Showing papers in "Philosophy and Literature in 1984"

Roman Jakobson on Metaphor and Metonymy

Abstract: Roman jakobson's \"Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasie Disturbances\" is a fundamental text in the Structuralist corpus, and has been extremely influential in studies of metaphor, in literary criticism, in philosophy of language, and in the theory and description of culture.1 It is not just its thought, but its language also, that has proved persuasive: here it was that Jakobson drew his famous distinction between metaphor and metonymy; and in some circles, to call a thing (say a social or religious ritual) \"métonymie\" or \"metaphoric\" is instantly illuminating. It would be taken to explain something of its inner structure and character, its relation to other rituals, and its relation even to other cultural artifacts and practices. Yet a thoughtful reading of the paper brings a sense of discomfort. There are certain obscurities in its most basic concepts, a suspicious neatness in its distinctions, a careless loosening of the notions of metaphor and metonymy, that provoke caution. Intellectually brilliant and innovative, it tempts us to follow where it leads;2 but it is the pedestrian purpose of this article to subject the text to a more rigorous scrutiny than is customary, to see whether its obscurities can be eliminated, its thought clarified, and whether metaphor and metonymy yield to the explanation, and sustain the weight, that they have been given.

Personal Love and Kantian Ethics in Effi Briest

Abstract: One of the most striking aspects of Kant's moral philosophy is the way in which he takes himself to be articulating ordinary moral consciousness, and providing a metaphysical basis for judgments that we are naturally inclined to make anyway. (At the end of chapter 1 of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he even questions whether philosophy might do more harm than good in disturbing the innocence of the ordinary person's moral reasoning.) This raises some difficulties for the parallels Kant wants between practical and theoretical reason (since the everyday use of theoretical reason, unstirred to philosophical self-consciousness, is not so innocent), yet Kant still insists that, while the presupposition of moral thinking, namely freedom to act, is problematic, ' there is no great problem about what moral thinking is. It is the recognition that there are demands on us which are categorical — which do not depend on any desires or interests that we have — and which are impartial, applying to anyone in relevantly similar circumstances, individual characteristics and particular commitments being discarded as irrelevant.2 Kant realizes, of course, that we do not act morally all or even most of the time; but \"even children of moderate age\" can recognize, he claims, what is obvious to anybody prepared to use their reason, namely that morality is a matter of doing one's duty regardless of one's own interests or desires, and abstracting totally from any personal considerations.3 The most telling modern criticism of Kant is that he was just wrong in his claim to be articulating what morality is. It is all too obvious to us now that Kant was overimpressed by the consensus among moral views uttered by the members of the society in which he lived; that the religious background giving those views support has largely disappeared; 4 and that for many people morality simply cannot be regarded in Kant's way without fiction and pretense.5 It can no longer seem obvious to us that the Categorical Imperative is the manifest principle of morality, the only serious problem about this being how it is possible. And not only is the unconditional force Kant ascribes to morality not easily available to us, we are also all too aware of the dangers implicit in regarding morality as

The Way to Nearness: Heidegger's Interpretation of Presence

Abstract: WHAT DO WE mean when we speak of \"presence\"? Do we refer to the ostensibly concrete, pragmatic presence of things at hand, of objects lying before us which we may touch and manipulate? Do we include the often nonproximate presence of persons, for example, an author's mediated influence, or the emergent presence of moods, of weathers, of responsibilities — in other words, things which we cannot touch but which nonetheless touch us? Have we pondered this wide-ranging parasensuous sense of \"touch\"? Have we distinguished between the presence of now and of here or, alternately, grasped the intimate complicity of spatial presence and temporal present, as something that goes beyond mere terminology? For that matter, what about the intangible but weighty presence of words, meaning not just external signs — written or phonetic, not just language as a body of information or a scheme for communication, but language as a universal function transcending the status of instrument or entity, a function neither objective nor subjective, language as the very condition of intelligibility and multidimensional articulation? In what sense is the sense of what is said — whether verbally, in \"body language,\" or in other modes of expression (such as images) — present to one who follows? For the words \"sense\" and Sinn, as Martin Heidegger explains in his preoccupation with the latent poetry of idiom, originally signify way, course.1 Is presence, as something that elusively concerns and bears upon, homes in, touches, means, perhaps associated with following a way or going through? These questions announce the main themes of my discussion. If presence has to do with \"throughness,\" it is probably no accident that Heidegger's approach to the problem, which claimed his attention practically from start to finish of his long career, comes itself to resemble a series of ever renewed attacks on an ever receding stronghold. Conceived as necessarily experimental and provisional, this project involves, as I shall indicate, the assumption of now one word, now another, in the endeavor to name, invoke, and thus draw into a luminous clearing, the specter of presence. But throughout

What's the Point of Professional Interpretation of Literature?

Abstract: In a free country, people — including literary critics — may say what they please. And — die later Wittgenstein, RyIe, Quine, Feyerabend, Derrida, Kuhn, Sellars, and, recendy, Rorty have almost persuaded us — there are no neutral or privileged ways of saying anything, except perhaps of saying tiiat there are none. One kind of saying tiiat a great many literary critics are given to nowadays is interpretation of individual works of literature — mostly works of fiction (The Waste Land, The Golden Bowl), but also revered works of nonfiction (Sir John Davies's Orchestra, Areopagitica) and mixtures of fiction widi nonfiction (Paradise Lost, War and Peace). Here, in a somewhat tendentious essay in cultural anthropology, my purpose is not to propose a neutral or privileged or better or even just different way of such interpretation. My purpose is, rather, to anatomize it and ask what its point is. Until about World War II, literary criticism and scholarship in America — as manifested in articles in PMLA, for example, and in books published by university presses — was chiefly a historical and theoretical discipline. Its goal was to contribute to knowledge of literature and its context. This goal it tried to achieve in a great variety of ways: by describing recurring diemes or motifs in an author's oeuvre, by formulating the conventions of a genre, by formulating the principles of meter, by describing parallels and establishing influences, by constructing critical editions recovering their authors' final intentions, by establishing the sequence of stories in a text, by establishing dates of composition or publication, by tracing the stage history of a play or the history of the critical reception of a novel, by showing the relationship between a work and die author who wrote it or the time in which he wrote it, by tracing the history of a taste or literary fashion or the evolution of a movement, by describing an audior's style, and, of course, by interpreting individual works of literature.

The Scarlet Letter: Hawthorne's Theory of Moral Sentiments

Abstract: quality, it names the individual who wears it; it tells the world what she

The Culture of Resentment

Abstract: La theorie du ressentiment de Scheler et de Nietzsche. A ce dernier surtout, l'A. oppose sa propre theorie, qui non seulement fait remonter la culture du ressentiment a la Grece antique, avant le christianisme issu du judaisme, mais pose le ressentiment comme un facteur essentiel de culture, constitutif du sujet. L'A. prend pour exemple le personnage d'Achille dans l'Iliade. Il analyse les relations entre ressentiment et significations, et conclut sur une discussion des positions de Derrida.

Explaining the Unity of the Platonic Dialogue

Abstract: Many philosophers have written dialogues or in quasi-dialogue form, but in none but Plato's case has the double aspect of die dialogue — as work of philosophy and as artwork — been so keenly sensed as to raise a serious question about the relation between the two aspects, about the looseness or tightness of fit between them. Some insist that the two aspects are irreducibly different even after the implications of interlocking relations between the two have been worked out — a position that I call exegetic dualism. Others — exegetic monists — have argued for what they call \"the essential unity of a Platonic dialogue.\" ' What the monists mean is not clear, but perhaps it is this: there is just one best explanation of all of the significant elements of the Platonic dialogue. There are many explanations of Plato's choice oí the dialogue (Plato's political caution, the form of Socratic elenchus, the elusive or incomplete nature of philosophical accounts, dialogue as psychological therapy, good pedagogy, and so on),2 but none under current discussion justifies exegetic monism. For while they are all valid and illuminating, none of them blocks die dualist from appealing to unexplained aestíietic features that appear to be significant elements of the dialogues. In what follows, I develop an explanation diat does justify exegetic monism. I also claim that no weaker explanation could justify it. My explanation is developed in four stages: Plato's conception of products of image-craft, Plato's use of models in philosophical inquiry, micro-dialogues within the finished macro-dialogues, and the emergence of dialogue itself as a model and a constraining frame. My aim is to restrict the explanatory framework to one that might plausibly be understood by Plato himself. I do this not in order to attribute intentions to Plato but in order to keep the explanation close to the texture of the dialogues. The monism that I would advocate is moderate in one way. No one could deny that at some level Plato's dialogues have purely aesthetic qualities that serve no discernible philosophical purposes (like die avoidance of hiatus). This is not an open door to the dualist, however, since I

Flaubert's Laughter

Abstract: Gustave Flaubert's booming laugh was his most widely known physical trait. It was a habit which, in combination with his hulking frame, always impressed and sometimes intimidated those in the same room with him. Because he laughed so loudly and so often in social situations, the trait earned a certain notoriety of its own in the salons of Paris, and among his family and intimates, and is often described in memoirs of the period.1 The celebrated mannerism has its perfect equivalent in his cor respondence, in the form of his fondness for such words as enorme, to express vastly amused outrage. The use of such words in the letters, which often have the spontaneity of speech, preserves something at least of the flavor of his physical presence for posterity. It is easy to imagine that Flaubert bellowed out his loud laugh in his gueuloir when writing the word enorme. To express the maximum of astonishment and hilarity he sometimes adopted a burlesque spelling of the word: "Ce portrait de moi en gentleman revenu des erreurs de la jeunesse, et qui a ecrit [Madame Bovary] pour chasser l'ennui! Henaurme!"2 There are, of course, other exclamations in

The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (review)

Abstract: development. Price's statement on Forster^ view of India as a country where \"everything is ambiguous\" (p. 300) is important; his understanding of Mrs. Moore and Godbole seems superficial. What has been suggested by interesting theories and an impressive list of authors is marred by simplistic assumptions whenever Price fails to control his overview. An overview is always an exciting process but it carries with it the danger of misleading generalization.

"You Can't Separate the Work of Art from the Artist"

Abstract: ed from the critical literature the meanings of the certitude it has taken as its targets. This is a gain in generality which escapes Socrates' objections to examples. What is lost, however, in removing the discussion from particular first-order studies, is die concrete deployment of the certitude, wherein we see most clearly why it commends itself to critics doing their job. Hence my alternative. I select a single literary biography which is grounded in the certitude. The objections are mitigated by choosing a work that is, in its scholarship, thoroughness, and astuteness, exemplary. An Aunt Sally won't do. There is a second, quite different argument for my undertaking. The last decade has seen the massive and, speaking strictly, unprecedented development of critical theory and practice which simply negate the above formula. The work can be, and is, separated from its author. The critic is not constrained, normatively, historically, or, we might add, morally by the writer. Whatever the cogency or longevity of this development, it is symptomatic. It evidences the gap between certitude and certainty. Even in an age avid for novelties, it is unlikely that these iconoclasms could have so quickly taken over large sectors of the critical profession, had the conventional wisdom owned the substance diat would warrant its plausibility and its endurance. The biographical approach to literature is the archetype of such wisdom. Consider, now, the conceptual rigor of this approach. Joseph Frank — no Aunt Sally he, a distinguished cride, the first volume of whose life of Dostoevsky ' has been as widely acclaimed as any literary biography in' recent years. His announcement of his purpose is considered and appealing. Since it is the art that makes an author worthy of biography, Frank

The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (review)

Abstract: MONROEC beardsley published his first article in aesthetics in 1942, and — not counting about twenty-five articles in Shipley's Dictionary of World Literature, 1943 — his second and most influential one in 1946: \"The Intentional Fallacy\" (with W. K. Wimsatt). Between then and publication of The Aesthetic Point of View he published about seventy-five more articles, numerous reviews, and (disregarding edited books) three books: Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958), Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (1966), and The Possibility of Criticism (1978). The number, the range, and above all the quality of Beardsley's writings have made him the most eminent living American aesthetician. Whether or not the intentional fallacy is indeed a fallacy or just so-called, it was the most influential single notion in American literary theory and criticism for at least three decades, being almost on all fours with affirming the consequent in traditional and symbolic logic. And, as the editors of The Aesthetic Point of View observe in their excellent introduction, \"Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy ofCriticism . . . has become something of a classic in the philosophy of art, having acquired almost the status of a reference work. More than any other single text, it set analytic aesthetics on its feet and made the philosophy of art a respectable area for contemporary Anglo-American philosophers to work in\" (p. 7). Indeed, it almost singlehandedly prevents textbooks that are distinguished works of scholarship from being a null class. The virtues of Beardsley's writings in aesthetics lie not solely or even chiefly in his being right or more plausible than other comers. Often he is, of course. But