One of the most typical features of modernity is the acceleration of experience, systematically ruled by the economic principle. In Benjamin's interpretation, Baudelaire's poetry identifies in that ...acceleration some very notable points: it is a powerful multiplier of the transience of the world; it is the domain of a movement which is paradoxically static and which sustains no change in social structures; and it represents a constitutive threat to poetry. With a radically antagonistic gesture, Baudelaire drafts various strategies to contrast modernity: to give it an accomplished form, which includes all its negativity; to represent authentically his impoverished degraded experience; to fight it with his own means, through poetry of impact and shock.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of literary realism both in contemporary debate and in aesthetic reflection of nineteenth Century. What I intend to show, in fact, is the ...possibility to exploit some conceptual tools developed during the last century in the context of German literary aesthetics in order to give an answer to a set of problems deeply bounded to the contemporary discussion. Therefore, I intend to present Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s notion of “literary realism” as a possible solution to some problematic refrains in the philosophical investigation of literature. To this aim, I’ll divide my argument in three steps: first of all, I’ll sketch out the basic lines of the historical debate about realism in novels; secondly, I’ll outline Adorno’s notion of realism; thirdly, I’ll try to show to what extent Adorno’s definition could provide an answer to recurring issues in current debates.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of literary realism both in contemporary debate and in aesthetic reflection of nineteenth Century. What I intend to show, in fact, is the ...possibility to exploit some conceptual tools developed during the last century in the context of German literary aesthetics in order to give an answer to a set of problems deeply bounded to the contemporary discussion. Therefore, I intend to present Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s notion of “literary realism” as a possible solution to some problematic refrains in the philosophical investigation of literature. To this aim, I’ll divide my argument in three steps: first of all, I’ll sketch out the basic lines of the historical debate about realism in novels; secondly, I’ll outline Adorno’s notion of realism; thirdly, I’ll try to show to what extent Adorno’s definition could provide an answer to recurring issues in current debates.
This volume critically discusses the role empathy plays in different processes of understanding. More precisely, it clarifies empathy’s role in interpersonal understanding and appreciating works of ...literature and art. The volume also includes a section on historical theories of empathy’s role in understanding. When it comes to understanding other persons, empathy is typically seen as a process that enables the empathizer to recognize a target person’s mental states, a process which is in turn seen as “understanding” this person. This volume, however, explores empathy’s role in understanding beyond mere mental state recognition. With contributions on processes of interpersonal understanding and understanding of literature and art, it provides readers with an overview over both differences and similarities regarding empathy’s epistemic role in two rather different areas. Since important roots of the debate about empathic understanding lie at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the historical section of the volume focusses specifically on this period. Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics and the history of philosophy, as well as in literary studies and art history.
The present paper focuses on a specific aspect of Michel Foucault’s interest in literature, addressing his study on the French poet and novelist Raymond Roussel. Published only few days before The ...Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), Death and the Labyrinth (1963) provides a philosophical reading of some Roussel’s writings, in a constant confrontation with the posthumous essay How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935) in which Roussel explains his peculiar process of composition. Here, I propose considering that Death and the Labyrinth offers not only a critical account on the relationship between philosophy and literature, but it also displays the significance of philosophy towards the study of literature. From this perspective, I will mainly focus on three themes – the death of the language; the repetition of the language; the duality of the language –, showing also that the first source of the Foucauldian further interest on the relationship between “words” and “things” has been Roussel’s oeuvre.
In the philosophical debate about literary interpretation, actual intentionalists claim, and anti‐intentionalists deny, that an acceptable interpretation of fictional literature must be constrained ...by the author's intentions. This paper argues that a close examination of the two most influential recent strands in this debate reveals a surprising convergence. Both sides (a) focus on literary works as they are, where work identity is determined in part by certain (successfully realized) categorial intentions concerning, for example, title, genre, and large‐scale instances of allusion, allegory, and irony, and (b) allow that works can acceptably be interpreted for unintended meanings—since an intentional act can, under a different description, exhibit unintended features. Insofar as both sides do this, they turn out to share the same interpretive policy concerning authorial intention. This suggests that philosophers should shift the interpretation debate away from issues of authorial intention and toward issues about the aims of interpretation.
When Philip Sidney defends poetry by defending the methods used by poets and lawyers alike, he relies on the traditional association between fiction and legal procedure--an association that begins ...with Aristotle. In this study Kathy Eden offers a new understanding of this tradition, from its origins in Aristotle's Poetics and De Anima, through its development in the psychological and rhetorical theory of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to its culmination in the literary theory of the Renaissance.
Originally published in 1986.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and the Art of Writing suggests something vital about the tension between philosophical discourses that cannot capture or be the full meaning of living a life in ...relation to wisdom, and lived philosophies that cannot do away with discourses to deepen a lived experience beyond them: that philosophy as “an embodied way of life” is a sub‐creation that emerges from the tension between them. This paper uses several different moments and ideas from Philosophy and the Art of Writing as points of departure for further inquiry. Some “memories,” repurposed, reorganized, and manipulated, take up these starting points to further the investigation. The present work was a spiritual exercise for the author and, one hopes, will be for the reader in what it means to practice philosophy as a way of life. By doing so, we may find more forgiveness and appreciation for our philosophical vocation that creates something more than what we say or are now.
This article analyses the digital literary criticism, which got rid of the obsession of academic Babylon in the field of literary criticism in the 1980s and revealed a more diverse field of voice, ...inspiring endless possibilities of variation in the transformative stage of criticism. The advent of the Internet has created a participatory field for literary criticism and a platform to weaken the distinction between identity and power. Equality disrupts the validity of authority and the structure of the knowledge circle, which is also the reason why digital literary criticism has a certain degree of carnivalesque traits. The authors believe that literary criticism in a digital context is no longer obsessed with the confusion of history and the uncertainty of time. While capturing the pulse of globalisation, it at the same time ardently embraces the value of desire endowed by consumer culture. The article points out that Chinese literary criticism in the new era is a product of the construction of multidimensional relations in a digital context, which sheds the shackles of historical context and rushes into the age of digitalisation. With the rapid flow of consumption, a very open, inclusive, and complex space of media discourse has emerged. The results of the study show that a group of numerous critics belonging to the postmodernist perspective is forming in the digital world. The authors conclude that in the confrontation between tradition and modernity, in the complex interweaving of elitist consciousness and mass consumption, in the struggle for discursive position between media and literature, digital literary criticism differs from traditional in terms of aesthetic standards, criticism style, criticism language and media platform, creating the macro future development of Chinese literary criticism with its independent attitude, revolutionary impulse and irresistible courage.
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