Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10929002
Christopher Braider
We’ve always had two Pascals, one apologetic, the other startlingly unapologetic. The unapologetic Pascal is the merciless, proto-ethnographic observer of human psychology and human social arrangements whose sardonic picture of what he calls the wretchedness of life without God is summed up in the strikingly Hobbesian chiasmus “Lacking the might to compel obedience to right, we’ve made it right to compel obedience to might.” However, Pascal turns demoralizing insights like this to apologetic purposes by showing how they’re the natural effect of a lack of specifically Christian belief. The question this essay poses against the background of the conflicted history of Pascalian exegesis is, how should we read the Pensées? The answer proposed is that we should do so in the dialectical terms that Pascal’s characteristic resort to chiasmoi like this one suggest. The result takes the form of a three-cornered conversation that links Pascalian thinking not only to the Hobbes of Leviathan but to the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Elements of Right and to the Wittgenstein of the late, sadly fruitless notebook On Certainty.
{"title":"Pascal without Apology","authors":"Christopher Braider","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10929002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10929002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We’ve always had two Pascals, one apologetic, the other startlingly unapologetic. The unapologetic Pascal is the merciless, proto-ethnographic observer of human psychology and human social arrangements whose sardonic picture of what he calls the wretchedness of life without God is summed up in the strikingly Hobbesian chiasmus “Lacking the might to compel obedience to right, we’ve made it right to compel obedience to might.” However, Pascal turns demoralizing insights like this to apologetic purposes by showing how they’re the natural effect of a lack of specifically Christian belief. The question this essay poses against the background of the conflicted history of Pascalian exegesis is, how should we read the Pensées? The answer proposed is that we should do so in the dialectical terms that Pascal’s characteristic resort to chiasmoi like this one suggest. The result takes the form of a three-cornered conversation that links Pascalian thinking not only to the Hobbes of Leviathan but to the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Elements of Right and to the Wittgenstein of the late, sadly fruitless notebook On Certainty.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"45 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10929034
Seth Jacobowitz
{"title":"The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry: Translation and Form","authors":"Seth Jacobowitz","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10929034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10929034","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"84 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138586708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10928986
Joseph M. Ortiz
{"title":"Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England","authors":"Joseph M. Ortiz","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10928986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10928986","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"62 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10929018
S. Ziolkowski
The Triestine author Italo Svevo spent a considerable amount of time in London and its environs between 1901 and 1926. His experiences there influenced his modernist writing, including Zeno’s Conscience, his most famous novel. Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press was the first to publish Svevo’s work in English. His story “The Hoax” marked their first translation from Italian and his short story collection The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl and Other Stories their second, helping shape the press’s international modernist program. Despite residing in the same quickly changing city in the same period and despite their literary connections, Svevo and Virginia Woolf have rarely been compared. They have been difficult to envision together in part because their gender, backgrounds, and nationalities separate them. By exploring Woolf’s and Svevo’s shared modernist networks, including London’s influence and Hogarth Press, this article reveals Svevo’s significance as an author who has not easily fit Anglophone paradigms of modernist fiction and whose associations with Woolf contribute to the growing challenges to nation-based literary histories.
{"title":"Who’s Afraid of Italo Svevo? Routes of European Modernism between Trieste and Virginia Woolf’s London","authors":"S. Ziolkowski","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10929018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10929018","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Triestine author Italo Svevo spent a considerable amount of time in London and its environs between 1901 and 1926. His experiences there influenced his modernist writing, including Zeno’s Conscience, his most famous novel. Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press was the first to publish Svevo’s work in English. His story “The Hoax” marked their first translation from Italian and his short story collection The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl and Other Stories their second, helping shape the press’s international modernist program. Despite residing in the same quickly changing city in the same period and despite their literary connections, Svevo and Virginia Woolf have rarely been compared. They have been difficult to envision together in part because their gender, backgrounds, and nationalities separate them. By exploring Woolf’s and Svevo’s shared modernist networks, including London’s influence and Hogarth Press, this article reveals Svevo’s significance as an author who has not easily fit Anglophone paradigms of modernist fiction and whose associations with Woolf contribute to the growing challenges to nation-based literary histories.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"66 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10928970
Ana Schwartz
{"title":"Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement","authors":"Ana Schwartz","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10928970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10928970","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"14 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138589453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10929010
A. Deutermann
{"title":"Uncertainty and Understanding in the Early Modern English Theater","authors":"A. Deutermann","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10929010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10929010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"5 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10929026
Elisha Cohn
{"title":"The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism","authors":"Elisha Cohn","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10929026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10929026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"44 39","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138588521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10928994
Ross Lerner
{"title":"Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature","authors":"Ross Lerner","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10928994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10928994","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10928978
Daniel DiMassa
Serious fiction, according to Frank Kermode, avoids the apocalyptic paradigm of beginning, middle, and end. Part of the paradigm that escaped Kermode’s attention, however, is the inevitable defeat of evil by forces of good. The present essay inquires after the narratological fate of evil in the sorts of literary fiction that exist outside this paradigm. Taking up the novels of Jonathan Franzen, which are replete with representations of evil, this essay locates the sources of Franzen’s fixation in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and argues that, as theodicy fell out of favor in the European eighteenth century, Goethe developed a proto-existential poetics that sought to reckon with the apparent ineluctability of evil. The essay thus aims to offer a newly historicized reading of Franzen’s literary project; to draw attention to the significance of the collapse of theodicy for the development of literary fiction; and to position Goethe as a critical voice to emerge from that collapse and put forward literary fiction as a discursive alternative to theological paradigms.
根据弗兰克·克莫德(Frank Kermode)的说法，严肃小说避免了开头、中间和结尾的启示录范式。然而，克莫德没有注意到的部分范式是，正义的力量不可避免地击败了邪恶。本文探讨了存在于这一范式之外的各种文学小说中邪恶的叙事命运。本文以乔纳森·弗兰岑(Jonathan Franzen)充满邪恶表征的小说为例，找出弗兰岑对约翰·沃尔夫冈·冯·歌德(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)的执迷之源，并认为，随着神正论在18世纪欧洲失势，歌德发展了一种原始存在主义诗学，试图解决邪恶的明显必然性。因此，本文旨在为弗兰岑的文学计划提供一种新的历史化解读;注意神正论的崩溃对文学小说发展的意义;并将歌德定位为一个批判的声音，从崩溃中脱颖而出，并提出文学小说作为神学范式的一种话语选择。
{"title":"Evil in Exile: Fiction, Franzen, Faust","authors":"Daniel DiMassa","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10928978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10928978","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Serious fiction, according to Frank Kermode, avoids the apocalyptic paradigm of beginning, middle, and end. Part of the paradigm that escaped Kermode’s attention, however, is the inevitable defeat of evil by forces of good. The present essay inquires after the narratological fate of evil in the sorts of literary fiction that exist outside this paradigm. Taking up the novels of Jonathan Franzen, which are replete with representations of evil, this essay locates the sources of Franzen’s fixation in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and argues that, as theodicy fell out of favor in the European eighteenth century, Goethe developed a proto-existential poetics that sought to reckon with the apparent ineluctability of evil. The essay thus aims to offer a newly historicized reading of Franzen’s literary project; to draw attention to the significance of the collapse of theodicy for the development of literary fiction; and to position Goethe as a critical voice to emerge from that collapse and put forward literary fiction as a discursive alternative to theological paradigms.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"75 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10929042
Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud
{"title":"The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism","authors":"Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10929042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10929042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"37 45","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138588903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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