The Semiotics of the Foreseen: Modes of Narrative Intelligibility in (Contemporary) Fiction

Reviewed by: What's the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice Kent Puckett (bio) What's the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice, by Kerry McSweeney; pp. 177. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, $45.00. Kerry McSweeney's What's the Import? offers a methodological alternative to what he sees as a problematic "transformation of literary studies over the past three decades" (3). Where literary critics tend to rely on "theory-based interpretive discourse" or "cultural studies contextualization" (3, 5), McSweeney argues for what he calls aesthetic criticism. Claiming that recent discussion of nineteenth-century poetry restricts itself to "cognitive" and "hermeneutic" styles of reading, McSweeney draws on philosophical aesthetics (notably the work of Jerrold Levinson) to go not against but beyond interpretation and to understand the poem as an object demanding a response that is simultaneously affective, perceptual, and cognitive. In readings of poems by William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and others, McSweeney models what he sees as the critic's responsibility: to take the individual poem on its own terms. McSweeney surveys a range of critical approaches (from New Criticism to New Historicism) to show that the sense that poetry must be made to mean something has obscured what poems do and what poetry as a special activity is good for: at its best, poetry offers an aesthetic resolution of what remains "unresolved at the level of meaning" (148). It is this play between what, following Edgar Allan Poe, he calls the "indefinitiveness of meaning" and the "definitiveness of effect" that characterizes good poetry (47). Poetry succeeds where it gives expression to what must remain unsayable: the endlessly complicated mix of affective, ethical, and sensory experiences that is our [End Page 192] relation to the world. The critical attention that McSweeney takes as appropriate to this idea of the poem might be best described using a phrase that he uses in relation to Michael Field: "hard looking" (33). Where theoretical, political, and interpretive preconceptions distort the reader's view of the poem, "hard looking"—which we might take as an implicit answer to close reading—allows the aesthetic critic to feel or, to use McSweeney's term, "to perform" the particularity of the poem at hand. As useful as this sense of the poem as aesthetic object is, the tilt of McSweeney's argument leads him to rush through some issues. Is it simply the case that "contemporary critical practice" in general fails to attend to the aesthetic particulars of nineteenth-century poetry? To think so, it seems to me, is to overlook a number of critics who work self-consciously between social life and aesthetic form (I'm thinking, for instance, of work by Isobel Armstrong, Yopie Prins, Marjorie Levinson, Caroline Levine, and Herbert Tucker). Also, if it is the goal of the aesthetic critic to attend to the tension between formal resolution and interpretive irresolution, why not look to variously inflected theoretical work in poetics that similarly troubles our sense of poetry's ends? I wonder what McSweeney would do, for instance, with Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem (1999), Nicolas Abraham's Rhythms (1995), or Susan Stewart's Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002). McSweeney sometimes seems, in other words, to go too far in leveling the unruly field of poetics in particular and contemporary critical practice in general. If, however, his view of the field can seem restrictive, it allows McSweeney to engage in a feisty evaluative mode that is increasingly rare in academic writing. He writes that one critic deals in "broad-brush generalizations" (4), another "obliterates" a poem that he reads (6), and another is "desensitized . . . to the musical suggestiveness" of a particular poem (25). Critics are, in McSweeney's view, often dead wrong about what they read. This willingness to evaluate is applied equally to the poems with which he deals. One poem by Field is "an embarrassing anomaly" (35). J. Stanyan Bigg's "An Irish Picture" (1862) is "an essentially flawed artwork" (72). And though the ending of Walt Whitman's "The Sleepers" (1855; 1881) "is a...

Reviewed by: What’s the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice Michael Epp Kerry McSweeney. What’s the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. $75.00. The bold “aim of this book is to help restore a balance to the critical study of nineteenth-century poetry” (7) through new readings of familiar nineteenth-century poems that stress the aesthetic or “intrinsic” qualities of poetry. This form of reading is intended to point up problems with “contemporary critical practice” that focus too much on interpretations of meaning and not enough on formal qualities that determine reading experience. This accessibly written book, of course, cannot possibly achieve this aim, in the first case because it is unlikely that any single book could accomplish this kind of revolution in literary critical practice. It cannot achieve this aim in the second case because of the lack of rigour that characterizes its engagement with the discourse it seeks to alter and that sometimes characterizes its readings of the poetry itself. The strength of this book is its original, close readings of familiar nineteenth-century poems that stress the aesthetic experience of reading them. Although the terminology that drives the readings is unnecessarily vague (“resonant,” “flawed,” “important,” and “better” are characteristic examples), McSweeney’s meaning is generally clear to anyone familiar with this blend of new criticism and generalized artistic evaluation. Readings of Dickinson, Hopkins, Hardy, Whitman, and Browning cover writing from the entire century and are not limited to a narrow national focus. One of the most intriguing readings argues against standard interpretations by claiming that the ending of Whitman’s “The Sleepers” “is both an aesthetic and ethical flaw that makes it idle to speak of the poem as a masterpiece” (73). McSweeney argues that, unlike dreams, the poem ends with a resolution and with a “saving message” that is written “at considerable qualitative cost to the poem” (83). The book also includes critiques of lesser known poems, such as “An Irish Picture” by J. Stanyan Bigg. The poem’s reliance [End Page 259] on conventions and stereotypes, it is argued, are ethical flaws; McSweeney takes this as an opportunity to question if ethical flaws are the same as aesthetic flaws. The point of all of his close readings is to provide an object lesson in the value of the particular kind of critical-aesthetic reading McSweeney practises. The weaknesses of the book, unfortunately, undercut the value of these readings. For instance, one would expect from a book that intends to critique contemporary critical practice a detailed history of that practice. But there is no sustained—or even minimal—account of the contributions or purposes of the work of major schools such as poststructuralism, feminism, queer studies, Marxist dialectical historicism, or any others. There is virtually no mention of the most influential thinkers, such as Derrida, Bourdieu, Jameson, Kristeva, D.F. McKenzie, and Butler, which would have balanced the book’s general focus on canonical poetry. The bogeyman of “cultural studies” is raised, or so it seems to me, only as a shadowy spectre of those things inscrutable people do in what used to be the comfortable, genteel halls of gentlemanly literary discussion. The intriguing and even exciting argument that “interpretation of meaning” is too dominant in literary criticism motivated much of my reading of the book, but by the end there was no substantial engagement with the problems of this dominance and no articulation of the real purposes behind it. More strikingly, in a book that is meant to propose an aesthetic turn in literary criticism, there is no sustained engagement with the concept of the aesthetic. Certainly at least a chapter should have been devoted to explaining the decline of aesthetic readings in literary criticism and to martialing the significant number of allies McSweeney could call on to make his case (there was, for instance, a significant turn to aesthetics in rhetoric in the 1990s). At least Gerald Graff’s argument in Professing Literature should have been engaged to explain the institutional history of the shift McSweeney counters, and most certainly Bourdieus arguments in Distinction and The Field of Cultural...

Things just don’t make sense the way we’re told they used to — if, in fact, they make any sense at all — and they certainly don’t in postmodern fiction. But what does it mean ‘not to make sense? Whatever other implications the expression might enjoy, it most certainly means that the categories and concepts in terms of which we attempt to structure and grasp the constitutive moments of our experience are inadequate to the task. In other words, incomprehensibility is the unhappy product of the incommensurability of the structure of our understanding and the world in which we live: our traditional categories no longer apply. If this is correct, we might expect to find some trace of this incommensurability reflected in postmodern fiction, one defining characteristic of which is precisely the ultimate incomprehensibility of the contemporary world. In this paper, I argue that this trace is already to be discerned in what I refer to as ‘early postmodern fiction’, much of which explores new manners in which to depict the spatio-temporal dimensions of human existence, our ‘place in time’. I suggest that the new ways of depicting human temporality go hand in hand with the depiction of both the world and human existence as ultimately meaningless, and I locate the source of this meaninglessness in the inapplicability of the traditional, ‘modern’ categorial structure of our understanding to the contemporary world. I argue that the mystery of meaning which is our inheritance from Martin Heidegger has found its home in contemporary fiction, where we find human temporality depicted in a startlingly new manner, a manner that reflects the impossibility of the application of categories to the world, and hence the impossibility of discovering any ultimate meaning either in that world itself or in human existence within that world. In concluding, after taking a quick look at the traditional literary treatment of the theme of immortality, I raise a question regarding the manner in which this theme, mutatis mutandis, is dealt with in postmodern fiction — a question that is intended to provoke further questions about both the nature of human being and the hermeneutical dimension of the experience of the postmodern literary work of art.

The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction Paul Dawson (bio) I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fiction: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly outmoded omniscient narrator. In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-knowing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive commentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world. The novelists I'm thinking of include Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, David Lodge, Adam Thirlwell, Michel Faber, and Nicola Barker in the UK; and Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody, and John Updike in the US. In this paper I want to consider why so many contemporary writers have turned to omniscient narration, given the aesthetic prejudice against this narrative voice which has prevailed for at least a century. For instance, in 2004 Eugene Goodheart pointed out that: "In the age of perspectivism, in which all claims to authority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patronized when he is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when he appears in contemporary work" (1). How are we to evaluate novels which employ an ostensibly redundant nineteenth century form in the twenty-first century? Are they conservative and nostalgic [End Page 143] by virtue of their form, or are they experimental and contemporary in their use of this form? This paradox is captured with ironic pithiness in the last paragraph of David Lodge's 2002 novel, Thinks: "In the first year of the new millennium Helen published a novel which one reviewer described as 'so old-fashioned in form as to be almost experimental'. It was written in the third person, past tense, with an omniscient and sometimes intrusive narrator" (340). We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that modernist and postmodernist fiction throughout the twentieth century can be characterised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omniscient narration. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in fact represents a further development and refinement of some of the technical experiments of postmodern fiction. I want to further argue that the reworking of omniscience in contemporary fiction can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades. Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself. According to Gérard Genette, in Narrative Discourse, the paradox of poetics is that "there are no objects except particular ones and no science except of the general" (23). Existing theoretical accounts of omniscient narration derive largely from the study of classic nineteenth century novels. While narrative theory acknowledges historical shifts in fashion, it operates with a synchronic understanding of omniscient narration as a static element of narrative, produced by the structural relationship between focalization and voice. A study of contemporary fiction will enable us to approach the category of omniscient narration as a mutable and historically contingent practice of novelistic craft sensitive to historical and cultural contexts. The Debate About Omniscience It is a fascinating historical coincidence, I think, that a theoretical debate about omniscience has emerged in the first decade of the new millennium, at roughly the same time that a revival of omniscient narration has reached a critical mass in contemporary fiction. A dramatization of this debate would see Nicholas Royle and Jonathan Culler lined up for a concerted new millennium attack on literary omniscience, and Barbara K. Olson and Meir Sternberg carrying out a staunch rearguard defence.1 And yet, so far, besides terminological wranglings and abstract theorizing, the debate has not led beyond re-examinations of nineteenth century fiction, such as William Nelles...

Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.

‘Who knew forensic derives from forum?’, Muldoon asks in a recently published poem. His compulsive etymologising challenges audiences to see both the relevance and the irrelevance of etymology to interpretation, thereby accepting that they are the ultimate arbiters of Muldoon’s linguistic forensics. Following an analysis of how audience responses to etymologies are cued in his criticism, this chapter reflects on the connection that seems to exist between etymologising and elegising in Muldoon’s poetry to characterise the effect of what Paula Blank calls the ‘“etymological moment” in contemporary critical practice’ when it occurs in the poetry itself.

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Readeris the first book to collect the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide ...

In his reflections upon the spirit of place in recent fiction, John Barth remarks that the setting as metaphor is a function of the discourse within which it is situated. Perhaps predictably, Barth insists that the proper function of the trope of place in contemporary fiction is to be found in a postmodern reconciliation of competing claims: "realism and antirealism, linearity and nonlinearity, continuity and discontinuity"; however, as the narrator of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," reminds us, to decipher the figurai truth in an urban landscape might well mean the pursuit of a text that will "not permit itself to be read."1 Nevertheless, Barth's reflections suggest the ways in which, in both his own fiction and in the work of Don DeLillo, the site of the narrative's unfolding is always the sign and context of a particular postmodern attitude. As the scene of the dead repetitions of history and of the dispersal of the self, the city in the fiction of both authors is an exemplary sign of the anxieties of the postmodern condition, one which surely echoes the panicky amnesia of the culture of the simulacrum and the "[postmodern] fascination with a degraded landscape."2 But this is only one side of the postmodern rewriting of the city; in postmodern fiction we also confront the ironic encoding of the city as a positive site of resistance to the master tropes of cultural authority, and particularly those of the modernist tradition. Both these attitudes can be found in postmodern fiction, and often they are found together in the same text as signs of the ambivalence that resides at the heart of postmodern culture.

(1992). “To Wielderfight His Penisolate War”: “The Lover's Discourse” in Postmodern Fiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 63-79.

A Burnt-Out Case (1960) is part of Graham Greene's “African writings,” together with the novel The Heart of the Matter (1948), and the travelogues Journey without Maps (1935) and In Search of a Cha...

Reviewed by: Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction Christian Moraru Brian Richardson. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. xiii + 168 pp. Those who have followed Brian Richardson’s work over the past couple of years must have suspected, as I have, that his articles were part of something bigger and ambitious. A landmark in narrative analysis and in the study of modern and postmodern fiction generally, Unnatural Voices confirms the suspicion. For more than two decades now, narrative scholarship has been under strong pressure [End Page 457] to revisit its postulates, which, largely speaking, had been set forth by the linguistics-based poetics of the structuralist 1960s and 1970s. The cultural-historicist turn, its emphasis on ideology, the “politics of” (rather than the “poetics of”) kind of approaches to things literary, and, before them, the poststructuralist skepticism of taxonomic logic appeared, at least for a while, to render considerations of voice, viewpoint, character-narrator-author dynamic, and the like less imperative. All of a sudden, the urgent issues, we were being told, were elsewhere. Or so it seemed. A number of theorists and critics, primarily American, Dutch, and German, were already busy recalibrating time-honored concepts and approaches, and it is due to them that voice is currently dealt with as a matter of both form and subjectivity. Patrick O’Donnell’s 1992 book Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative was one of the studies that helped us realize that voice just cannot be—and cannot manifest itself—other than as a configuration of expressed (“voiced”) content regardless of the latter’s nature. Meanwhile, the conversation in the field has diversified a great deal, and Richardson himself has been one of the most original participants. Unnatural Voices organizes his contributions into a systematic if inductive treatment of the particular—one might say, characteristic —vocality or voicedness of modern and postmodern fictional prose (but chapter six successfully extends the book’s conclusions to contemporary drama). Simply speaking, this treatment leads the critic to several conclusions. First, modernism and postmodernism, and more broadly the last hundred years or so of fiction, can be defined by the struggle to give voice to a world, human and nonhuman alike, that according to more traditional—mimetic, humanistic, culturally and politically conservative—way of understanding the speaking subject, remains silent or is deliberately silenced. Second, he notices that narratology has met with little success in its attempts to come to grips with the unnatural voices with which modern and postmodern writers tell their stories. Hard to fit into the models usually employed to hear them, these voices may be odd, but they are not aberrations. In reality, the plethora of examples adduced throughout the book suggest, as observed earlier, that such vocal forms are dominant. Derived from this insight is the critic’s conviction that curiosities of these kind can be theorized and organized; it is just that available theories and classifications are not very helpful, precisely because in these accounts such narrative procedures are usually treated as exceptions and what they “communicate” is regarded accordingly. What Richardson argues in chapter 1 is actually the opposite: the “death” of certain techniques does not herald, pace Wolfgang Kayser, the death of narrative—of the novel in this case (1). In fact, [End Page 458] it may well signal the birth of a particular narrative type and with it a whole shift in the representation of the human. How we see ourselves comes off, Richardson contends across Unnatural Voices, in how and with what kind of voice we tell our own and others’ stories, in how we speak, from what and with how many perspectives, and finally, in how we picture the speaking subject, what qualities we think this speakerly/storytelling instance might possess. Along these lines, chapter 2 examines one of the most unnatural storytelling forms: the second person. For it, Richardson unearths a “surprisingly rich . . . genealogy” (17), with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ian Flemming among the precursors of Butor’s La Modification, after which the you-narration turns into something of a fashion. Here, the critic distinguishes among “standard” (common), “hypothetical” (more vague, future-oriented...

Deleuze edebi eserlere, özellikle romanlara kavramsal olarak yaklaşır. Onun için gerçek edebiyat olma ölçütü, bir eserin metinselliğiyle veya tarihselliğiyle değil onun canlılığı, yaşamsal anlamıyla ilişkilidir. Ona göre sanat, felsefeden daha az düşünmez, sadece düşünceyi algılanım ve duygulanımlarla iletir. Her edebi eser bir yaşam tarzını, yaşama biçimini niteler ve bu yüzden sadece eleştirel olarak değil, klinik olarak da incelenmelidir. Bu anlamıyla edebiyat bir sağlık işidir. Yazın olarak, edebiyat olarak sağlık şu anda var olmayan insanları üretir. Edebiyatın da en önemli amacı tüm karmaşanın içinde sağlığın yaratımını, olmayan insanın üretimini, yeni yaşam olanaklarını özgür kılmaktır. Çağdaş roman, postmodern romandan farklı bir biçimde şekillenmektedir. Çağdaş romanın hassasiyetleri ve endişeleri yeni milenyuma göredir ve bir bakıma Deleuze’ün edebi görüşleriyle uyum içindedir. Deleuze’ü anlamak, bu noktada, çağdaş edebiyatta gördüğümüz tavır, hassasiyet, endişe ve ton değişimlerini araştırırken gerekli olabilir. Bu makale, çağdaş roman adını verdiğimiz eserlerin anlam ve işlevlerinin Deleuze’ün bakış açısıyla anlaşılıp anlaşılamayacağı, çağdaş romana Deleuzyen bir tavırla yaklaşılıp yaklaşılamayacağı ve bu deneyimin çağdaş romanı anlamlandırmada ne gibi katkıları olacağı üzerinedir.

In the context of contemporary higher education, post white paper, ‘Students at the heart of the system’ [BIS, 2011. Students at the heart of the system [online]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf, (Accessed 5 Feb 2014), in which funding and commodification of learning and of students dominate university mission statements and agendas, it is crucial that we collaborate with our students to engage imagination and critical faculties with issues of value, and of social justice. Teaching and researching contemporary feminist speculative fictions and feminist critical practice offer a priceless opportunity to make a difference, to challenge the intellectual impoverishment that this new austerity brings with it. Learning and teaching research into threshold concepts and signature pedagogies combine here with feminist critical practice in a discussion of teaching two speculative fictions which engage criticality and values: Atwood [Atwood, 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese.) and Hopkinson [Hopkinson, 1996. A habit of waste. Skin folk. New York: Aspect, 183–202] each of which critiques flawed societies using tropes of waste, and rejection of difference. Each suggests recovery from damage done in the name of austerity, and imagines futures for the critical imagination, social justice, self-worth and agency.

This article offers a study of literary criticism in Plato’s Laws . According to standard accounts of the history of literary criticism, fourth-century philosophers represent a break from archaic and democratic notions of poetic judgment. The interpretation presented here suggests that the Laws synthesizes archaic and contemporary critical practices. In doing so, it fashions literary criticism as a performance of philosophy, combining claims to social and political authority with the evaluation of texts according to independent, objective criteria. The Laws thereby offers a hybrid model of contemporary critical practices to extend the ideal city’s political and moral philosophy into contexts of performance.

Brief Notices Reviewed by Richard Macksey Carol Jacobs. Skirting the Ethical. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. xxiii + 223 pages. The author of this challenging book is Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her earlier books include The Dissimulating Harmony (1978), Uncontainable Romanticism (1989), Telling Time (1993), and In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999). In the present volume she offers sensitive, detailed, and highly original readings of six works widely separated in respect to place, time, and culture. The first four texts are firmly situated within the canon of literary and philosophical discourse—Sophocles' Antigone, Plato's Symposium and Republic, and Hamann's "Aesthetica in nuce." The last two, Sebald's The Emigrants and Jane Campion's film The Piano, cross traditional lines of narrative genre and address, not by chance, two major ethical concerns in contemporary critical practice. What emerges in this exemplary sextet is not merely a sequence of scenes dramatizing the power of institutions to coerce ethical judgments through the force of language, but the unsettling, disruptive role of an examined language, a non-prescriptive "literary ethics" of another order that "offers a resistance to power and simplistic conceptualizations of truth, an emancipation from the 'must-be' that implies an ever to be renewed renegotiation": We read here works that openly stake our ethico-political positions, but are no less bound to disrupt them. Six works that set up side by side, as parallel worlds, literal and letteral tyrannies: the power of the state, polis, Reich, of patriarchy, of divine law and its unshakable judgment, for example, alongside unproblematic powers of representation and prescription. Six works that at the same time skirt their own prescriptions, ethical and linguistic, by way of meditations that may, as in Plato and Hamann, speak directly about language, but which more incisively perform its complexities and thus question their own will to unmediated truth and moral certitude. (xvii) Jacobs readily acknowledges that for the responsible, responsive reader "there is no way to avoid skirting the ethical." Her book is both a response [End Page 1231] to and an elaboration of the call for "an ethics of reading" raised some years ago by Hillis Miller in his Wellek Lectures. (Both critics clearly recognize that a "readerly" ethics is not just another name for situational ethics.) By extending this call to include the notion of "skirting," which is neither simple evasion nor simple accommodation, she suggests the peculiar responsibilities of attending to her authors' subtle disruptions of our (and often their own) complacencies. To cite but one "red thread" of concern running through her finely nuanced meditation on the tasks of the responsible reader, one could consider how the political and ethical positions read here can be "sometimes overtly and often famously bound up with the question of gender": Jane Campion's film, The Piano, is to all eyes, at least from a certain point of view, a feminist film if ever there was one. Hamann's best known work, "Aesthetica in nuce," directs us to a little celebrated corner of his opus in which the definitions of good and evil pivot around the virtue of a biblical heroine. The Symposium is conditional upon expelling women from the scene of discourse, though Socrates, in a speech which one tends to take as Plato's final word in the matter of love, ventriloquizes his female mentor. In the Republic we find Socrates forced to turn back and transvaluate the place of woman in the polis before his ideal state can be fully conceived (Book V). It is gender politics as well that are so often understood to govern Antigone's affront to the state: by Creon in the tragedy and by many of Sophocles' most striking readers—Hegel and Irigaray, for example—for whom the formation of the state and the ethical in general cannot but pass by way of woman. (xx) After comments on how the politics of identity functions as gender and as state in Plato and Hegel...