Abstract:The Inferno's central conflict is between us readers and God. When fictional characters captivate us, we are normally free to enjoy their charms. Not so Dante's sinners. If we feel bad for these characters, it cannot be because they are sympathetic—after all, God put them in Hell—but because we are naive. But is this sympathy really naive? This article reconsiders the Ugolino episode as a paradigm for the Inferno's ethical contradictions. In a poem that reminds us that crimes often create the circumstances for victimization, perhaps sympathizing with the damned is the most ethical reading of all.
{"title":"Ethical Criticism in Hell: The Sympathetic Fallacy of Inferno 32–33","authors":"James Nikopoulos","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Inferno's central conflict is between us readers and God. When fictional characters captivate us, we are normally free to enjoy their charms. Not so Dante's sinners. If we feel bad for these characters, it cannot be because they are sympathetic—after all, God put them in Hell—but because we are naive. But is this sympathy really naive? This article reconsiders the Ugolino episode as a paradigm for the Inferno's ethical contradictions. In a poem that reminds us that crimes often create the circumstances for victimization, perhaps sympathizing with the damned is the most ethical reading of all.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"468 - 489"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49377958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:What if a prostitute had expressed the idea of individual rights to property based on labor, even before John Locke? The London Jilt presents Cornelia, a prostitute who endorses her stigmatized job on the grounds that sexual labor is the same as any other profession. By analyzing self-ownership embodied in the prostitute figure, I claim that The London Jilt significantly anticipates Locke's labor theory. Cornelia adopts the emerging discourse of labor and property and situates prostitutes as economic subjects who turn female sexuality into profits. This fiction also reveals marriage is an unfair financial trade that exploits women's sexual labor.
{"title":"\"Money for which my Buttocks had labored so vigorously\": John Locke and Sexual Labor in The London Jilt","authors":"Yoojung Choi","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What if a prostitute had expressed the idea of individual rights to property based on labor, even before John Locke? The London Jilt presents Cornelia, a prostitute who endorses her stigmatized job on the grounds that sexual labor is the same as any other profession. By analyzing self-ownership embodied in the prostitute figure, I claim that The London Jilt significantly anticipates Locke's labor theory. Cornelia adopts the emerging discourse of labor and property and situates prostitutes as economic subjects who turn female sexuality into profits. This fiction also reveals marriage is an unfair financial trade that exploits women's sexual labor.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"223 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44726504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Apuleius's The Golden Ass presents curiosity as the protagonist's downfall, yet ultimately recodes curiosity as the single virtue through which the human soul achieves not only immortality but joy. I identify Apuleius's treatment of curiosity as falling into the categories of erotic and nonerotic. The union of Eros and the curious human soul suggests that one who is erotically curious can take pleasure in her devotion to one, precisely because she has eyes for the beauty of many.
{"title":"The Virtue of Erotic Curiosity","authors":"Rachel Aumiller","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Apuleius's The Golden Ass presents curiosity as the protagonist's downfall, yet ultimately recodes curiosity as the single virtue through which the human soul achieves not only immortality but joy. I identify Apuleius's treatment of curiosity as falling into the categories of erotic and nonerotic. The union of Eros and the curious human soul suggests that one who is erotically curious can take pleasure in her devotion to one, precisely because she has eyes for the beauty of many.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"208 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41529025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions by Steven Connor (review)","authors":"Rick de Villiers","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"244 - 247"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66275488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this article, I argue that even if one can justify the initial impetus to want to deconstruct a literary or philosophical text, this does not make it possible in practice. To this end, I engage with relevant aspects of Jacques Derrida's thought, examining the motivations and purpose behind wanting to carry out a deconstruction, to then offer a pragmatic critique of the idea one might ever be able to do so. I base my argument on various factors, including deconstruction's nonmethodological nature and the challenges involved in adjudicating a given deconstructive reading a success or failure, among other considerations.
{"title":"Why Deconstruction Might Work in Theory but Not in Practice","authors":"Alan Daboin","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I argue that even if one can justify the initial impetus to want to deconstruct a literary or philosophical text, this does not make it possible in practice. To this end, I engage with relevant aspects of Jacques Derrida's thought, examining the motivations and purpose behind wanting to carry out a deconstruction, to then offer a pragmatic critique of the idea one might ever be able to do so. I base my argument on various factors, including deconstruction's nonmethodological nature and the challenges involved in adjudicating a given deconstructive reading a success or failure, among other considerations.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"86 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47585524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:What would Wittgensteinian fiction—not overtly about or influenced by him, but that resonates with his thought—look like? Lydia Davis has avowed, but never explained, her admiration for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her short and fragmentary fictions are attuned to how grammar and usage reveal our forms of life. Alongside briefer discussion of Adam Ehrlich Sachs and other contemporary American writers, I characterize both Wittgenstein and Davis as uncanny grammarians: though we live in language, we are never fully at home in it. Both press on our ordinary language in an extraordinary way, defamiliarizing the familiar to more explicitly understand it.
{"title":"On Wittgenstein, Lydia Davis, and Other Uncanny Grammarians","authors":"Ben Roth","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What would Wittgensteinian fiction—not overtly about or influenced by him, but that resonates with his thought—look like? Lydia Davis has avowed, but never explained, her admiration for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her short and fragmentary fictions are attuned to how grammar and usage reveal our forms of life. Alongside briefer discussion of Adam Ehrlich Sachs and other contemporary American writers, I characterize both Wittgenstein and Davis as uncanny grammarians: though we live in language, we are never fully at home in it. Both press on our ordinary language in an extraordinary way, defamiliarizing the familiar to more explicitly understand it.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"1 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44861476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play by Michael Y. Bennett (review)","authors":"B. Ezell","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"241 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45429808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The term "tragedy" is widely misused in common parlance to designate any disastrous occurrence of great magnitude. If this practice is to be resisted and reformed, an alternative account of real-life tragedy must be sustained. I attempt to offer one that is grounded in the connections between agency and luck. More specifically, I argue that in a universe lacking any supernatural power of fate, real-life tragedy occurs when the exercise of agency results, through a confluence of constitutive and circumstantial bad luck, in the suffering and the destruction of the agent.
{"title":"Agency, Luck, and Tragedy","authors":"Charles Nussbaum","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The term \"tragedy\" is widely misused in common parlance to designate any disastrous occurrence of great magnitude. If this practice is to be resisted and reformed, an alternative account of real-life tragedy must be sustained. I attempt to offer one that is grounded in the connections between agency and luck. More specifically, I argue that in a universe lacking any supernatural power of fate, real-life tragedy occurs when the exercise of agency results, through a confluence of constitutive and circumstantial bad luck, in the suffering and the destruction of the agent.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"68 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47832783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Is there a convergence of Philip Roth's The Facts and "the facts," as contextualized historically, in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time? And to the extent The Facts may reconfigure Sartrean flight and Heideggerian regard for resolute consciousness and historicity, how does such transformation relate to Roth's implied musings in The Facts on Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade? Roth channels irresolute facts not toward the somber absence of consciousness implied by Heideggerian resoluteness and "historicality" but toward the supremacy of Dasein inherent in enduring literary excursion charted by the Sartrean-inspired masquerade of Dasein's being what one is and is not.
{"title":"From Heideggerian Dasein to Melvillean Masquerade: Historiology and Imaginative Excursion in Philip Roth's The Facts","authors":"James Duban","doi":"10.1353/phl.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Is there a convergence of Philip Roth's The Facts and \"the facts,\" as contextualized historically, in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time? And to the extent The Facts may reconfigure Sartrean flight and Heideggerian regard for resolute consciousness and historicity, how does such transformation relate to Roth's implied musings in The Facts on Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade? Roth channels irresolute facts not toward the somber absence of consciousness implied by Heideggerian resoluteness and \"historicality\" but toward the supremacy of Dasein inherent in enduring literary excursion charted by the Sartrean-inspired masquerade of Dasein's being what one is and is not.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"54 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41329003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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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