholarly style of argument, so forget about the eleven pages of deconstructive criticism (113–23) and enjoy the rest of the book.

Falling Upwards: Paul Celan's Poetics of the Abyss

Abstract: The abyss, the German Abgrund , is a recurring concept and motif which Paul Celan addresses in both his poetics and poetry. The abyss-like quality of Celan’s poetry did not emerge unheralded, but the Abgrund topos has been little researched. This paper argues that in Celan Abgrund functions as both a thematic image and textual practice. The Abgrund topos is motivated by rich allusions to Celan’s literary sources. Celan’s abysses have a paradoxical twofold function. On the one hand the abyss is an ultimate end-point in which significance and value are doomed to collapse; on the other hand, building on that non-foundation is the source of Celan’s poetic craft.

Towards a Hermeneutics of Ambiguity: The Book of Esther and the Silence of Signs

Abstract: The “accidental” does not seem to have any place in modern literary theory. In narrative, everything is meant to have a function and therefore signify. Indeed, contingency, fortuitous coincidences, belongs rather to the domain of hermeneutics and interpretive projections. The Book of Esther confronts us with such a kind of “causality” which is both plausible and “unexpected.” It tells the story of an extermination plot in Ahasuerus’ court, which is finally undone via an “astonishingly” favorable series of circumstances. Still, the text remains silent about the presumed logic of these coincidences. It simply points out a concomitancy of events, without indicating any superior intelligibility. More generally speaking, both Midrash and Talmud insist on these textual “signs” being opaque and deceiving — as if the rabbis wished to raise the (literary) devices of ambiguity to an ontological level, and open with the Book of Esther an enigmatic, essentially ambivalent, hermeneutics of destiny.

Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract: The relations between literature and the political community have figured prominently on the research agenda in the humanities in the last few decades. The tension between political power and its different rhetorical and literary figurations can be productively explored by focusing on the juncture of two prominent nineteenth-century discourses: those relying on notions of Bildung (a term capturing processes of self-development and organic growth) and the state (which often denotes those aspects of power that cannot be couched in a naturalizing rhetoric of the nation or, indeed, Bildung ). This forum traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.

Between Ghetto and Zion: Margarete Susman's Mediations of Germany, Jewishness, and Culture, 1906-1916

Abstract: The article discusses the German-Jewish author and philosopher Margarete Susman (1872–1966) and her interpretation of cultural Zionism around the First World War. Susman has largely disappeared from our cultural canvas in spite of the fact that she is one of the rare thinkers in German philosophical tradition for whom the challenge of idealism lies in its potential conversion into reality, and the force of beauty in its undeniable ethical appeal. In 1916 Margarete Susman wrote an extensive article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on the Zionist philosophy of Ahad Ha'am and Martin Bubber. Although the cultural journalist and former poet from the wider circle around Stefan George had already reflected on the question of Jewish identity in Germany in previous years, her strong interest in Zionism cannot just be explained by a sudden awareness of her Jewish descent. The 1916 article reveals a remarkable interpretation of cultural Zionism as a spiritual movement that is the real foundation of all political thought and any state. It has its roots in her belief in the meaning of spirit and art as truly regenerating forces, a belief she did not lose in spite of fact that she never turned a blind eye to the brutal reality of her time.

Victorian Fiction and the ''What If?'' Theory: Heritage and Inheritance in Daniel Deronda

Abstract: The laws and the literature of a society both express and influence the attitudes and norms of its members. The law, however, has a conservative function, while literature can work to change opinions and, in the longer run, legal systems. This essay argues that legal discourse possesses an inherent narrative potential, giving rise to fictional stories that serve to investigate and expose the effects of particular laws. Like many other novels, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda seems to construct its plot on the basis of the reiterated question “But what if…?” exploring social and moral implications of inheritance law, in particular the principle of primogeniture. The two major strands of Eliot’s double plot, with Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda as the protagonists, together with the subplots involving a series of minor characters, embody four areas concerned with this theme: gambling; the duties that come with heritage; illegitimacy; and the conditions of women associated with a system based on privileging a male heir. By pressing the aesthetic effect of thematic recurrence as well as an element of readerly unease into the service of the ethical, this novel makes a powerful statement on the subject of inheritance. It may have contributed to social and political change, and counteracted the preserving effect of the law.

The Ethics of Temporality — A Rejoinder Syllepsis Redux and the Rhetoric of Double Agency

Abstract: Syllepsis is already syntax redux, a return of grammar upon itself. This essay returns to the question of its ethical valence, as pursued in a previ- ous article of mine on the pages of this journal, prompted this time by the animating response of Kent Puckett, "Some Versions of Syllepsis." Like the rest of us of a certain age, I used to call it zeugma. But in ongo- ing skirmishes over terminology, Anglo-American rhetoricians now tend to favor that former tag to designate instead its ungrammatical variants: Wage peace not war, for instance. Syllepsis, rather than zeugma, is lately the prevailing term of choice where two senses of the object do make strict sense with the verb as well as each other: Make love not war. Or across the intransitive opening of a phrasal verb: Make up and out, not trouble. 1 Aside from the touchstone of grammatical correctness, how- ever, I have chosen the "umbrella" term syllepsis — for the pleats and tucks of such syntactic unfolding — mainly for its etymological common ground with an everyday noun like syllable, each prefix (equivalent to syn for "with") being attached in fact by various stages of derivation to the same Greek root (lambanein, to take). Designated thereby is a tak- ing-with or a taking-together, a composite verbal synergy, whose literary manifestations can thus seem fractalized in their surprise fusions all the way up from sublexical phonemic play in syllabic overlaps to the disrup- tive syntactic bunchings I have singled out. Timing is everything, not only in love and war but in the cross-cou- pling of syntactic ligature this trope performs. With or without heavy breathing, syllepsis is a phrasing that catches its own breath in progress, renews itself along a second fork of its own retained possibility. And so the timing of syllepsis is always a fraction off. This is the case even in the mildest of intransitive forms, as when, traveling unencumbered, I think to 1 In an even more forced contortion of the sexual if grammatically neuter idiom "get it on," as if to call up its own variant of "getting on with it," there is the example passed to me by a graduate student lately, knowing of my interest in these phrasal displacements: the single's bar logic of "getting a girl drunk and it on."

Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Editing for Content in Sophocles, Virgil, and W. S. Gilbert

Abstract: “Pray what authors should she read, who in Classics would succeed?” the director of a new women’s university is asked in W. S. Gilbert’s comic opera libretto, Princess Ida . In the new schools and colleges that were extending formal education to women and to the poor, the core curriculum was still selected “classic” Latin and Greek writers as it had been in the traditional boys schools of the rich. The director’s three selected “classic” authors, Ovid, Aristophanes, and Juvenal (in that order) would have surprised Gilbert’s audience, since they mark a progression from risque sexual allusiveness to crude and overt sexual satire. Then she adds: “if you’re well advised, you will get them Bowdlerised.” Dr. Bowdler’s removal of elements he considered tasteless made his name synonymous with sexual censorship. But sexual reference, overt or oblique, is not the most important element altered in the public presentation of classical poetry in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. Educators were no less anxious about inflammatory or revolutionary political ideas and wanted “classic” texts that could be used to enhance a patriotic agenda. The only ancient epic that suited their needs was Virgil’s Aeneid . This paper discusses why and how Gilbert’s libretti were (and still are) misread as supportive of the very ideas he was criticizing; why Virgil’s Aeneid was, by a process of judicious excerpting, represented throughout Europe as a paean of praise to Rome and Augustus, and why it has been as difficult for us to escape this nineteenth century view of the Aeneid as it has been to escape from Freud’s understanding of Oedipus or Nietzsche’s reading of Greek Tragedy.

Fernando Pessoa's Lisbon: Toponymy vs. Heteronymy

Abstract: Lisbon holds a special place in Fernando Pessoa’s corpus because this text, uncharacteristically not signed by a heteronym, undertakes a quest for identity which fully coincides with that of his city. Lisbon establishes a reflexive relationship between the poet and his work, in so far as his meticulously evoked image extends over the most developed area of his poetics, that is, his personal mythology. The Portugese capital emerges as a personified city to which Pessoa gives a voice for the sake of constituting it as a language being, like Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague. Lisbon signals the temptation of encyclopedic literature, which relates back to the impossiblity of capturing the other in any way but as visions coming across names of places

"Glad Animal Movements": Motion in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and "The Two-Part Prelude"

Abstract: In perhaps the most famous Romantic account of self-development, William Wordsworth brackets and discards as beneath significance a primal moment of bodily motion. What most readers of “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” recall as a two-part narrative, divided between the “then” of 1793 when nature was to the speaker “all in all” (l. 76) and the “now” of 1798 when he hears in it “[t]he still, sad music of humanity” (l. 92), also includes a prior stage of “animal movements” hastily dispensed with in a quick parenthesis: “(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, / And their glad animal movements all gone by)” (ll. 74–5). In a manner paralleling their syntactical bracketing, these movements, and the “coarser pleasures” associated with them, are left unspecified, ambiguous — not for the canonically Wordsworthian reason of lying too deep for explanation, but because they seem not to bear on the main drift of the narrative. Conventional associations with “coarse pleasure” and the “animal” might suggest early sexual activity, 1 but, regardless of specific referents, what is most notable about this parenthesis, inserted in a sentence describing the speaker’s 1793 state of mind, is the way it stands outside the poem’s broader project of conceiving change as an articulation of different stages, and the faith that however disruptive this change might seem there is “strength” (to borrow the terms of the Immortality Ode, l. 180) in “what remains behind.” In contrast to the dialectical formula of “abundant recompense” (“Tintern Abbey,” l. 89) by which 1793 is yoked to 1798 in a narrative of loss and gain, the primal moment of “glad animal movements” is “all gone by,” lost in an absolute past, evacuated from the poem’s account of development. The status of the parenthesis as an absolute construction, pushed out of the ongoing temporality of the sentence into an eternal past, syntactically replicates the marginalization of this primal stage in the poem’s core biographical section. 1 See, for instance, Kenneth R. Johnston’s chapter on Wordsworth’s “Young Love-Liking” and the poet’s careful negotiation of early sexual feeling (133–54).

Nation/Building: Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and the Novelist as Post- Revolutionary Historian

Abstract: This essay argues that Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris rescues Gothic buildings that still existed in France from destruction by transforming them into national symbols. Through his novel, he transforms the people who were their greatest threat — from a restive mob into a nation — by inserting them and their ancestors into the narrative of French history. Hugo saw destruction of castles and churches in France in the wake of the Revolution and became convinced that these first and easiest targets of political unrest were also irreplaceable witnesses to important events right up to his own uneasy present. Their disappearance meant the loss of part of the historical record, gaps in collective memory, and the loss of a corresponding part of the national identity. The 1830s, when Notre Dame de Paris was published, political debate turned to how to end the cycle of revolution and restoration in which the French seemed locked. What sort of government was France to have? How was French society to be organised? By whom were such decisions to be made? Hugo’s novel answers these questions by turning the attention of a wide readership to a distant, non-controversial past in order to construct an image of France and its people that everyone could endorse, one that combines the best qualities of all people, regardless of faction or ideology. United and possessing political will and real power to effect change, they are the French nation centuries before the idea of nation. The writing and publication of this novel, then, is an act of architectural restoration, recovery of a lost world, and creation of national myth rooted in the “Gothic” past—a literary restoration of the buildings of the ancien regime , even as his it underscores the impossibility and undesirability of the restoration of Bourbon absolutism. Hugo showed post-Revolutionary France how to make sense of their recent past as periodically recurring upheaval in modern guise, not as catastrophe to be explained away or denied. The publication of his novel marks a novelist’s insertion of himself into what his contemporaries often saw as an essentially political debate. Hugo presents French identity as a collective project driven by people’s intellectual engagement with their culture and with a past they have never really considered their own. By including a mass readership in the process of defining French identity, Hugo’s novel could extend Revolution into the realm of civil discourse — and, perhaps, remove it from the streets.

Articulations of Memory: Reflections on Imagination and the Scope of Collective Memory in the Public Sphere

Abstract: During the decades following the pioneering work of authors such as Walter Benjamin or Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and 1930s, it has become increasingly common to refer to memory as a source not only of personal identity or of the identity of small groups but also of large collectivities. In recent years an ever growing number of studies in a variety of disciplines employ the concept of collective memory. My purpose in analyzing this concept here is not to provide a survey of the ways in which it is employed but to investigate its precise meaning in the methodological perspective of philosophy. I shall examine what exactly we mean when we refer to “collective memory,” and the role of imagination as a source of collectively remembered, communicable experience. My aim is to elucidate the way in which collective memory might be demarcated from constructs of the imagination, above all in the public sphere. Upon initial examination, the concept of “collective memory” presents an immediate difficulty. According to its primary signification, remembrance is carried out in the original sphere of the self. In a strict sense, collectivities never “remember” any more than they have an autonomous, substantial being. And yet, members of a community, vast as it may be, may share remembrances of what can be publicly communicated through word, image, and gesture. In the public sphere, however, it is not generally possible to convey what memory recalls in immediate personal experience: people and things, events and situations as they actually present themselves in a direct encounter or, so to speak, “in the flesh.” My understanding of this term draws on phenomenological theory, and above all on Edmund Husserl, who equated original experience with what he termed experience in the flesh in a given living present

Imagining a New World: Henriette Frölich's Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820)

Abstract: The title of Henriette Frolich’s Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820) voices the nineteenth-century imagination of America as the locus of a new civilization in the wake of post-Revolutionary disillusionment. The novel’s subtitle, Mehr Wahrheit als Dichtung , echoes the title of the autobiography of Goethe, author of the German Bildungsroman par excellence, Wilhelm Meister . Frolich’s title establishes a correlation between new concepts of community and the individual’s “Bildung” as the basis for novel forms of communal living in the early nineteenth century. This paper explores the ambivalent legacy of Frolich’s text. On the one hand, Virginia has been described as a socialist utopia modeled on thinkers such as Francois-Noel Babeuf, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, and Etienne-Gabriel Morelly. On the other hand, however, this new community does not extend equality to women, Native Americans, Blacks, and non-French European immigrants such as Germans. Ethnic, racial, and gender inequalities persist in the North American colony. Frolich’s utopia is, therefore, also a dystopia, which is shaped by the same social injustice that provided the impetus for its creation.

Pessoa's Heteronymy between Linguistics and Poetics

Abstract: This paper deals with three kinds of poetical nihilism the annihilation of the poetic subject in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic writing; the apophatic definition of the divine demiurge and its repercussion on the poet considered as a substitute of the demiurge in Paul Celan’s poetry; and the gradual disappearance of the poetical word in Edmond Jabes cycle “The Book of Questions.” It is an attempt to connect this three-fold process of annihilation with cultural-contextual (mostly linguistic) factors in the case of Pessoa; with philosophical-pragmatical principles in Paul Celan’s work, and with the poetics of the blank and silence in the case of Edmond Jabes. In spite of this compartamentalization, some overlapping between the nihilist paradigms may occur: Jabes occasionally indulges in a kind of parodic heteronymy, whereas Pessoa’s subjective nihilism reaches an objective dimension through a metaphoric equation between the void of the poetical Self and the non-existence of the Book.

Nietzsche and Pessoa's Heteronyms

Abstract: The ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche – in particular the will to power – are patent in the psychology and writings of Alvaro de Campos, who was supposedly born on the philosopher’s birthday, October 15th. Prose pieces such as “Notes for a non-Aristotelian Aesthetics,” with its definition of art as “a struggle to dominate others” and its notion of an aesthetics founded on power rather than on beauty, and the “Ultimatum,” with its explicit invocation of the Superman, make the naval engineer read at times like a Pessoan Zarathustra. I propose, however, that Nietzsche’s influence is more pervasive, informing Fernando Pessoa’s entire literary project, concerned as it was with personal transformation, on the one hand, and domination of other people – namely us his readers – on the other. Self-enlargement and self-proliferation were an ontological as well as aesthetic program, both realized and theorized by the creator of heteronyms.

An-sky's The Dybbuk through the Eyes of Habima's Rival Studio

Abstract: The Dybbuk , written by An-sky in Russian, staged by Vakhtangov in Hebrew triumphantly in Moscow in 1922, subsequently a seminal work of Israeli national theater, often attracted harsh criticism and was a subject of many controversies. While under fire from Jewish Communists for its choice of “bourgeois” Hebrew rather than “proletarian” Yiddish Habima became a cult with the Russian intellectual audience not only out of reverence for the language of the Bible but also in the face of the Bolshevik persecutions of religion. It was natural for the artistic public to feel solidarity with the spiritual drama on the stage, made universal by the genius of Vakhtangov — given that was the only place in Moscow where one spoke of the spirit at all. And yet it was not without reservations that the play was received by fellow actors and directors. One piece of evidence to this is a parody review that originated in Moscow Art Theater’s First Studio. This paper is an attempt to interpret the review and explain what in the production of The Dybbuk could irritate fellow Russian artists.

Fernão and Fernando: Two Great Travelers

Abstract: This paper attempts to draw a parallel between Fernao Mendes Pinto, the sixteenth-century adventurer, explorer and writer who spent twenty-one years travelling in the Middle and Far East, and Fernando Pessoa, the twentieth-century poet who spent his working life at the desks of commercial firms in downtown Lisbon In Pinto’s case, the voyage was the actual physical movement from one place to another, through dangers and adventures, while in Pessoa the voyage was an immobile journey through the inner self It is argued that Pinto’s book Peregrinacao and Pessoa’s book Livro do desassossego can be read as entering a dialogue with each other