This essay considers the irony in Shakespeare’s portrayal of blindness in King Lear. With attention to the play’s “Dover cliff” scene, I show how Shakespeare puts a particular device—dramatic irony—to strange use. Such irony often serves ableist purposes with regard to blindness, such that the latter becomes dramatic irony embodied; being unable to see what others see means being unable to know what others know. Lear’s “Dover cliff” scene can seem an almost parodic instance of this, with a sighted character convincing an unsighted one that he falls from a cliff when he merely falls onto his face. I, though, argue that in this scene Shakespeare enacts a breakdown of dramatic irony, making it impossible to know who knows more than whom. This breakdown, I conclude, opens the question of what blindness can mean and be and in so doing creates another, more salutary irony.
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Focusing on Paradiso 24, which contains the so-called test of faith, this essay argues that Dante is conflicted between his desire to remain faithful to the church of his time and his desire to seek the truth wherever it leads. Insofar as he is aware of this conflict but unwilling to acknowledge it explicitly, the result is a version of what Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness called “bad faith.” In Paradiso 24, to be sure, Dante is making a good-faith effort to glorify faith and to assimilate a theological account of what constitutes faith to the demands of his terza rima; nevertheless, the repressed conflict mentioned above manifests itself in “residues” that offer themselves for analysis. This essay focuses on three: the epithet of “chief centurion” (alto primipilo) that Dante (the pilgrim) applies to Saint Peter; the ambivalent treatment of syllogistic reasoning (not in canto 24, but when measured against two other cantos of the Paradiso); and finally, the metaphor of the coin that Peter applies to faith.
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This article offers an exploration of the creative process of literary authors from a cognitive-psychological perspective. Analyzing Annie Ernaux’s personal diary, her writing diary, and avant-textes and manuscript drafts for Les années (2008), translated as The Years, the article demonstrates how Ernaux innovates the genre of autobiography and the relation between the individual and the collective. The article considers Ernaux’s experimentation with cognitive and material resources in light of and as shedding light on accounts of creativity and writing from psychology and philosophy of mind. In so doing, it contributes to interdisciplinary exploration of creativity and points to new directions for the field of genetic criticism.
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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEnlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Edited by Eva von Contzen and James Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. 232.Ray SchrireRay SchrireTel-Aviv University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMorethe various tasks of the reeve written in Old-Englishan Anglo-Saxon poem about legendary kings and kingdomsthe names of God in Middle Englisha devotional mnemonic work based on the children of Jacobexegeses on the names of the rivers in paradisethe Middle English tradition of the Trojan War;the dream poetry of Chaucer and Douglascatalogs of trees among Elizabethan poetshumanist textbooks, administrative records, and Protestant playsPolemical, Reformation-era intrasentence inventoriesWhat all these texts have in common (hereafter, list 1) is that they are all discussed in the thought-provoking collection of essays Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. As the authors of this volume show (and as list 1 summarizes), lists—a literary form that has “not received much attention from scholars” (4)—were in fact found everywhere, from the most canonical to most obscure literary works of the Middle Ages and early modernity.What justifies bringing such diverse texts together in one volume is the intention to “offer answers to the question, ‘what are lists capable of doing in medieval and early modern literature?’” (8), as the editors of the volume write in the very helpful and generous introduction. Indeed, reading through the ten essays that comprise this volume, we learn that the lists recorded in list 1 can do quite a lot. They can raise questions of culture, history, and temporality (Andrew James Johnston); emphasize the ignorance of their writer (Alexis Kellner Becker); give the appearance of objective truth while at the same time undermine the notion of objective truth (Eva von Contzen); mark what is notable in each item (Ingo Berensmeyer); raise the soul to a state of ecstasy (Suzanne Conklin Akbari); dismantle the sacredness of the ancien régime (James Simpson); break and remake order like a kaleidoscope (Kathryn Mogk Wagner); serve as a mental map (Martha D. Rust); help identify paradoxes in intellectual movements and bureaucratic reforms (Alex Davis); relate a text to the genre of the epic (Eva von Contzen); bring order to the cognitive household (Wolfram R. Keller); help authors participate in a community of poets (Ingo Berensmeyer); destroy the flow of syntax (James Simpson); or lead to a sweet and eternal annihilation (Suzanne Conklin Akbari). As this list indicates (hereafter list 2), the essays in this collection go a long way to displaying just how creative the use of lists was by the texts presented in list 1.In sum, these essays demonstrate that we find lists in many literary texts (list 1) and t
{"title":":<i>Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature</i>","authors":"Ray Schrire","doi":"10.1086/726022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726022","url":null,"abstract":"Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEnlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Edited by Eva von Contzen and James Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. 232.Ray SchrireRay SchrireTel-Aviv University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMorethe various tasks of the reeve written in Old-Englishan Anglo-Saxon poem about legendary kings and kingdomsthe names of God in Middle Englisha devotional mnemonic work based on the children of Jacobexegeses on the names of the rivers in paradisethe Middle English tradition of the Trojan War;the dream poetry of Chaucer and Douglascatalogs of trees among Elizabethan poetshumanist textbooks, administrative records, and Protestant playsPolemical, Reformation-era intrasentence inventoriesWhat all these texts have in common (hereafter, list 1) is that they are all discussed in the thought-provoking collection of essays Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. As the authors of this volume show (and as list 1 summarizes), lists—a literary form that has “not received much attention from scholars” (4)—were in fact found everywhere, from the most canonical to most obscure literary works of the Middle Ages and early modernity.What justifies bringing such diverse texts together in one volume is the intention to “offer answers to the question, ‘what are lists capable of doing in medieval and early modern literature?’” (8), as the editors of the volume write in the very helpful and generous introduction. Indeed, reading through the ten essays that comprise this volume, we learn that the lists recorded in list 1 can do quite a lot. They can raise questions of culture, history, and temporality (Andrew James Johnston); emphasize the ignorance of their writer (Alexis Kellner Becker); give the appearance of objective truth while at the same time undermine the notion of objective truth (Eva von Contzen); mark what is notable in each item (Ingo Berensmeyer); raise the soul to a state of ecstasy (Suzanne Conklin Akbari); dismantle the sacredness of the ancien régime (James Simpson); break and remake order like a kaleidoscope (Kathryn Mogk Wagner); serve as a mental map (Martha D. Rust); help identify paradoxes in intellectual movements and bureaucratic reforms (Alex Davis); relate a text to the genre of the epic (Eva von Contzen); bring order to the cognitive household (Wolfram R. Keller); help authors participate in a community of poets (Ingo Berensmeyer); destroy the flow of syntax (James Simpson); or lead to a sweet and eternal annihilation (Suzanne Conklin Akbari). As this list indicates (hereafter list 2), the essays in this collection go a long way to displaying just how creative the use of lists was by the texts presented in list 1.In sum, these essays demonstrate that we find lists in many literary texts (list 1) and t","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"34 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136132991","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}
On the other hand, the alternative offered by Romantic and post-Romantic philologists was hardly an uncomplicated step forward. The naturalization of language might have allowed writers and theorists of language a chance to bypass the colonizing ambit of abstraction, but an organic vision attuned to plants and roots also smoothed the way for racial determinism and the “insidious forms of nineteenth-century race science” (5). As Wolff notes, Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boaz’s later attempts “to re-create the study of language as a social science” was motivated by a racialization of language that is often traced back to Romanticism itself (47). Wolff’s object is to think about Romantic writers who resisted this dichotomy by belaboring a linguistic actualism sustained by broader understandings of time itself.
另一方面，浪漫主义和后浪漫主义语言学家提出的另一种选择很难是一个简单的进步。语言的自然化可能让作家和语言理论家有机会绕过抽象的殖民范围，但与植物和根相协调的有机视觉也为种族决定论和“19世纪种族科学的阴险形式”铺平了道路(5)。费迪南德·德·索绪尔(Ferdinand de Saussure)和弗朗兹·波阿兹(Franz Boaz)后来试图“将语言研究作为一门社会科学重新创造出来”，其动机是语言的种族化，这通常可以追溯到浪漫主义本身(47)。沃尔夫的目标是思考浪漫主义作家，他们抵制这种二分法，通过对时间本身更广泛的理解来努力实现语言的现实主义。
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I am happy to report that I found no serious shortcomings in Assessing Intelligence, as the book skillfully and persuasively intertwines literary and intellectual history and approaches literary texts in a manner that is both incisive and generous: although it notes the many contradictions that pervade the treatment of intelligence in the novels of Eliot, Hardy, James, Wells, and Woolf, Assessing Intelligence has the virtue of not thinking itself cleverer than the texts it analyzes. Among its other virtues are the clarity of writing (which should make it accessible even to those not thoroughly acquainted with Victorian literary and intellectual history) and the quality of close readings: to invoke just one example, Lyons’s treatment of The Mill on the Floss should be thoroughly illuminating even to seasoned scholars of Eliot’s fiction.
{"title":":<i>Assessing Intelligence: The Bildungsroman and the Politics of Human Potential in England, 1860–1910</i>","authors":"Aleksandar Stević","doi":"10.1086/727794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727794","url":null,"abstract":"I am happy to report that I found no serious shortcomings in Assessing Intelligence, as the book skillfully and persuasively intertwines literary and intellectual history and approaches literary texts in a manner that is both incisive and generous: although it notes the many contradictions that pervade the treatment of intelligence in the novels of Eliot, Hardy, James, Wells, and Woolf, Assessing Intelligence has the virtue of not thinking itself cleverer than the texts it analyzes. Among its other virtues are the clarity of writing (which should make it accessible even to those not thoroughly acquainted with Victorian literary and intellectual history) and the quality of close readings: to invoke just one example, Lyons’s treatment of The Mill on the Floss should be thoroughly illuminating even to seasoned scholars of Eliot’s fiction.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135567851","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}
Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels. Yoon Sun Lee. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 258.Cynthia WallCynthia WallUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIf a body impinge upon another, and by its force change the motion of the other, that body also … will undergo an equal change, in its own motion.(Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [1687])1Newtonian physics is just one of the many new empiricisms employed in learned depth in The Natural Laws of Plot to argue that the plots of novels are as much if not more embedded in their own landscapes, “rely[ing] more deeply and intricately on an environing world to carry along any action” (2), as they are involved with narrative and characters. “Things have shadows and textures, as well as depths and surfaces,” and fictional events are shaped by the “real world of physical forces and laws” (3). Bodies impinge on bodies, motion changes bodies, matter mixes and moves. The real world kept discovering and describing new physical forces and laws, and the well-read British public (and its novelists) kept abreast of and internalized those discoveries as new ways of understanding “how things happen.” The chapters progress through the period, matching up canonical authors’ narrative strategies with natural philosophers and theories: Daniel-Defovian causality and Newtonian physics; the characters of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson and the types and orders of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon; Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and chemistry; a molecular Jane Austen; Maria Edgeworth, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Humphry Davy, and “mechanical objectivity”; Walter Scott, Erasmus Darwin, and vertigo. Throughout, the originally mingled concepts later identified as “objectivity” and “subjectivity” get disentangled, both historically and ideologically. In every historical, scientific, and narratological shift, the “external world” is always, like my uncle Toby’s map of Namur, “far more than an inert backdrop to action. It provides the laws that are then twisted into plot and pinned to the ground” (60).The first chapter, “Novels, Novel-Theory, and the History of Objectivity,” argues that objectivity is not “a way of telling the story with a certain detachment or from a third-person point of view” but “something that has to be built into the plot of the novel” (1) and that will change its appearance dramatically over time, in rhythm with the changing contours of natural philosophy, from the necessary subjectivity—the reliance “on their own accumulated experience, their knowledge, skill, and instincts” (9)—of the early empiricists to the active suppression of the self into the nineteenth century.2 “The novel emerged in tandem” (11) no
情节远不止是“有意的人类动作”(34);它包括劳伦斯·斯特恩(Laurence Sterne)的《崔斯特拉姆·珊迪》(Tristram Shandy, 1759-67)中导致窗扇重重地落在年轻主人公身上，缩短了时间的一系列微小事件(33-34页)。这一章追溯了经验主义与小说之间熟悉的联系，但提出了新的主张，即经验主义的世界观为小说情节的新形态提供了一个“基线本体论”，正如约翰·德萨吉耶(John Desagulier)对笛卡尔因果关系的总结所捕捉到的那样:“情节的变化是因为‘情境、距离、结构和凝聚力’以及身体之间和内部空间的变化而发生的”(39)。《笛福伸展的世界》颂扬了铺路石式的情节模式，在这种模式中，事件是“根据推动、拉动、移动或稳定世界碎片的力量”来构思的;因此，“物理情节是人物行为、情感和反思的基础”，有时会鼓励他们，但更多的时候是“反复削弱他们，拿走一些被认为已经解决的东西”(63)。李认为笛福对情节的重要贡献“与他保留的决定的内部结构无关。在《鲁滨逊漂流记》[1719]中，它与行动、知识和时间之间的关系有关，与它们相互作用的尺度有关，最重要的是，将中介原因作为在外部世界中产生可靠的、可精确计算的物理效应的事物进行说明”(72)。李引用笛福对早期现代科学的专业熟悉，这在《实用艺术的发现和改进通史》(1725-26)中得到了证明，他还详细描述了罗伯特·波义耳和牛顿所做的实验;笛福的情节之所以有趣，正是因为那些看似随机发生的事情，比如克鲁索的“神奇”大麦，可以通过逻辑原因追溯到原因。菲尔丁和理查森是《地点、类型和秩序:作为自然史的情节》一书的核心人物。“将情节作为形式统一的经典观念”(84)遇到了一种新的“知识模式”，在这种模式下，自然哲学将“把完全不同的现象汇集在一起，从而使相似和差异的层次变得清晰可见”;其结果是“一种深深致力于秩序观念和可见领域的叙事”(83-84)。菲尔丁的个体与他们的类型(或者用菲尔丁的话来说是“物种”)有关;在理查森的《克拉丽莎》(1747-48)中，浪子罗伯特·洛夫莱斯不断地“测试”克拉丽莎的美德，看她是否真的是她自己的同类。什么样的标准才足够?菲尔丁和理查森都“被确定他们的主人公和他们显然所属的类型或物种之间的关系的需要所驱使”(99)。第五章“追踪变化和测试物质:亲密的客观性”将拉德克利夫和伯尼的情节带入了化学领域。“他们的情节似乎对主体的问题不太感兴趣，谁制造了什么，而更感兴趣的是构成的问题，因为它是什么样的物质而如何表现”(107-8)。在伯尼的《卡米拉》中，主角的延展性“就是卡米拉本身”(123，强调添加);雷德克里夫的著名描述中的色彩被置于显微镜下(124)。(托拜厄斯·斯莫列特的《汉弗莱·克林克》[1771]在这里得到了很好的处理，因为它对混合物很着迷。)贝茨小姐在奥斯丁的《爱玛》(1815)中的独白展示了第六章中“奥斯丁情节中的分子可能性”，“展示了一个微小的、混乱的、不间断的运动领域，其中铆钉、苹果、眼镜、吃东西和推荐的动作来回弹跳，碰撞而不失去任何运动，然后再回来，无休止地旋转”(131)。的确，艾玛以“科学家的超然”对待她的乡村朋友哈丽特的思想，认为它是“一种物质安排”，可以用一块代替另一块来填补空缺或转移注意力——“这个模型是机械的”(148)。下一章将讨论这一模式及其与“堂吉诃德主义”的关系，后者“将情节的形状与主人公扭曲的信仰和感知联系在一起”，强调了新认识的“主体性的危险”(151)。埃奇沃斯的《贝琳达》(1800)紧随夏洛特·伦诺克斯的《女堂吉诃德》(1752):“堂吉诃德主义变得内化和地方化了”，与其说是把风车误认为巨人，或者把男人误认为崇拜者，不如说是“没有认识到自己”(161)。李认为，埃奇沃斯的儿童文学“在小说和自然哲学之间架起了一座桥梁，当时两者都参与了知识模式的转变”(166)。 本章的实验节点是化学家汉弗莱·戴维(Humphry Davy)，他作为“名人科学家”获得了“前所未有的知名度”(161);他“对一氧化二氮的实验读起来几乎就像进入一个纯粹的、封闭的主体性内部空间的旅行”(163)。这些实验，就像新的情节一样，“产生了一种悬念”，在小说中成为“一种紧急的相邻体验”(165)。对我来说，这个论点似乎是合理的，直到它被威廉·戈德温(William Godwin)奇特的哥特式小说《迦勒·威廉姆斯》(Caleb Williams, 1796)绊倒。“情节似乎不知道如何处理物体”(175)，因为它们经常无法解释。戈德温写道:“情节甚至连自己都无法说服，就像两个结局一样，在悲剧中崩溃了”(176)。“小说失去了验证、开放或关闭主观性的手段”(176)。然而，从另一个角度来看，所有这些都以一种哥特式的隐喻方式，准确地抓住了巴博尔德和斯科特的“现实主义”标准:我们并不总是知道事物的意义，“在现实生活中，我们合理的期望往往会落空。”’”换句话说，戈德温的副标题是:事物的本来面目。最后一章，“历史眩晕和动物运动规律”，将斯科特的韦弗利小说作为转向“堂吉诃德主义正常化”和“以主观性反对客观真理”的例子(183)。“历史小说的情节寻找埋藏在深处的力量，这些力量在某些时刻突然显现出来，推动着这种变化，考验着人类的主体”(184)。在这里，被深深掩埋的力量与“日常运动体验”(185)、“身体的一种堂吉诃德主义”(186)的新理论有关，被称为“矢量”或“眩晕”，一种主观的生理感觉，将运动投射到周围环境中。伊拉斯谟·达尔文的《动物学》;《有机生命的法则》(The Laws of Organic Life, 1795-96)成为了这里的合作伙伴，因为这部作品就像斯科特眼中的“现代”小说一样，研究和解释了日常生活的细枝末节(189)。这些详细的经历，尤其是那些令人眩晕的经历，也与帝国的概念有关:“失去分辨自己在移动还是世界在移动的能力的现象，是斯科特在韦弗利中用来描述历史转型经历的一种流动。韦弗利许多小说的情节可以用达尔文的这句话来概括:“当我们被不寻常的运动包围时，我们就失去了垂直性”(191)。这就是新的“深度现实主义”的来源(194):历史被认为太大，太深，太有力，太超出我们的控制或理解;“它推你拉你，使你走得平坦或使你跌倒”(206)。李以结束语“扎迪·史密斯的白牙中的情节、历史和整体”结束了她的作品，将她的分析带入我们当代的相关性。“小说和自然哲学之间的联系是如何变化的?”它们消失了吗?”(207)。扎迪·史密斯自己宣称:“作家的工作不是告诉我们某人对某事的感受，而是告诉我们世界是如何运转的”(引用于第208页)。凭借自己收集的全部日期、事件和科学实验，以及对这些事件的刻意重复，小说将人们的注意力吸引到作为代理人的情节上:“‘每一刻都发生两次:内部和外部，它们是两种不同的历史’”(引用于第210页)。史密斯的小说为李的历史观点提供了现代的论据。我对李这本令人印象深刻的书的一个严重抵制是，它(以及巴博尔德和斯科特)在对18世纪小说的正式连贯性的“某些不满”中，假设了太多非18世纪的现实主义。首先，这忽略或忽视了清教徒的遗产，即在最小的事物和最小的事件之间寻找详细的意义和神圣的联系(例如，参见J. Paul Hunter的《小说之
{"title":":<i>The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels</i>","authors":"Cynthia Wall","doi":"10.1086/727803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727803","url":null,"abstract":"Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels. Yoon Sun Lee. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 258.Cynthia WallCynthia WallUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIf a body impinge upon another, and by its force change the motion of the other, that body also … will undergo an equal change, in its own motion.(Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [1687])1Newtonian physics is just one of the many new empiricisms employed in learned depth in The Natural Laws of Plot to argue that the plots of novels are as much if not more embedded in their own landscapes, “rely[ing] more deeply and intricately on an environing world to carry along any action” (2), as they are involved with narrative and characters. “Things have shadows and textures, as well as depths and surfaces,” and fictional events are shaped by the “real world of physical forces and laws” (3). Bodies impinge on bodies, motion changes bodies, matter mixes and moves. The real world kept discovering and describing new physical forces and laws, and the well-read British public (and its novelists) kept abreast of and internalized those discoveries as new ways of understanding “how things happen.” The chapters progress through the period, matching up canonical authors’ narrative strategies with natural philosophers and theories: Daniel-Defovian causality and Newtonian physics; the characters of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson and the types and orders of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon; Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and chemistry; a molecular Jane Austen; Maria Edgeworth, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Humphry Davy, and “mechanical objectivity”; Walter Scott, Erasmus Darwin, and vertigo. Throughout, the originally mingled concepts later identified as “objectivity” and “subjectivity” get disentangled, both historically and ideologically. In every historical, scientific, and narratological shift, the “external world” is always, like my uncle Toby’s map of Namur, “far more than an inert backdrop to action. It provides the laws that are then twisted into plot and pinned to the ground” (60).The first chapter, “Novels, Novel-Theory, and the History of Objectivity,” argues that objectivity is not “a way of telling the story with a certain detachment or from a third-person point of view” but “something that has to be built into the plot of the novel” (1) and that will change its appearance dramatically over time, in rhythm with the changing contours of natural philosophy, from the necessary subjectivity—the reliance “on their own accumulated experience, their knowledge, skill, and instincts” (9)—of the early empiricists to the active suppression of the self into the nineteenth century.2 “The novel emerged in tandem” (11) no","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135551726","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}
Next article FreeBook Review“Genial” Perception: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Myth of Genius in the Long Eighteenth Century. William Edinger. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2022. Pp. ix+287. Hope: A Literary History. Adam Potkay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. vii+422.A. W. LeeA. W. LeeContributing Editor, The Scriblerian and Kit-Cats Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreAdam Potkay’s latest monograph more or less picks up from his 2007 The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. Winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the best book in literary history between 2006 and 2008, The Story of Joy culturally and philologically excavates “joy” from the Hebrew Bible through Yeats and beyond. In the present volume, he provides a similar service for the concept (or emotion or virtue) of hope. Potkay begins with the ancient Greeks—Hesiod, Aeschylus, Pindar, and Thucydides—and carries his survey through modernism—Kafka, Camus, Ellison, and Beckett. Throughout this process, he combines a probing historical imagination, a sharp critical discernment, and a deft eye for textual explication, along with the gifts of a good storyteller, to provide a thoroughly accessible yet intellectually engaging account.Each of the five chapters takes up a distinct cultural episteme: classical, Christian, Augustan, Romantic, and modernist. In each, Potkay elucidates the antinomies both positive and negative—and many complexities in between—that philosophers and literary artists have discerned and developed in their deployment of “hope.”The first chapter, focusing upon Greek and Roman antiquity, exhibits the limits and restrictions these two intertwined worlds imposed: hope as deceptive, as irrational, as productive of fearfulness, as distracting from the present moment, and as squandered on things devoid of authentic value. A good example of this layered dialectic may be found in Potkay’s handling of the texts by the Greek poet Hesiod, whose only surviving authentic writings, Theogony and Works and Days, feature the myth of Pandora’s jar. Zeus, enraged at the trickery of Prometheus, creates a beautiful woman whom he sends to earth with a container full of mortal ills, such as care, toil, and disease. After Pandora opens the lid, they all escape, leaving only hope (elpis, ἐλπὶς) in the jar. While the standard interpretation holds that hope is a comfort to humankind, Potkay explores other possibilities—especially the notion that Zeus intended it to be an additional torment. Prometheus’s presence in the story adduces further complexities, such as the Titan’s gifting mortals ignorance of their final fate, as well as fire. This constitutes a sort of “blind hope,” allowing people to undertake future-oriented endeavors, occluded from their possible failure of futility.In Works and Days, Hesiod admits tw
由于希腊文的早期作品全部丢失或只剩下碎片，罗马诗人卢克莱修最充分地代表了前一派。公元前一世纪中叶，基于唯物主义原子论理论，《事物的本质》(De rerum natura)提倡放弃对死亡的恐惧——以及个人的永生——以达到当前状态的精神平静(精神状态)。斯多葛学派也赞成以现在为首要，因为他们寻求从痛苦(冷漠)中解脱出来，尤其是在人类的激情中。尽管后来的罗马斯多葛派塞内加允许帮助他人和维护祖国安全的希望，但在这两种计划中，希望都被最小化了。维吉尔可能在他的“统治者的希望”中表达了这一点，一个国家的救世主，就像他著名的第四首牧歌一样(尽管波特凯对这一点进行了讽刺的解读)。总而言之，第一章压缩了大量的信息，我在这里的简短叙述很难公正地描述这些信息。我只是想用它来说明波特凯的作品的深度和广度，尽管这还不够。因此，读者可以把前面的段落作为本书接下来四章的代表。刚才列举的一些主题在本书的其他地方也出现了。例如，在第2章中，我们发现“统治者的希望”(维吉尔和以赛亚)复活成为一个普遍的弥赛亚，正如基督教福音书中所阐述的那样，尤其是保罗的书信体，它宣布了耶稣即将回来的“好消息”。在基督教中，在古典世界中像品达这样的人物身上发现的试探性的“美好的希望”，变成了一个不可避免的主题应许，如在哥林多前书13:13 (KJV)中:“如今常存的有信心，有盼望，有爱，这三样;但其中最伟大的是慈善。”这三种美德被称为神学美德。虽然圣奥古斯丁反对他们的命令，但他们形成了圣托马斯·阿奎那宏伟的神学架构的基石，今天仍然是天主教会的主要神学。这一章还考察了基于罗马书8:20-21，由早期教会教父奥利金和尼萨的格里高利发展起来的所有人得救的概念所赋予的希望(并在20世纪被卡尔·巴特和迪特里希·邦霍费尔等神学家悄悄地重申)。公元早期几个世纪基督教革命的主要转变包括对永生的希望(而不是卢克莱西亚对个人毁灭的庆祝)，以及对基督给地球上贫穷和不幸的人带来希望的投资——而不是希腊罗马对贵族和文化精英的崇拜。无论是基于相似还是对比(例如，在第三章和第五章中，在其他地方被称为“可实现的希望”的延伸)，这种结构上的连接将《希望》的各个章节缝合在一起，贯穿始终，就像许多主题一样，将更大整体的音乐拉进统一之中。后面的章节在前两章的基础上进行了扩展和复杂化，涉及到弥尔顿和蒲柏、塞缪尔·约翰逊、华兹华斯和珀西·雪莱、歌德、乔治·艾略特、陀思妥耶夫斯基、尼采和卡夫卡等权威人物，以《等待戈多》结尾。但是，正如我们所看到的，当爱斯特拉冈(在《等待戈多》中)最后建议他们分手可能会更好时，弗拉基米尔以我们的方式回答:“我们明天上吊吧... .。除非戈多来了。”希望和自杀仍然是两种选择，在这部戏剧中构成了一个对立，最终，这部戏剧既关乎自身的形式，也关乎人类的状况，或关乎一战后欧洲的状况。希望和希望的缺失，以及希望的事物和希望的缺失，在欧洲统一信仰的时代结束后很久仍然是组织原则。(324)如果这还不能让我们回到赫西奥德和古典世界，那么把最后四章轻轻交织成一个令人满意的简洁的小结就足够了。《希望》中的阅读有时很精彩，有时也很隐晦。例如，用一页纸讨论塔西佗，用两页纸讨论康德，可能会提出并非所有读者都准备好满足的要求。然而，虽然人们可能不同意作者的所有解释性结论，但不加考虑就将其驳回将是一个错误。希望不容易读懂。如果读者真正深入挖掘波特凯考察的主要段落——就像我经常尝试做的那样——绘制上下文，解析原文的线条，追踪与其他相关作品的联系和联系，那么真正有益的体验就会出现。波特凯通过“希望”这个复杂而广阔的棱镜，带领我们穿越了西方知识传统的一些高峰(除了意大利文艺复兴时期与北方人文主义者之间令人遗憾的差距，尤其是伊拉斯谟和托马斯·莫尔)。 有些人可能会认为这种关注令人反感:虽然他研究了劳动阶级成员(斯蒂芬·杜克、玛丽·科利尔)、女性(汉娜·莫尔、狄金森)和有色人种(埃奎亚诺、赖特、布鲁克斯、埃里森)的作品，但他的主旨并不是要打破传统。但这并不等于指责这本书缺乏当代意义。随着灾难性的气候变化，民主政治制度面临可能的死亡，以及威胁全球的疾病，我们在2023年(以及未来几年)比以往任何时候都更需要希望。《希望》对人类精神这一难以捉摸却又不可或缺的属性——也许是不可剥夺的人权——进行了彻底(如果不是全面的话)的考察。威廉·艾丁格写了一本书，《亲切的感知:华兹华斯、柯勒律治和漫长的18世纪的天才神话》，几乎与波特凯的书同一天出版。“亲切的”感知和希望还有其他共同点。两人都把浪漫主义时期作为他们论述范围的中心。两者都在实践所谓的“文化文献学”，即对一个词在其词源学、社会史和文学史上的解析。在艾丁格的例子中，“亲切”是指“天才”，用塞缪尔·约翰逊(Samuel Johnson)的话说，是直接和原始地感知，“没有被任何其他思想的干预削弱或扭曲”(1;《莎士比亚序言》[1765])。当然，波特凯的调查得到了更广泛的传统支持:与霍普对喜马拉雅山脉的调查相比，还有谁的最新专著能从中受益?然而，虽然Edinger的项目声称“仅”英国的18世纪作为其研究领域，但它允许他追溯家谱，追溯到17世纪(在法国和英国)，以及古代古典世界。艾丁格从柯勒律治(《文学传》中的“亲切的歧视”)和华兹华斯(《前奏》中的“亲切的环境”)的用法中提取了他的关键术语。传统上，浪漫主义(艾丁格在很大程度上回避了这个词)被视为一条与它的嫡代先辈相对立的新道路，它宣扬天赋和无媒介想象的价值，与至少自柏拉图和亚里士多德美学以来占据主导地位的文学创作模仿模式相对立:这两种观点在艾布拉姆斯(m.h. Abrams)的名作《镜子与灯》(the Mirror and the Lamp)的标题中令人难忘地体现了出来。艾丁格仔细研究了华兹华斯和柯勒律治的诗歌和批评文本，追溯了康德和18世纪晚期的思想史，这段思想史实际上浸没了年轻时诗人同伴的思想。艾丁格描述了一种“现代”(即后德莱顿)批判意识形态，他将其定义为“批判自然主义”——一种基于“自然”、“天才”和“想象力”等术语的意识形态。他写道:“这两位(华兹华斯和柯勒律治)认为自己是自主的、亲切的感知者……他们(也许是无意识地)接受了公认的传统批评术语”，为他们的“发现”奠定了基础(187)。通过仔细阅读《前奏》中《斯诺登山》段落的不同草稿，找到了斯宾塞、弥尔顿、沙夫茨伯里、柯林斯、阿肯赛德、詹姆斯·克拉克、詹姆斯·比蒂、威廉·吉尔平，甚至华兹华斯自己早期的影响，得出了这样一个令人难忘的语言学之旅的结论:“这里的语言不仅仅是视觉的载体或工具，而是视觉本身的创造性代理人。”华兹华斯的灵感不是来自山上的顿悟，而是语言或历史本身”(186)。这是一本重要的书，值得比目前篇幅所限更丰富的考虑。事实上，我对“希望”和“亲切”感知的描述都是如此。然而，一根更刺眼的针穿过了这两根。在他的序言中，波特凯感人地告诉我们，他妻子的死促使他开始写这本书，向她致敬。相反，威廉·艾丁格在《亲切的感知》出版后不久就去世了，留下了他的妻子和家庭，以及这本书的两部未出版的续集。如果眼前生活的匆忙和忧虑会让人疲惫不堪，那么文学和文学批评或许有望提供一种抵消和振奋人心的选择。下一篇文章详细信息图表参考文献被现代语言学引用提前印刷文章DOIht
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Next article FreeBook ReviewFree Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Timothy Bewes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii+315.David WylotDavid WylotUniversity of Leeds Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWhat is the novel’s relation to thought? For Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, the answer does not lie in the novel’s capacity to represent thought, nor in the novel’s capacity to communicate an authorial subjectivity. Rather, the answer involves comprehending a kind of thought that is intrinsic to the novel, which the novel is the subject of rather than vehicle for, and a kind of thought that is at odds with form or ideological claim. Drawing on the work of prominent contemporary novelists that include J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Zadie Smith, Free Indirect argues that the contemporary novel stages this thought in the context of a period that has seen an erosion of the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, narrator and character, and novelist and critic. Bewes terms this work “postfiction” (9) and names its thought the “free indirect” (5). With these, Free Indirect offers an expansive account of the “enigma of the novelistic utterance” (83) that explores the novel’s potentiality and concludes at the limits of criticism.Free Indirect begins with discussion of a logic intrinsic to the novel’s form, that of “instantiation” (25). Holding a great deal of force in literary criticism, “instantiation” describes a connective logic “according to which an entity (a person, an object, a linguistic sign, an encounter, a fictional description, a character trait) is asserted as a case or instance of a larger category, property, or concept, to whose reality it attests” (188), and which provides the novel with a basic structural relation that connects the literary work to the social world. Bewes recruits Catherine Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006) and its claim that fiction is founded on a nonreferentiality that paradoxically indicates a more generalized reference to argue that the “instantiation relation” (27) trains readers to infer a connective idea that underpins the novel’s communicative act. Literary criticism extracts an ethical or normative standpoint from this relation and judges the work’s “social significance” (25) accordingly. Yet, whether shaping accounts of the novel’s social form or its communicative purpose, this logic, Free Indirect argues, establishes a principle of relation that obscures the ways in which the contemporary novel seeks the dissolution of connection through a staging of thought “without a communicative function” (141).To define the “free indirect,” Bewes turns to free indirect discourse, the means through which a narrator renders a character’s thoughts available to the reader, to argue that t
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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWriting Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Thomas Constantinesco. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 288.Vivian DelchampsVivian DelchampsDominican University of California Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreSomething that is “generative” has the power to produce and reproduce, create and recreate. In Thomas Constantinesco’s exciting book Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States, the author emphasizes that pain is not solely destructive (as many tired frameworks suggest). The book’s framing of pain in the context of nineteenth-century history opens new avenues for understanding pain as a generative, active force that catalyzes creative experiments with literary form, narrative, and genre. Specifically, Constantinesco demonstrates that literary texts engage with and veer away from the dominant form used to understand pain in the nineteenth century—sentimentalism. Literature generates new knowledge about pain precisely because it does not merely use pain to foster empathy. Rather, literature complexly theorizes the problems of selfhood, identity, and language that emerge in pain’s wake.With this argument, Writing Pain contributes to historical literary scholarship and to pain studies—an interdisciplinary field that explores pain’s cultural and social contexts. Elaine Scarry famously argued in The Body in Pain (1987) that pain is unnarratable, unspeakable, and untranslatable. Constantinesco builds on and challenges Scarry’s ideas, asserting that pain is not merely a hindrance to language but is rather a fertile ground for the emergence of poetic expression. Like Michael Snediker, who deploys figuration to explore chronic pain in his wonderful book Contingent Figure (2021), Constantinesco argues that pain can transform language even when the resulting figures resist complete understanding. While Constantinesco and Snediker develop complementary ideas about pain, Constantinesco differs slightly from Snediker by asserting that literary texts perform formal work that is not only theoretical and philosophical; it is also historical. Thus, Constantinesco embraces the methods of Lauren Berlant (“The Subject of True Feeling” [1999]) who carefully attends to American history while analyzing the politics of pain. Constantinesco’s book similarly, and elegantly, invites theoretical perspectives while tracing pain’s histories and literary topologies.The book’s argument is evidenced in six chapters that interrogate pain’s paradoxical dimensions. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the rest of the book, analyzing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sentimental framing of pain as something that will someday be exchanged for spiritual ecstasy. Emerson’s economic understanding of pain has much to do with Emerson’s relationship to white masculinity, as Constantines
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