Alexander Lectures – serie

In this volume, based on the series of Alexander Lectures she delivered at the University of Toronto, Julia Kristeva explores the philosophical aspects of Hannah Arendt's work: her understanding of such concepts as language, self, body, political space, and life. Kristeva's aim is to clarify contradictions in Arendt's thought as well as correct misapprehensions about her political and philosophical views.The first two chapters describe how Arendt followed an original conception of human narrative, such that life, action, and even thought, are only human when they can be narrated and thus shared with other persons who, through the evocation of memory, complete the story and make history into a condensed sign, into a revelation of the 'who.' The third chapter concentrates on Arendt's work in relation to her twentieth-century contemporaries, especially Isak Dinesen, Brecht, Kafka, and Nathalie Sarraute. In the last two chapters, on the body and the Kantian concept of judgment, Kristeva offers a subtle critical exploration of Arendt's ignoring of the world of the unconscious opened up by psychoanalysis, an exploration that, paradoxically, reveals the political force of Arendt's acceptance of herself as woman and Jew.Kristeva's account of Arendt's 'philosophy of narrative' is clear, coherent, forceful, and often impassioned. Much has been written in North America about Arendt's political work, but little about her more philosophical endeavours. Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative makes a compelling case that Arendt may be the twentieth century's only true political philosopher.

These vigorous lectures deal with some of the many ways in which the question of structure in poetry (here synonymous with the whole range of artistic creation in words) can be discussed. Criticism has never been, Professor Clare argues, a single discipline, but a collection of more and less distinct conceptual "languages," within any one of which a literary problem takes on a special solution. The Alexander Lectures for 1952.

Professor Baker recounts and analyses the relations of the English Renaissance historians to other writers of their time and to the historians of later ages. Supported and enlivened with a wealth of quotation from the historians themselves, their critics and their colleagues, The Race of Time illuminates the problems of historiography in an age when academic freedom was always subservient to the national interest, to the sensitivity of rulers, to the prevalence of legends, and to the envy of contemporaries.

In the Alexander Lectures for 1965-66 at the University of Toronto, Dr. Frye describes the basis of the tragic vision as "being in time," in which death as "the essential event that gives shape and form to life ... defines the individual, and marks him off from the continuity of life that flows indefinitely between the past and the future."In Dr. Frye's view, three general types can be distinguished in Shakespearean tragedy, the tragedy of order, the tragedy of passion, and the tragedy of isolation, in all of which a pattern of "being in time" shapes the action. In the first type, of which Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet are examples, a strong ruler is killed, replaced by a rebel-figure, and avenged by a nemesis-figure; in the second, represented by Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida, authority is split and the hero is destroyed by a conflict between social and personal loyalties; and in the third, Othello, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, the central figure is cut off from his world, largely as a result of his failure to comprehend the dynamics of that world. What all these plays show us, Dr. Frye maintains, is "the impact of heroic energy on the human situation" with the result that the "heroic is normally destroyed ... and the human situation goes on surviving."Fools of Time will be welcomed not only by many scholars who are familiar with Dr. Frye's keen critical insight but also by undergraduates, graduates, high-school and university teachers who have long valued his work as a means toward a firmer grasp and deeper understanding of English literature.

Eve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between varying cultural demands. In one view, perhaps the dominant one, the only way to gain positive status is to fit appropriately into approved categories: appropriately beautiful, appropriately young, appropriately thin, appropriately successful. In another view, the view compellingly expressed by Carolyn Heilbrun, women must abandon the appropriate and seek out the liminel. The word limen means threshold. To be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, on the brink of leaving one condition or country or self to enter upon another. When recognized, liminality offers women freedom to be or become themselves.In Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold Carolyn Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have wrestled with their own betwixt and betweenness (in the process altering the face of literature, and the world): George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Gloria Steinem. She reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of these lives. Surprising explorations of the positions which launch women into uncertain ground extend these lectures outside the academic purview.Each year the Alexander lectureship invites a distinguished scholar to the University of Toronto to give a course of public lectures on the subject of English Literature. These four lectures from the 1997 series put Carolyn Heilbrun in a line of distinguished scholarly work with such previous lecturers as Walter Ong, Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye. But Heilbrun, within this distinguished genealogy, reworks the very notion of the line, creating a new pattern of writing and approaching literary culture, just as the women whose lives she examines have done. The reader will come out of this experience moved, refreshed, and inspired to create rather than take a position.

This volume contains the Alexander Lectures in University College, University of Toronto, for the session 1945-46, delivered by Samuel C. Chew, Professor of English Literature at Bryn Mawr College and author of Byron in England and The Crescent and the Rose. For a number of years Professor Chew has been engaged in the study of relation between poetry and the visual arts, especially in the English Renaissance. The Virtues Reconciled embodies his results in an important and more or less self-contained division of this general field. It deals with the allegorical representation, visual and verbal, of the four Virtues, Truth and Justice, Mercy and Peace.The first lecture, "The Friendship of the Arts," considers generally, but with abundant illustrative example, the nature and the relation of verbal and visual imagery. The second lecture, "The Parliament of Heaven," traces the history of the allegory of the Four Daughters of God (Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace), who enters into debate upon the Fall of Man and his future destiny. The problem is resolved, and the Virtues are reconciled, when the Son of God offers Himself in the Atonement. The third lecture examines more closely the various forms in which Truth and Justice are personified, both in art and literature; and the final lecture affords a similar treatment of Mercy and Peace.The argument is illustrated by eighteen plates from paintings, drawings, and title-pages. Many others are described in the text, together with the works of literature which present analogous ideas and images.Of equal value for the light which it throws on the literature of the past and on an aspect of the history of the visual arts, The Virtues Reconciled will also interest the general reader. For, as Professor Chew remarks, "by means of these images our forefathers sought to express their experiences of the changes and chances of this mortal life, and one cannot contemplate them without recognizing that these great commonplaces are still applicable to the human situation."

Coleridge is admired as a genius and derided as an opium addict and plagiarist. The aim here has been to examine his experiences, moods, thoughts, and reactions as a whole and their relation to poems such as Christabel, the Ancient Mariner, and the Dejection ode, and to his prose works, and also to look at many of his own statements made mainly in the privacy of his notebooks about his aims and purposes. The result of the new compound should alter some of the uninformed and prejudiced generalizations about Coleridge. The new picture is of a man and poet more human, more inquiring, more sceptical, whose strength and intellectual stature can fully be understood only against a background of suffering and loneliness; a critical, radical imagination is seen not only struggling to survive but to achieve creatively in the process.One of the world's pre-eminent Coleridge scholars, Kathleen Coburn brings a long association with and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's writings, both published and unpublished, to this sensitive study of a complex mind and personality.

In 1931, Sir William Craigie gave the Alexander Lectures in English at the University of Toronto entitled The Northern Element in English Literature with a focus on proving the existence of a Northern literary culture, comparing English literature with Northern literature, especially that of the Scottish and Scandinavians. The book is divided into four lectures.

The aim of the author, who has long been interested in the history of ideas, has been to give some illustrations of the ways in which at various periods English poetry has reflected current views of the human mind, with special reference to such topics as its place in the cosmos, its relations with the body, the connections between sense, passions, and reason, the problem of soul and its possible survival after death. The subject matter is important, for many of the more self-conscious writers have been profoundly affected by their assumptions about the senses and passions, the reason and the imagination.The author traces four main historical phases in each of which different aspects and potentialities of the mind have been stressed. Chapter I discusses the microcosmic conception of man inherited from the Middle Ages and traces its influence in some allegorical and didactic verse, lyric and epic. Chapter II considers the development of Shakespeare’s attitude to the mind and human character. Chapter III turns to some effects (between Dryden and Wordsworth) of the seventeenth-century revolution in philosophy and science, including the search for clarity and order, the Augustan interest in reason and the passions, and the rise of the association of psychology. Chapter IV shows how the Romantic poets made use of associations and intuitions, and discusses the Victorian poets’ hopes and fears about immortality in relation to the advance of science. The last chapter traces the influence of the philosophy of the “moment” from the aesthetes to T.S. Eliot, and distinguishes the effects of some twentieth-century psychologies in modern poetry.Poets, of course, have rarely been systematic philosophers or psychologists; they have usually picked out and applied imaginatively only a few notions from contemporary thought. Consequently this study does not attempt to set the history of English poetry squarely against the history of philosophy. Rather, characteristic topics and writers have been selected and the discussion of them will be seen to throw light on some major imaginative preoccupations of each age. The student of English poetry and the history of ideas will find valuable comments on the major writers from Chaucer and Spenser down through Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and on a variety of modern poets such as Bridges, Eliot, Sitwell, Auden, and Graces.Alexander Lecture Series.

The appearance of a fourth printing of The Renaissance and English Humanism indicated the scholarly success this book has enjoyed for more than a decade. As a brief yet thoughtful and eloquent evaluation of the influence of the Christian humanistic tradition upon our culture it has not been surpassed. The study is divided into four parts: in the first, Professor Bush discusses modern theories of the Renaissance; in the second and third, the character of classical humanism on the Continent and in England; and in the fourth, the place of Milton in the humanistic tradition."Douglas Bush has shown an unusual awareness," wrote Wallace K. Ferguson, "of the historiographical evolution of the Renaissance, and has taken his stand with rare explicitness on the side of those who find the Renaissance filled with mediaeval traditions." Professor Bush sees the dominant ideal of the English Renaissance as rational and religious order, rather than rebellious individualism, and his view has provided an important clue to the English literature and thought of the 16th and the earlier 17th century.

In this volume, Professor Bronson is primarily interested in the three worlds which appear in Chaucer's poetry: the dream world; the world of the mundane existence and waking observation; and the world of imagined life through reading. A study of these worlds raises questions about the kind of truth which resides in each, the literary values which can be extracted from them, their essentail relation to one another, and the perennial problem of appearance and reality.Professor Bronson is also concerned with the general critical approach to Chaucer's writings. He feels that many recent Chaucerian scholars have been misled by their application of critical disciplines nourished on the metaphysical poets to a poet who deliberately practised a style capable of being followed by a moderately attentive ear. The fact that Chaucer's poetry was composed for oral delivery has received no more than lip service from critics; yet Chaucer's relation to his audience is obviously of the greatest importance in understanding his poems. It behooves us, therefore, to clarify our thoughts as to the kind of techniques we may fittingly apply. Professor Bronson suggests that a less sophisticated way of looking at the subject might yield better results.Professor Bronson's book is a form of introduction to this new view of Chaucer; it is not a complete guide but an explanatory visit to each sphere of Chaucer's world, skilfully evocative of the people of the dream legends, the pilgrimage, the literary heroes and heroines of the Middle Ages, whom Chaucer brought into his poetry.This book is decorated with drawings in the manner of woodcuts taken from the three worlds of Chaucer's poetry.The Alexander Lectures for 1958-59.

The Alexander Lectures for 1949-50. In his Preface, Professor Brown says, "Isolating a single element or group of elements in the novel, and considering it in unreal separation from all the other elements which it actually fuses, is artificial, but so is all criticism. The artificiality is justified if when one turns back from the criticism to the novels these appear more intelligible and more delightful. That is the test." Applying the test to Dr. Brown's present work, the method is more than justified by the results. they are titled: "Phrase, Character, Incident," "Expanding Symbols," "Interweaving Themes," and "Rhythm in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India."