To turn philosophy to the service of life—to become the “poet of one’s life”—is the animating thought behind Alexander Nehamas’s recent book, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. The book’s central aim is to argue that philosophy can be an activity, a way of life, as distinct from a body of scholarly doctrine. While it has become standard to insist that “philosophy is a theoretical discipline” [AL 1], producing claims about the nature of truth, beauty, causality, and so on, Nehamas draws on an ancient tradition under which practical activity is the core philosophical enterprise, and the true philosopher, like Socrates in the Apology, need not author compelling theories but must live the life of a sage. His efforts to revive the ancient idea give rise to a conundrum, however. For he claims that his own book embodies the essentially practical type of philosophy, even though, to all appearances, it is standard theoretical fare: views are laid out, claims evaluated, and counterarguments refuted (often in extensive footnotes). How can we explain Nehamas’s conviction that his book belongs on the side of the practical philosophers, when it seems so theoretical? Where is the art of living in The Art of Living?

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Philosophy as Self-Fashioning: Alexander Nehamas's Art of Living

In this article I use the notion of ‘plot’ to uncover where in their texts international legal scholars are ‘present’, directing readers toward a particular conclusion about the meaning of law. I use Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot, in which he understands plot as ‘the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning’ (p. xi). In short, Brooks is concerned with plot as the movement caused by the order in which events are presented, making sure the reader continues reading. Drawing on the debate on cyberattacks and international law, my aim is to show where in these scholarly texts plot decisions are made by its writers and how these affect the conclusions drawn by them about the meaning of law. In order to show what I mean by the ‘presence of the writer’ I start with an analysis of metadiscourse: those elements of a text by means of which writers explicitly ‘manifest’ (Hyland) themselves, such as ‘in this section I will argue’. The discussion of metatext will hopefully then help to explain what I mean by plot as similar—though perhaps less obvious—proof of the writer’s presence. Overall, my aim is to show where restrictions on our reading experience—the boundaries of what is and is not law—are imposed by the writer.

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Narratives of Force: The Presence of the Writer in International Legal Scholarship

Henry James formally became a gay writer in 1991 when he was “outed,” if you will, by Edmund White, the editor of The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. The publisher’s timing was exactly right: Faber capitalized on the growth of a coherent and self-identified gay readership—and on the rise of academic gay studies, which required anthologies for its proliferating courses—and found its ideal editor in Edmund White who, at the peak of his career as a gay novelist and critic, possessed the cultural authority to establish a definitive gay canon. From the perspective of the James critical industry, it was nothing short of momentous that White decided to begin his chronological unfolding of gay fiction with James’s story “The Pupil,” which he chose, perhaps, because it appeared exactly a century before White’s exercise in canonical legitimation. (Literary historiography likes to organize itself in terms of centuries, a temporal measure on which it can impose a certain teleological order.) Readers who expected a story about homosexuality were frankly puzzled by White’s choice of “The Pupil” for their initiation; by the light of late twentieth-century categories of identity, there are no “homosexuals”—according to our current understanding of this identity-category—in James’s fiction. Disgruntled students, echoing Gertrude Stein, complained “there’s no there there.”

Entre Chien Et Loup: Henry James, Queer Theory, and the Biographical Imperative

History and the postpsychological self inThe Waste Land

The language of arboreal metamorphosis in Lady Mary Wroth’s pastoral song “The Spring Now Come att Last” from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) may invoke the myth of Apollo and Daphne. However, the Ovidian narrative so central to Petrarchan poetics celebrates the male poet by erasing the female voice. This essay instead explores parallels between Wroth’s poem and the metamorphosis of the Heliades, who turn into poplars while mourning their brother Phaeton in book 2 of the Metamorphoses. Their transformation is predicated on an act of female speech, however precarious and evanescent. This alternative Ovidian scenario offers a model of lyric that capitalizes on the brief resonance that the female voice acquires at the point of vanishing. By deploying it in her song, Wroth not only rewrites Petrarch through Ovid in order to articulate a gendered lyric voice but shows herself a poet attuned to the crucial developments in English lyric of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular the complex relationship between the Petrarchan and the Ovidian legacies.

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Philosophy as Self-Fashioning: Alexander Nehamas's Art of Living

Narratives of Force: The Presence of the Writer in International Legal Scholarship

Entre Chien Et Loup: Henry James, Queer Theory, and the Biographical Imperative

History and the postpsychological self inThe Waste Land

Mary Wroth, Ovid, and the Metamorphosis of Petrarch