SUNY series, The Margins of Literature – serie

Based on Nietzsche's critique of religion and culture, and engaging the contemporary offshoots of that critique, this book assesses the myths of origins that have been used to articulate the fundamental attitude toward the relationship between shame and beauty. In reconsidering some of the myths upon which the West is based, from Hesiod and Greek mythology to Plato and the Bible, Hans pursues the ways in which we have habitually separated shame and beauty in order to create the grounds that would provide us with the authority for our lives we think we need. By juxtaposing Socrates' repression of violence in The Republic and Nietzsche's conception of the overman, the author revises the network of relations that are associated with the religious, the aesthetic, and the political, asserting that the religious derives from the aesthetic rather than the other way around, and establishing a necessary connection between the political and the aesthetic.Hans aims to raise yet again the questions embodied in Nietzsche's attempt to prompt humans to face the true status of their actions in the world: are we finally able to address our shame without immediately projecting it onto another or repressing it? If so, what changes might we see in the psychological, social, and political worlds we would create out of such an acknowledgment? What value is to be found in accepting the uneasy relationship between shame and beauty upon which our lives rest? While The Origins of the Gods provides no definitive answers to such questions simply because none are possible, it makes use of such queries in order to reassert the great importance of Nietzsche's affirmation of the value of the world as it is. It argues that this affirmation has something crucial to offer if we are willing to forgo an authorized existence and confront the beauty and shame from which our lives are inevitably constituted.

Borrowed Lives is a novel. It is an enactment of issues of literary philosophy and criticism, including the question of whether there can be originality, coherence, and authenticity in life and art. It deepens William Blake's point - Make your own myth or else be enslaved by another man's - by asking whether one's own myth isn't also another man's myth and by portraying the terrible consequences of taking one's own myth literally.

This book is both an introductory overview of The Cantos and a detailed analysis advancing the knowledge of even the most sophisticated specialist. Sicari's analysis gives a clear orientation to the often bewildering but ultimately rewarding world of this difficult epic poem and shows that beneath the surface of the poem is the classical figure of the epic wanderer whose journey provides the "plot" of the poem.Non-specialists will appreciate Sicari's synthesis of a wide range of material. Sicari explores how Dante and the epic tradition informs The Cantos; those interested in the epic should find Sicari's study an important contribution to the field. Those studying modernism in general will see in Sicari's definition of the modern epic useful ways to study the other great achievements of high modernism, especially those of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce. Those interested in the relation between literature and politics will find this book especially informative, for Sicari is one of the few critics on Pound who does not ignore Pound's politics, or simply castigate him for the unfortunate views he adopts and advocates. The analysis of Pound's fascism is a sub-theme that sheds new light on how politics enters a great modernist poem and affects its shape and intention.

This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life by providing a new stance for the self. Grounding its argument in recent theories of play and in a historical analysis that sees the seventeenth century as a point of crisis in the formation of the western self, the author demonstrates how play helped mediate this crisis and how central texts of the period enact this mediation.

Through the Lens of the Reader is a sequence of ten essays exploring European narrative from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It covers a wide spectrum of authors ranging from Goethe through Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, George Eliot, Henry James to Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Kafka. The essays are unified by a particular mode of reading, in which the lens of the reader becomes the filter through which texts are constructed in accordance with the signals emitted by their narrational and linguistic strategies.

Reading Old Friends includes essays, reviews, and poems on poetics. Matthias, who has spent much time in England, concentrates on British poetry ranging from late modernist figures such as David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to contemporaries such as Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Michael Hamburger, and John Fuller. He also seeks to establish, or re-establish, meaningful trans-Atlantic connections between Wendell Berry and Jeremy Hooker, for example, or between Robert Duncan and David Jones. Other, more generally acknowledged figures, are also discussed, including Wordsworth, Pope, Crabbe, Constable, Turner, Britten, Tippet, Lowell, Auden, and Berryman. The book also contains three poems on poetics that engage many of the theoretical issues left implicit in most of the essays.

This book explores the relationship between authority and context and attempts to establish the ways in which authority is a function of a particular agent or set of agents, and the degree to which it is a product of a context rather than an agent. The work is not a sociological or psychological study but rather a literary/philosophical speculation into the roots of our conceptions of authority. It declares all authority to be aesthetic in nature and is based on an analysis of several key texts from various different cultural backgrounds: Foucault, Weber, Nietzsche, Confucius, and Homer.

By using the concept of play as a common denominator, this book outlines ways in which literary creativity can act as a free, open, and speculatively unburdened version of religious concerns. Contributors include Louis Dupré, Arthur Quinn, Sanford Budick, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Judah Goldin, and Jean-Michel Heimonet.

This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography since the eighteenth century. Discussing female literary figures including Hall, Wharton, Nin, "Reage," Jong, and Shulman; such men as Cleland, Sade, Beardsley, Lawrence, Joyce, and Miller; and film makers such as Brakhage, Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Bertolucci, Oshima, and Wertmuller; Michelson analyzes both the use of aesthetic pornography and the philosophical, cultural, and legal implications of its use. He proposes that realizing the obscene -in the sense of speaking the unspeakable- is the principle aesthetic function of pornography.

A philosophy professor's intellectual life unravels into a transformative journey that bridges Western thought and tantric Buddhism, blurring the line between lived experience and philosophical inquiry.Michael Evers, a philosophy professor steeped in Western thought and quiet indulgence, finds himself drawn into a series of strange, provocative, and transformative encounters. As his path unfolds, the boundaries between scholarship and experience dissolve, leading him toward a radically different way of seeing—one shaped by the paradoxes and disciplines of tantric Buddhism.Blending vivid narrative with profound philosophical inquiry, The Arimaspian Eye is not a conventional novel. It is an exploration—of consciousness, of culture, and of the uneasy dialogue between East and West. Through episodes that are by turns playful, unsettling, and illuminating, David L. Hall crafts a work that challenges the limits of fiction itself.At once a novel of ideas, an academic satire, and a spiritual odyssey, this is a book for readers willing to venture beyond plot into deeper terrain—where thought becomes action, and understanding demands transformation.

This book is a study of the relation between cognitive linguistics and literary theory. Theory of literary interpretation is reinterpreted in terms of current debate in cognitive science. While research in the humanities and social sciences is reasonably concerned with charting the power of culture to structure and constrain, Spolsky suggests that it is worthwhile to investigate the role of biological materialism as co-legislator of human life and understanding. The inevitable slippage we have come to acknowledge between words and the world has at least an analogue, and presumably also a source, in the workings of the human brain.

Philosophy and literary theory have devoted a great deal of their analysis to the problem of the origin and modalities of argumentation, but there has been an almost total lack of interest in the question of its procedural limits. Manners of Interpretation is an essay on ways of ending interpretations in literary studies as well as on patterns of controversy and consensus in the humanities. Tamen examines two major families of indisputable arguments in post-Enlightenment literary criticism and addresses the question of how one recognizes the proper time to use a given argument, especially and specifically an indisputable argument. The former aim leads to a tentative history of the constitution of literary theory as a set of identifiable ways of using arguments. The latter, meanwhile, points to a theory of argument and controversy and to a contribution to the discussion of human activities that, in spite of not being teachable, are nevertheless learnable. Such a theory seems to be particularly relevant both to the study of the interpretive dimension of literary criticism as it is now practiced and also to the knowledge and description of an area of the humanities that has often been neglected.

This is the first sustained, critical examination of the work of Edward Hopper, a major twentieth-century American painter. It is a sequence of meditations on his painting "A Woman in the Sun." Each meditation, informed by Derrida's conception of the supplement, is about both the painting and about the nature of the reading process.

Complementing recent feminist studies of female self-representation, this book examines the dynamics of masculine self-representation in nineteenth-century British literature. Arguing that the category "autobiography" was a product of nineteenth-century individualism, the author analyzes the dependence of the nineteenth-century masculine subject on autonomy or self-naming as the prerequisite for the composition of a life history. The masculine autobiographer achieves this autonomy by using a feminized other as a metaphorical mirror for the self.The feminized other in these texts represents the social cost of masculine autobiography. Authors from Wordsworth to Arnold, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse, use female lovers and family members as symbols for the community with which they feel they have lost contact. In the theoretical introduction, the author argues that these texts actually privilege the autonomous self over the images of community they ostensibly value, creating in the process a self-enclosed and self-referential "community of one."

This is an American novel of formed chaos playfully enacting the centrality of language in late twentieth-century art and life through the voices of two women steeped in Western traditions, one telling the story of her restoration of an ante-bellum house on the Florida Gulf Coast, the other faithfully recording it but running culturally wild in the process.In both literal and extended senses, The Restorationist is a mystery, with attendant bafflements, horrors, attempts to get to the bottom of things: mayhem and murder; artifices of trivialization by media, our technological doubles; arrangements of power in communities and in texts; signs and selves.

An exploration of language, knowledge, and evolution that unifies philosophy, science, and paradox into a single transformative vision of reality.What if the deepest problems of philosophy—language, mind, time, evolution, and reality itself—were not separate puzzles, but expressions of a single underlying structure?In Knowledge, Evolution and Paradox, Koen DePryck advances a bold and integrative framework that challenges the limits of postmodern skepticism and fragmented academic discourse. Drawing on insights from iterative, chaotic, and probabilistic processes in nature and computation, DePryck proposes a new way to understand how meaning, knowledge, and reality co-emerge through language.At its core, this work confronts enduring philosophical tensions:How can multiple disciplinary "worlds" belong to one world?How do language-games relate across apparent incommensurability?What is the role of paradox and self-reference in thought and reality?And how can mind and consciousness be understood as embodied, evolving phenomena?DePryck develops an ambitious interdisciplinary synthesis that bridges the sciences and humanities, offering not only a critique of postmodern limits but a constructive alternative grounded in evolutionary and systemic thinking.

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented social restructuring that disrupted traditional notions of people and place, country and city, private and public spheres. The break with the old order and the entry into the industrial age was most dramatically played out in France, with the growth of a new urban middle class under the July monarchy and the rebuilding of Paris by Haussmann under the Second Empire. The personal, immediate, and radical effects of these changes produced an altered conception of the meaning of home and a homeland.Focusing primarily on mid-nineteenth-century France, these essays, by noted literary critics, offer fascinating new accounts of the relationship between the social history of home and homelessness and the imaginative expressions of the age. This probing interdisciplinary approach, combining theoretical sophistication with historical detail, addresses the fundamental importance of class and gender to the modern history of homelessness. Its provocative readings of well-known texts provide a model of cultural studies at its best and most serious.

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented social restructuring that disrupted traditional notions of people and place, country and city, private and public spheres. The break with the old order and the entry into the industrial age was most dramatically played out in France, with the growth of a new urban middle class under the July monarchy and the rebuilding of Paris by Haussmann under the Second Empire. The personal, immediate, and radical effects of these changes produced an altered conception of the meaning of home and a homeland.Focusing primarily on mid-nineteenth-century France, these essays, by noted literary critics, offer fascinating new accounts of the relationship between the social history of home and homelessness and the imaginative expressions of the age. This probing interdisciplinary approach, combining theoretical sophistication with historical detail, addresses the fundamental importance of class and gender to the modern history of homelessness. Its provocative readings of well-known texts provide a model of cultural studies at its best and most serious.

Journey into the West’s fascination with the East in The Exotic, where scholarship, philosophy, and ideology collide in a dazzling quest for understanding.What does it mean to encounter the "Other"? How have Western scholars, writers, and philosophers understood—or misunderstood—the rich traditions of India?In The Exotic, Dorothy M. Figueira offers a masterful exploration of the West's engagement with Sanskrit studies, tracing the complex intersections of culture, ideology, and imagination from the nineteenth century to today. From German, French, and English scholarship to the tangled legacies of Indo-Germanism and National Socialism, Figueira uncovers how exoticism has served both as a source of inspiration and a lens of distortion.With unparalleled expertise in Sanskrit, Indian intellectual history, and European thought, Figueira illuminates the West's appropriation—and misappropriation—of Eastern ideas. The result is a rich, nuanced portrait of contrasting cultural discourses, revealing both the beauty and the perils of intellectual fascination with the "exotic."

This book is O'Rourke's first volume of nonfiction since his 1972 The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, which Garry Wills hailed as "a clinical x-ray of our society's condition." That book prompted Herbert Mitgang to name O'Rourke "one of the finest writers of his generation." Signs of the Literary Times provides new evidence for that assessment. It brings together O'Rourke's unique mixture of literary, political, and cultural criticism published periodically during the last twenty-two years. The collection ranges from autobiographical essays describing his generation's literary evolution, to articles on free speech issues, such as nude dancing and the Bush-era NEA controversies, as well as book reviews that provide a fresh and largely uncharted critical map of the period. O'Rourke is not only interested in genre bending and expansion, but in persevering during this age of academic specialization as, in his phrase, "a person of letters."In the two decades between his first work of nonfiction and this volume, O'Rourke has published three highly acclaimed novels, The Meekness of Isaac (1974), Idle Hands (1981), and Criminal Tendencies (1987). Of the last, The Virginia Quarterly Review wrote, "Of all the novelists paraded in recent years by publishers as natural successors to Graham Greene, this one comes the closest. A thoroughly entertaining literary event."Signs of the Literary Times is not so much a compendium of diverse pieces on various subjects, as it is a cogent and continuing x-ray of our society's condition.

The Poetics of Common Knowledge focuses on Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and the information theorists, on the one hand, and the poets of the American avant-garde, on the other. This book is a call literally for a new poetry, a new making, that manifests the possibility for sense-making in a postmodern condition without universals or absolutes. In such a poetry, fragmentation bespeaks not brokenness but the richness of the world apprehended without the habits of recognition.

At a time when the study of literature and the literary canon itself are once again the focus of intense debate, Building a Profession offers a retrospective on the early days of Comparative Literature in the United States and on its role in defining literary scholarship in the heady decades following the end of the second World War. Composed of autobiographical sketches by a number of eminent comparatists, chiefly of the generation that has either recently retired or is approaching retirement, it anchors the intellectual and scholarly aspirations of the post-War period, through the personal narratives of those who shared in them and promoted them, in the experience of war, uprooting, racial and religious intolerance or persecution, and a deep longing for peaceful exchange and international understanding. It is both a contribution to the history of literary study in the United States and a record of changes that have taken place in the culture of this country since World War II.

The Golden Mean reappraises the relationship among the three forms of good that exist in modern Western thought: the good of aesthetic beauty and performance, the good of right and wrong, and the forces of social resentment that shape the public debate about what is appropriate to society's needs.The book explores how the good found in aesthetics is linked to the good found in the ethical codes that govern people's lives. These "goods" interact with the sense of the community expressed in society's envy of those exemplary few who possess the powers of the aesthetic, even as they too must subscribe to the same strictures by which ordinary people live. The book also demonstrates how the concept of a middle path, a straight and narrow way, or a "golden mean" develops to provide a measure by which people can make sense out of these seemingly disparate phenomena.The Golden Mean argues that our current dilemmas both inside and outside the university should prompt us to see more clearly how the aesthetic and the ethical are intrinsically related. We need to reassess their relationship to the future of our ways of thinking and the development of our communities.

Rethinks of science through Nietzsche's philosophy, revealing knowledge as an aesthetic, life-driven act shaped by interpretation rather than absolute truth.What is the role of science when its claims to truth are no longer self-evident? In Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, Babette Babich offers a bold and provocative rethinking of modern scientific rationality through the philosophical lens of Friedrich Nietzsche.Rather than treating science as a self-justifying system of objective truths, Babich argues that it must be understood as an interpretive, aesthetic, and ultimately life-bound practice—one shaped by style, physiology, and cultural values. Drawing on Nietzsche's critique of truth, morality, and metaphysics, she reframes scientific knowledge as a perspectival achievement rooted in the conditions of life itself.Across seven richly argued chapters, Babich develops a sustained engagement with questions at the heart of contemporary philosophy of science: What counts as validity? Can objectivity be separated from interpretation? And what happens when science is viewed not as the final arbiter of truth, but as one expression of human creativity?Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science challenges readers to rethink the foundations of knowledge, placing science in dialogue with art, aesthetics, and the lived conditions of experience. The result is a powerful reconsideration of philosophy’s task in an age of epistemic uncertainty.

Rethinks of science through Nietzsche's philosophy, revealing knowledge as an aesthetic, life-driven act shaped by interpretation rather than absolute truth.What is the role of science when its claims to truth are no longer self-evident? In Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, Babette Babich offers a bold and provocative rethinking of modern scientific rationality through the philosophical lens of Friedrich Nietzsche.Rather than treating science as a self-justifying system of objective truths, Babich argues that it must be understood as an interpretive, aesthetic, and ultimately life-bound practice—one shaped by style, physiology, and cultural values. Drawing on Nietzsche's critique of truth, morality, and metaphysics, she reframes scientific knowledge as a perspectival achievement rooted in the conditions of life itself.Across seven richly argued chapters, Babich develops a sustained engagement with questions at the heart of contemporary philosophy of science: What counts as validity? Can objectivity be separated from interpretation? And what happens when science is viewed not as the final arbiter of truth, but as one expression of human creativity?Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science challenges readers to rethink the foundations of knowledge, placing science in dialogue with art, aesthetics, and the lived conditions of experience. The result is a powerful reconsideration of philosophy’s task in an age of epistemic uncertainty.

This book surveys selected modern theories of myth from philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis to demonstrate a common commitment to a dualistic ontology and/or epistemology. With help from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michael Polanyi, the author proposes a new theory of myth which goes beyond these dualisms. It argues that although the Enlightenment sought to banish myth, it was itself animated by myths which it could neither recognize nor accredit. Moreover, it argues that myth is a primordial, articulate grasp of the life-world and is essential for providing a fundamental orientation to all human activities, including theorizing. The myths of Timaeus and Genesis are shown tacitly to shape modernity's most sophisticated theories in science and philosophy, including the criteria for truth.

This book surveys selected modern theories of myth from philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis to demonstrate a common commitment to a dualistic ontology and/or epistemology. With help from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michael Polanyi, the author proposes a new theory of myth which goes beyond these dualisms. It argues that although the Enlightenment sought to banish myth, it was itself animated by myths which it could neither recognize nor accredit. Moreover, it argues that myth is a primordial, articulate grasp of the life-world and is essential for providing a fundamental orientation to all human activities, including theorizing. The myths of Timaeus and Genesis are shown tacitly to shape modernity's most sophisticated theories in science and philosophy, including the criteria for truth.

This book shows how writers like James Joyce, James Merrill, and Doris Lessing; scientists like Gregory Bateson, Ilya Prigogine, and David Bohm; and theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Serres forecasted and initiated a shift away from modernist conceptions of the world as a machine; the self as an isolated, enclosed principle, and representation as a reductive survey of the world and the self.The focus of this book is the "chaosmos" (a Joycean coinage) apparent within the atom and also within analogous "nuclear" sites such as the self, the word, the organism, and the world. By "chaosmos," Kuberski intends a unitary and yet untotalized-a chiasmic-concept of the world as a field of inevitable and intermittent interference and convergence, a multi-leveled complexity from which emerge organisms, languages, and selves. In exploring and mapping chaosmos, Kuberski emphasizes significant convergences of literary and philosophic, deconstructive and organistic, Eastern and Western, and scientific and humanistic points of view.

This book shows how writers like James Joyce, James Merrill, and Doris Lessing; scientists like Gregory Bateson, Ilya Prigogine, and David Bohm; and theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Serres forecasted and initiated a shift away from modernist conceptions of the world as a machine; the self as an isolated, enclosed principle, and representation as a reductive survey of the world and the self.The focus of this book is the "chaosmos" (a Joycean coinage) apparent within the atom and also within analogous "nuclear" sites such as the self, the word, the organism, and the world. By "chaosmos," Kuberski intends a unitary and yet untotalized-a chiasmic-concept of the world as a field of inevitable and intermittent interference and convergence, a multi-leveled complexity from which emerge organisms, languages, and selves. In exploring and mapping chaosmos, Kuberski emphasizes significant convergences of literary and philosophic, deconstructive and organistic, Eastern and Western, and scientific and humanistic points of view.