Literature

The present study utilized research design in which six different poems were given repeated readings by groups of persons in which there were an equal number of males and females and of introverts and extraverts as assessed by the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1962). Assessments of readers’ experience of the poem were obtained immediately after an initial reading and again after repeated readings of the poem. Subjects' general descriptions of their experience of the poems were reduced to fundamental descriptions (...) (Colaizzi, 1969) by a three-step procedure (preliminary listing, grouping, and constituent definition) and then resynthesized in a fourth step that placed the constituents into a coherent general description. As understanding increased, readers experience became less personal and more closely related to that intended by the poet. The general trend was increased imagery but attenuation of emotional experience as both were experienced as a part of or derived more directly from the poem itself. (shrink)

This article examines Richard Bauman's conception of oral narrative as performance and argues instead for a view of narrative texts as autonomous entities, analyzable in language-internal Saussurian terms. Plot is viewed as a matter of syntagmatic relations, and character as a matter of paradigmatic relations. A contrast is drawn between narrative truth (cohesion) and historical truth (correspondence). Alternatives to some of Bauman's analyses of narrative texts are proposed.

English interpretations, appropriations, and transpositions of the figure of Don Quixote play a pivotal role in eighteenth-century constructions of so-called English national character. A corpus of quixotic narratives worked to reinforce the centrality of Don Quixote and the practice of quixotism in the national literary landscape. They stressed the man from La Mancha’s eccentricity and melancholy in ways inextricable from English self-constructions of these traits.2 This is why Stuart Tave is able to write that eighteenth-century Britons could “recast” Don Quixote (...) in a fashion that followed “national pride” in the “freedom” of their humors.1 However, Don Quixote’s integral place in patriotic self-constructions was troubled by gender. While national character was construed as masculine by default, quixotism’s association with masculinity was complicated by the potential passive penetrability of quixotism and the proliferation of narratives about female quixotic readers. This essay will analyze these tensions. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) are key examples of quixotic texts that respond to the figure of the female quixote by interrogating the relationship between Englishness, masculinity, and quixotism. (shrink)

A discussion of Umberto Eco's notion of open and closed texts.

That we find the idea of travelling in time, and in particular travelling backwards in time, fascinating, is evidenced by the plethora of new science fictions shows depicting time travel that hit our TV screens in 2016. I love time travel shows, and I can hardly keep up. In almost all cases these shows depict what philosophers call inconsistent time travel stories: stories that commit what my colleague Nick Smith (The University of Sydney) calls the second time around fallacy. These (...) stories depict individuals travelling back in time (or in some cases sending a signal back in time) in order to change some past event (or, in some cases, to try and mitigate the changes brought about by some other time travellers). -/- It’s easy to see why these storylines are captivating. They ask us to imaginatively entertain questions about the robustness of the present. We are asked to ponder to what extent the way things are now is the product of fluky events, so that had the past been ever so slightly different, the present would be very different indeed. These questions are intriguing because we all wonder to what extent our present selves are the result of choices we made, where we could so easily have made others, and to what extent who we are is most robust, resilient under small changes in our past decisions. (shrink)

Un viaggio nell'opera filosofica, narratologica e poetologica di Ingeborg Bachmann che include i radiodrammi e i saggi radiofonici.

The main aim of this essay is to show that, for Stevens, the concept of reality is very fluctuating. The essay begins with addressing the relationship between poetry and philosophy. I argue, contra Critchley, that Stevens’ poetic work can elucidate, or at least help us to understand better, the ideas of philosophers that are usually considered obscure. The main “obscure” philosophical work introduced in and discussed throughout the essay is Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism. Both a (shellingian) philosopher and a (...) (stevensian) poet search for reality. In order to understand Stevens’ poetry better, I distingush several concepts of reality: initial reality (the external world of the common sense), imagined reality (a fiction, a product of one’s mind), final reality (the object of a philosopher’s and a poet’s search) and total reality (the sum of all realities, Being). These determinations are fixed by reason (in the present essay), whereas in Stevens’ poetic works, they are made fluid by the imagination. This fluidity leads the concept of reality from its initial stage through the imagined stage to its final stage. Throughout this process, imagined reality must be distinguished from both a mere fancy and its products. Final reality is, however, nothing transcendent. It is rather a general transpersonal order of reality created by poetry/the imagination. The main peculiarity of final reality is that it is a dynamic order. It is provisional at each moment. Stevens (and Schelling too) characterizes this order as that of a work of art which is a finite object, but has an infinite meaning. Stevens calls this order “the central poem” or the “endlessly elaborating poem”. If ultimate reality is a poem created by the imagination, one may ask who is the imagining subject. I argue that this agent is best to be thought as total reality, that is, as Being. Stevens, however, maintains that if there were such an agency, it would be an inhuman agency, “an inhuman meditation”. The essay concludes, in a Derridian manner, with the claim that this agency cannot have any name; it is the “unnamed creator of an unknown sphere, / Unknown as yet, unknowable, / Uncertain certainty” (OP: 127). It is best thought as an X, as an unknown variable. Being has no name. (shrink)

Aristotle's Poetics has been the basis for theories of entertainment for over 2,000 years. But the general approach it uses has led to a number of gaps, contradictions, and difficulties in predicting the success of books, plays, movies, and entertainment as a whole, so much so that sayings like "there are no rules, but you break them at your peril," and "in Hollywood, nobody knows anything" have become widespread and accepted. -/- However, it turns out that a model of entertainment (...) that defines literary conventions by the pleasurable feelings they release in the brain, and then equates them with outside experiences that people subconsciously attach to the literary work, in the same way that we can be conditioned to feel love when we view our wedding rings, can actually resolve almost every seeming contradiction in Aristotle's ideas and traditional theories of storytelling when compared to real-world results. -/- Furthermore, this approach can be extended to the other major forms of art, including painting, music and even video games, leading to a "Non-Aristotelian" theory that modifies the fundamental aspects of each of these fields, but in a natural and necessary way, which strengthens both our understanding and our ability to predict the success or failure of art in the future. -/- My work as a vlogger and writer, mostly done via my Youtube channel "StoryBrain," has been viewed over 6 million times, and written about in MovieMaker magazine, Creative Screenwriting magazine, on the front page of major sites like Reddit, Roger Ebert online, and in international newspapers like the Sydney Morning-Herald in Australia and Fotogramas in Spain. My work is also the subject of a chapter of the currently-in-release book "Neuro-Design," by Kogan Page publishing, called "The Neuro Movie Analyst." This paper is a detailed introduction to the theory of Emotional Indiscretion which I have talked about in my work. (shrink)

A "sad and corrupt" age, a period of "crisis" and "upheaval"—what T.S. Eliot famously summed up as "the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why, then, was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud to Pirandello, Beckett, Hughes, Barnes, and Joyce, no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity’s paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the (...) gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world, as Max Weber wrote, that had been "disenchanted of its gods?" In answering these questions, Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory, as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor, in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter, humor, and their complicated relationships with modern life. The Stability of Laughter explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction. (shrink)

This chapter argues that contemporary literary criticism suffers from a reflexive faith in things, conceived broadly as static objects that reflect wider political, social, and cultural practices. Literature is re-imagined here as an open-ended event that demands an immanent materialism in which distinctions between literary objects and human bodies no longer stand up. By reflecting on the ambiguous “thing-ness” of Shakespeare, Vallelly draws attention to the elusive nature of things in theatrical spaces, and explores how this enigmatic materiality can be (...) applied to literary experience more generally. To do so, he draws on Roberto’s Bolaño’s 2666, affect theory, and new materialism to construct a new literary materialism, one in which literary meaning is located neither in the human nor in the non-human world, but in the affective correspondence between these worlds. To illustrate this point, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between characters and stones in Shakespearean drama. (shrink)

Ovid versteht seine Metamorphosen als zusammenhängende Dichtung (perpetuum carmen). Für die Syrinx-Erzählung ist dieser Zusammenhang offensichtlich: Im ersten Buch wird erzählt, wie es zur Erfindung der Panflöte (Syrinx) gekommen ist, im elften Buch tritt Pan auf der Syrinx gegen Apollon an. Die unmittelbar anschließende Geschichte vom Barbier des Midas wird dagegen gegenwärtig nur selten mit der Syrinx verknüpft. Zu Unrecht, wie in diesem Aufsatz dargestellt werden soll. Denn diese Geschichte ist der eigentliche Schlusspunkt des musikalischen Wettstreits zwischen Pan und Apollon, (...) worin er sich, quasi in einer Zugabe, zugleich als Gott der Wahrheit präsentiert. Die vordergründig groteske Handlungsweise des Dieners ist durchgängig eine semantische Komposition zum Thema Syrinx. Nun wird Ovids Geschichte vom Barbier des Midas bekanntlich gerne mit dem Wort Binsenweisheit verknüpft und umgekehrt. Das geschieht durchaus unorthodox, nämlich nicht gestützt auf etymologische Wörterbücher, die meist andere Quellen bevorzugen, wenn sie die Wortbildung nicht gleich ungeklärt sein lassen. Zu dieser Verbindung gehört also eine gute Portion Einfalt. 2 Vor dem oben genannten Hintergrund müsste diese Beziehung zudem als besonders glückliche Fügung betrachtet werden. Ich kann nicht umhin, es so zu sehen und werde dafür argumentieren, dass Binsenweisheit ein Wort mit Geschichte ist, weil es ein Wort mit Geschichte ist. Gut, der Barbier des Midas wird darin zum Prototyp eines Whistleblowers. Das sieht nach einer hausgemachten Schwierigkeit aus, denn Binsenwahrheiten sind gerade keine Geheimnisse. Dieser Aspekt wird durch Bezug auf antike Interpreten, Ausonius und Persius, näher untersucht. All dies ist nicht möglich ohne kurze Streifzüge durch die Semantik von Binsenweisheit vermittels der stets griffbereiten Vergewisserungsformel Es ist eine Binsenweisheit, dass ... Zwischen Binsenwahrheit und Binsenweisheit wird im Aufsatz nicht weiter unterschieden. Wer möchte, kann sie jeweils Syrinx und Apollon, den beiden Hintergrundakteuren der Barbiergeschichte, zuordnen. (shrink)

How does the theme of the other–-as person, experience or alternative conceptual scheme—allow us to reassess the role of the self in literary texts? This book employs phenomenology and semiotics to argue that modern literature is strongly concerned with the role of time in the construction of the self. "Alterity and Criticism: Retracing Time in Modern Literature" argues that the role of time in canonical literature underlies the experience of alterity and requires a new hermeneutic to clarify how the self (...) emerges in literary texts. -/- Romantic poetry from Goethe to Shelley and the modern prose tradition from Flaubert to Butor constitute different traditions but also indicate, on a textual basis, how alterity performs a crucial role in reading, thus encouraging us to interpret literary texts in terms of the related concerns of self, other and time. The author examines the phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas and Wolfgang Iser, as well as the cultural semiotics of Julia Kristeva, to argue that modern literature provides the occasion for a new understanding of the self in time and, in this way, addresses some of the pressing literary problems of our own period. (shrink)

In 1939 Gaston Bachelard published a book Lautréamont on the poem The Songs of Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse. Bachelard’s Lautréamont was inspired by the method of psychoanalysis. The purpose of this article is to analyze Bachelard’s interpretation of the Chants, to compare his version of psychoanalysis with the versions of Freud and Jung, and to show its meaning in the historical and philosophical context.

Un'esplorazione tra la storia scritta e la storia dei senza storia, alla ricerca di elementi che possano disfare le trame e le dialettiche del comando/assenso.

Un'esplorazione tra la storia scritta e la storia dei senza storia, alla ricerca di elementi che possano disfare le trame e le dialettiche del comando/assenso.

Mostly learners and even teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are still not able to speak grammatically and fluently just because they lack of the Indonesian language proficiency and comprehension. This research was done to investigate how the Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) can assist the teachers and learners of EFL in improving their English proficiency and comprehension. The data were analyzed by applying Miles’ and Huberman’s framework; data reduction, data display, and drawing then verifying conclusion. The findings showed some (...) positive and negative representative perceptions of the teachers dealing with the roles of the Indonesian in the teaching and learning EFL. The second findings showed and explored the roles of the Indonesian in the teaching and learning EFL. There were five roles by which the Indonesian contribute to such as Functional Equation, Competence Indicator, Linguistic Mediator, Communicative Language Paradigm, and Situational Language Use. The third findings explored the aspects in which the Indonesian had the roles to play in assisting the teaching and learning the EFL such as aspect of the Linguistic Item, aspect of Semantics, and aspect of Pragmatics. There were three other findings in this research that were explored and labeled as Linguistic Competence vs Linguistic Cognition, Cultural Behavior-Based Language, and First Language Interest. (shrink)

Messud's The Woman Upstairs as a post-9/11 craft makes use of transnational characters to emphasize the hidden bigotry and hypocrisy in the current age. The dominance of feminine figures in The Woman Upstairs highlights the significance of 'Agonistic feminine identity' in the twenty-first century America that reflects how the interactions among women are socio-politically flavored. Messud’s feminine setting in The Woman Upstairs sketches out Nora as a woman who constructs her life in accordance with the socio-cultural norms her mother and (...) the society promote. Yet women’s friendship that bridges the sociocultural gap between women of the First World and women of the Third World reveals to be a fake friendship that covers the antagonisms. Thus, although multiraciality is constantly represented in Messud’s oeuvre, the tension against the ‘others’ who are to be neocolonially subjugated in the postcolonial America is symbolically represented through Messud's ‘Wonderland’. Decoding the sociocultural behavior of women in the twenty-first century America through Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism, it can be concluded that a new form of feminine identity, that can be well labeled as 'agonistic feminine identity', is constructed in the twenty first century America due to traumatic events such as the 9/11. Hence, intolerance and revenge that is flooding between the two women of two different worlds is agonistically controlled through the construction of The Woman Upstairs. Messud's The Woman Upstairs as a post-9/11 craft makes use of transnational characters to emphasize the hidden bigotry and hypocrisy in the current age. The dominance of feminine figures in The Woman Upstairs highlights the significance of 'Agonistic feminine identity' in the twenty-first century America that reflects how the interactions among women are socio-politically flavored. Messud’s feminine setting in The Woman Upstairs sketches out Nora as a woman who constructs her life in accordance with the socio-cultural norms her mother and the society promote. Yet women’s friendship that bridges the sociocultural gap between women of the First World and women of the Third World reveals to be a fake friendship that covers the antagonisms. Thus, although multiraciality is constantly represented in Messud’s oeuvre, the tension against the ‘others’ who are to be neocolonially subjugated in the postcolonial America is symbolically represented through Messud's ‘Wonderland’. Decoding the sociocultural behavior of women in the twenty-first century America through Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism, it can be concluded that a new form of feminine identity, that can be well labeled as 'agonistic feminine identity', is constructed in the twenty first century America due to traumatic events such as the 9/11. Hence, intolerance and revenge that is flooding between the two women of two different worlds is agonistically controlled through the construction of The Woman Upstairs. (shrink)

Since 1997 a new, complete edition of all extant materials from Kierkegaard’s hand is being published by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen, under the name of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings, hereafter abbreviated SKS). From the very start of the project, the aim has been to publish a book as well as a digital version from the same base data, created by the researchers at the Centre. Apart from Kierkegaard’s texts, it comprises explanatory notes, text critical accounts, (...) and more, which are in the book version contained in the K-volumes (commentaries). (shrink)

Letters constitute words that constitute lines that constitute pages that constitute a text. As, however, the text appears, letters, lines etc. are interpreted together with several other signals important to the reader. Any other concrete rendering of the text might convey the same meaning of the text. We shall term the union set of such renderings the abstract intention with the text, and show that it is more comprehensive than any single rendering, including the one delivered by the author of (...) the text. The paper address the issue of how to encode and store a computer representation of a text whether it be the base of a printed copy of a book or an electronic version. (shrink)

Articolo in occasione del quindicesimo anniversario della morte di Carmelo Bene.

This volume is devoted to investigating the relationships and correspondences that hold between the poetry of Wallace Stevens and philosophy. Stevens used the aesthetically enhanced language of his poems to create inquiries into the nature of reality that parallel those conducted by philosophers. He also maintained poetry’s independence from philosophy. The first part of the volume contains articles that pursue various aspects of these parallels. Here, the authors explore the relations between Stevens’ poems and specific philosophical concepts or the thought (...) of individual philosophers. The articles contained in the second part narrow down the scope to the issues within the philosophy of language. This section concentrates on the role of metaphor and figurativeness in Stevens’ poetry. (shrink)

Critical edition, translation and commentary of an epigram addressed by Arias Montano to Hernando Díaz, from a copy probably made by Juan Moreno Ramírez. Diaz was also gifted with knives made by Lancero in Guadalajara.

Lesbian organizations have frequently cited the concept of a Lesbian Nation as an ideal community where women could be freed from the oppression of relationships with men. The term was used in speeches made by lesbian activists beginning in the 1970s. However, lesbian militant activities have increasingly merged with the overall gay civil rights movement, so that most activists have preferred to use the term Queer Nation to refer to the movement in general.

Do metaphorical sentences express facts or represent states of affairs in the world? Can a metaphorical statement tell us ‘what there is’? These questions raise the issue of whether metaphors can be used to make truth-claims; that is, whether metaphors can be regarded as assertions that can be evaluated as true or false. Some theorists on metaphor have argued for a negative answer to the above-mentioned questions. They have claimed, among others, that metaphorical utterances are non-descriptive uses of language (Blackburn (...) 1998); truth is not the constitutive aim of metaphors (Lamarque and Olsen 1994); metaphorical sentences do not have propositional contents (Davidson 1979; Cooper 1986; Rorty 1987, 1989; Lepore and Stone 2010, 2015); metaphorical utterances are neither assertions nor expressions of beliefs (Loewenberg 1973, 1975; Davies 1982; Davies 1984; Blackburn, 1984). I discuss a particular view, Metaphorical Expressivism, which exploits the relationship between truth, belief and assertion, and argues for the irrelevancy of truth to metaphors on the premise that metaphorical utterances do not count as assertions and that they do not count as the expression of beliefs. The denial of the truth-evaluability of metaphors on this view, I argue, is a product of an unmotivated tendency to see truth and meaning in terms of the portrayal of facts and a commitment to two untenable principles: literalism and representationalism. (shrink)

This article uses the thinking of Martin Heidegger and his reflections on what is divine and the Holy to make sense of how tragic literature speaks of God and the gods.

This article uses the thinking of Martin Heidegger and his reflections on what is divine and the Holy to make sense of how tragic literature speaks of God and the gods.

The engagement with Epicurus in the Epistulae morales is a multifaceted literary device essential to the fabric of that epistolary Bildungsroman. It characterizes a Letter Writer “Seneca” and contributes to the dramatic structure of the Epistulae morales as an introduction not just to Stoicism, but to philosophy itself. The Letter Writer develops into a serious philosopher and progresses from naïve endorsement to a more sophisticated account of Stoic thought. He draws increasingly sharper distinctions between his own views and Epicurean tenets. (...) There are two layers of reception: While the Letter Writer might be blissfully unaware of a theoretical problem, the author L. Annaeus understood Epicurus well enough to know exactly what he was doing when he cunningly manipulated Epicurean tenets and expressions in order to unfold an intellectual drama. (shrink)