THE EUROPEAN LEGACY: Volume 14, Issue 5 (2009)

We are pleased to announce the publication of the new (special topic) issue of “The European Legacy,” which is available online at:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g914049653

Topic: Philosophy as Literature

Guest Editor: Costica Bradatan (The Honors College, Texas Tech University)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Articles:

“Introduction: Unorthodox Remarks on Philosophy as Literature”
By Costica Bradatan
Pages 513 – 518

“Of Poets and Thinkers: A Conversation on Philosophy, Literature and the Rebuilding of the World”
By Costica Bradatan; Simon Critchley; Giuseppe Mazzotta; Alexander Nehamas
Pages 519 – 534

“Hunting Plato’s Agalmata”
By Matthew Sharpe
Pages 535 – 547

“The Nexus of Unity of an Emerson Sentence”
By Kelly Dean Jolley
Pages 549 – 560

“The Concept of Writing, with Continual Reference to ‘Kierkegaard’”
By Mark Cortes Favis
Pages 561 – 572

“An Inhumanly Wise Shame”
By Brendan Moran
Pages 573 – 585

“Stanley Cavell and Two Pictures of the Voice”
By Adam Gonya
Pages 587 – 598

“Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis”
By Jonathan Monroe
Pages 599 – 611

Review Essays:

“After the Abyss: Theory Lives On”
By Constance Eichenlaub
Pages 613 – 616

“Funny Masters”
By Sonia Arribas
Pages 617 – 620

“Ritual or Playful? On the Foundations of European Drama”
By Victor Castellani
Pages 621 – 631

Book Reviews:

Reviews by Nick Bentley; Ronald Bogue; Peter Burke; John Danvers; Christopher Irwin; Geoff Kemp; Martyn Lyons; David Malcolm; Gordon Marino; Amy L. Mclaughlin; Brian Nelson; Christian Roy; Paola S. Timiras; Eric White
Pages 633 – 646

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Wilde’s extraordinary panegyric to Christ culminates in what he calls Christ’s ‘dangerous idea’. This turns upon the treatment of a sinner like Wilde himself. Christ does not condemn the sinner – “Let him of you who has never sinned be the first to throw the stone” – but rather sees sin and suffering as ‘being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection’. By this, Wilde does not mean that the act of sin itself is holy, but the transfiguration of this act that follows from the experience of long repentance and suffering. To this extent, and Wilde finds this a deeply un-Hellenic thought, one can transform one’s past through a process of aesthetic transfiguration or sublimation.

Read the rest

A review of Dante and Derrida: Face to Face (S U N Y Series in Theology and Continental Thought)

A challenge all interpreters face is finding a language in which to mediate understanding between the author they are interpreting and a contemporary audience. Erich Auerbach accomplished this by recovering and expounding the idea and practice of figura, which became the basis for path-breaking interpretations of Dante. Similarly, many scholars have brought forward passages in Thomas Aquinas that Dante echoes or likely had in mind and used them to explain the poem’s theological and philosophical grounding. Another example is the careful reconstruction of the cosmology of the Commedia, used to organize the entire structure of the Pardiso as well as for smaller functions like marking the passage of time or to convey a variety of other meanings. The advantage of such scholarly recoveries is that these are languages Dante himself spoke fluently. The disadvantage is that they may be so remote that they actually widen the distance of the contemporary reader from Dante. The more we understand Dante, the more we realize his thought presupposes ideas we may no longer believe and cannot share. One can try to relegate such erudition to footnotes where the ordinary reader can ignore it, but it is disconcerting to think that the more precisely one understands Dante, the more he seems so much of his time, the less he has to say to us.

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A visiting legal ethicist talks to us about why a novella by Herman Melville, involving mutiny and an execution at sea, has become required reading for those interested in the intersection of literature, law and ethics.

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Articles

“To use a metaphor at a time like this would be obscene”: a study of cancer, poetry and metaphor
Cathy Altmann

Burning Down the [Big] House: Sati in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary
Frances Botkin

Wounded Space: Law, Justice and Violence to the Land
Jennifer Coralie

Seeing Stars: Reading Melancholy and Power at Madame Tussauds through the Lens of Hiroshi Sugimoto
Elizabeth Howie

Concrete Containment in Late Capitalism, Mysticism, the Marquis de Sade, and Phenomenological Anthropology
Apple Igrek

“Edging Back Into Awareness”; How Late it Was, How Late, Form, and the Utopian Demand
Dougal McNeill

Crisis of Memory

Traumatic Memory and Holocaust Testimony: Passing Judgement in Representations of Chaim Rumkowski
Adam Brown

Recreating Postmemory? Children of Holocaust Survivors and the
Journey to Auschwitz
Esther Jilovsky

Blurring the Boundaries: History, Memory and Imagination in the Works of W G Sebald
Diane Molloy

Articles are available here

Frederic Will — Can We Get Inside the Aesthetic Sensibility of the Archaic Past?
Maryvonne Saison — “The People Are Missing”
Thomas Leddy — The Aesthetics of Junkyards and Roadside Clutter
Emmanouil Aretoulakis — Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11
Dan Disney — Toward a Poeticognosis: Re-reading Plato’s The Republic via Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
Jonathan Davis — Questioning “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: A Stroll around the Louvre after Reading Benjamin
Grant Tavinor — Definition of Videogames
SYMPOSIUM: Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Twenty-Five Years Later
Ivan Gaskell — The Riddle of a Riddle
Thomas E. Wartenberg — Not Just Mere Things
Cynthia Freeland — Danto and Art Criticism
Arthur C. Danto — Ontology, Criticism, and the Riddle of Art Versus Non-Art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

TOC

Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization — Ihab Hassan

The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy — Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman’s The Narrative Corpse — Brian Boyd

Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will? — Don Levi

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida — David Hillman

Literature, Politics, and Character — Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality — Jon Adams

How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? — Amihud Gilead

“A little throat cutting in the meantime”: Seneca’s Violent Imagery — Amy Olberding

Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses — Patrick Colm Hogan

And more

Richard Crary has been reading Blanchot’s The Space of Literature and is sharing his thoughts.

Link to his blog: The Existence Machine

“Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy”
Interdisciplinary Colloquium
University of Ottawa
Carleton University
Ottawa, ON (Canada)
31 October – 2 November 2008

This bilingual English/French colloquium celebrates the works of one of the world’s most compelling intellectuals, the Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said (November 1st 1935- September 23rd 2003), author of “Orientalism,” “Culture and Imperialism,” and “Out of Place” among other famous books. The colloquium revolves around the theme of “Counterpoint,” extensively used by Said as the interplay of diverse ideas and various “discrepant” cultural experiences.

As Said writes in Culture and Imperialism: “As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread
it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.”

Following Said’s legacy this colloquium envisions a polyphonic, interdisciplinary engagement from fields as broad as comparative literature, sociology, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Diaspora studies, musicology, and political science with a special focus on Middle Eastern politics.

The organizers seek papers/ panel proposals drawing from or expanding on the following themes:
- Colonialism and Imperialism: A Middle Eastern Context
- Transnationalism and Reflections on Exile
- Overlapping Territories and Imaginative Geographies
- Language, History and the Production of Knowledge
- The Arab World: States, Territories and Refugees.
- Gender, Class and Orientalism
- Criticism and French Philosophy
- Otherness in the Arts
- Representations of the Secular
- Power, Politics and Truth

Please send a 200 word abstract of paper/panel proposals to: counterpoints.conference@gmail.com

Deadline for paper/panel submission: July 15th, 2008

For more information please contact: may.telmissany@uottawa.ca or nahla_abdo@carleton.ca

Obits: NYT, Le Monde, IHT

A video where Cesaire speaks of his childhood (in French):

Ours does not promise to go down in literary history as a great age of religious poetry. Yet if contemporary poetry is not often religious, it is still intensely, covertly metaphysical. Human nature, it seems, compels us to keep asking about the first things, even if we no longer accept the same answers that our ancestors did, or even the same kind of answers. The more widely you read, in fact, the clearer it becomes that our poetry has a distinctive metaphysics, a set of principles or intuitions held in common by poets as different as Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Billy Collins. This metaphysical sensibility, I think, is what will give our period a retrospective unity, when readers of the future come to survey what looks to us like chaos. And the best document of that sensibility—the single piece of writing that does the most to explain what our poetry believes, and the ways it expresses that belief—is an essay by Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art.”

Today, Heidegger’s name is most often heard in debates about his collaboration with the Nazis. Though he lived from 1889 to 1976, his life and work must be judged by his behavior during the early thirties, when the Nazi Party came to power with a promise to renew the German spirit. Because this was also Heidegger’s goal—in a different, but not unrelated sense—he was happy to add his intellectual prestige to the Nazi cause, serving as rector of his university under the new government. He was soon disillusioned with Hitler, but he never fully came to grips with his catastrophic moral and intellectual failure. It was left to writers in our own time, like Richard Wolin and Charles Bambach, to show the full implications of Heidegger’s Nazism for his immensely influential work.

Continue reading

A review of Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Cultural Memory in the Present):

If there is no such thing as literature — i.e., self-identity of the literary thing — if what is announced or promised as literature never gives itself as such, that means, among other things, that a literature that talked only about literature or a work that was purely self-referential would immediately be annulled. You'll say that that's maybe what's happening. In which case it is this experience of the nothing-ing of nothing that interests our desire under the name of literature. Experience of Being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of metaphysics, literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself. It's the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world, and this is why, if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.

 

– Jacques Derrida, "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques Derrida"[1]

 

Over the years there have been various efforts to engage Jacques Derrida's conception of literature.[2] I think it is widely acknowledged now that there is (or was) no concept or theory of any sort but instead an ongoing attraction to forms of language that make certain works of writing peculiar enough to trouble the ways in which we make sense of things. Anyhow here is what I think we think we know about Derrida's thinking with respect to literature:

 the rest of the review

In this online lecture, Dr. Richard Kearney of Boston College examines the subject of faith and doubt through the twin lenses of continental philosophy and english literature. Recorded at Trinity Western University on May 12, 2007 at the Western Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature.

Link

 Thanks to Joel Buxton

An ubu edition:

The Last Man (1957)
Maurice Blanchot

73 Pages

We can dream about the last writer, with whom would disappear, without anyone noticing it, the little mystery of writing. A dense, dream-like exploration of the extreme limits of this mystery, written some ten years prior to the Death of the Author, (though unpublished in English until thirty years later) Maurice Blanchot's The Last Man (Le Dernier Homme, 1957) could be considered a narrative follow-up to The Space of Literature (L'Espace littéraire, 1955) or a fictional companion to the critical essays composing The Book to Come (Le Livre à venir, 1959). One can imagine an infinite conversation between these works: drifting wearily across abyssal alterities—the echo, in advance, of what has not been said and will never be said. But this sumptuous récit alone demands the reader's full attention—marvelously, Blanchot writes what cannot be written without losing it as un-writable by writing it (Hans-Yost Frey, YFS, 1998). Narrating at the threshold of this impossible writing, The Last Man weaves a blurring of several prosopopetic characters towards a radical revision of the subject and the text. The prose itself never crystallizes into an unambiguous statement—Blanchot's trangressive philosophy peculiar in the tantalizingly pleasurable suspension of the never-fulfilled promise of understanding. Reading happens in this continual absence of comprehension: instead, dense knots of delightfully paradoxical propositions and stupefying catachreses drive the reader on in the unconditional acceptance of the text that pierces, like a look that is too direct, the indeterminate prose, and makes all relations, and especially our relationship to time, absolutely precarious. 

Link

Via Wood's Lot 

Détours: Je dois d’abord vous demander pourquoi L’Absolu littéraire et pourquoi vous avez senti le besoin d’écrire ce livre à la fin des années ‘70 ?

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: La fin des années ‘70 c’est le moment où le livre a été publié. Le projet, quant à lui, était plus ancien. Déjà le numéro 21 de Poétique (1975), dont Gérard Genette m’avait confié la direction, réservait, sous le titre très général de Littérature et Philosophie, une large place à la problématique du romantisme d’Iéna. Il s’agissait en réalité d’un viel intérêt. La racine du projet était double.

Il y avait tout d’abord que Jan-Luc Nancy et moi, pour des raisons qu’il serait trop long d’exposer ici, avions concentré l’essentiel de notre travail depuis le début des années ‘70 sur Nietzsche, sur le “premier Nietzsche”. En traduisant ou retraduisant, en allant voir ce qui se passait du côté de l’enseignement de Nietzsche, en interrogeant les présupposés d’un livre comme La Naissance de la tragédie, nous nous sommes aperçus qu’il n’y avait pas seulement un arrière-fond philosophique ou métaphysique, comme Heidegger l’avait magistralement fait venir au jour, mais toute une réélaboration de thèmes ou de motifs venus de la “théorie littéraire” du romantisme ou du pararomantisme. Nietzsche nous est apparu assez largement tributaire du romantisme sur lequel Heidegger, il ne faut pas l’oublier, a très peu insisté. Cela nous a conduit naturellement à vouloir en savoir un peu plus, à lire ou à relire les textes majeurs. c’est le moment où Nancy a entrepris la traduction du Cours préparatoire d’Esthétique de Jean Paul, réputé intraduisible. C’est aussi le moment où je me suis surpris à travailler sur la Lucinde de Friedrich Schlegel qui apparemment n’intéressait pas grand monde.

The rest

American Novelists in French Eyes

Glossary of Literary Theory
Index of Primary Entries
University of Toronto — English Library Criticism and Theory Resources

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