Early Essays Research Articles

Corporate Honor and Conflictive Subjectivity in Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea

Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El alcalde de Zalamea has typically been viewed as a drama that pivots on the tension between social honor (fama, opinión) and personal honor (patrimonio del alma). This essay argues for the inseparability of these two concepts and, in turn, explores how they relate to morality and justice. The corporate sense of honor—related to a Christian worldview and as elaborated in an early essay by Peter N. Dunn—functions in the drama as an organizing principle made manifest by the opening and closing images of the body. While reassessing honor’s place, I examine the ways in which language within the drama elaborates a dynamic and dialectically conflictive sense of subjectivity typical of the Golden Age literary corpus.

Robert Frost and The Poetics of Loyalty

Robert Frost and The Poetics of Loyalty Sam Gee (bio) Compare two poetic fantasies of escape: Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Good-Bye" and Robert Frost's "Into My Own." Both poems imagine leaving the workaday world behind to get in touch with the heart of reality. Emerson says "Good-Bye, proud world! I'm going home," and retires to "A secret nook in a pleasant land / Whose groves the frolic fairies planned." Frost describes deep, dark woods that he wishes "stretched away unto the edge of doom," and the voice of his poem announces in a tone as confident as Emerson's that "I should not be withheld but that some day / Into their vastness I should steal away." Emerson's poem spurns the society from which he fled, saying goodbye to "Flattery's fawning face," "Grandeur with his wise grimace," "those who go, and those who come," and the "sophist schools and learned clan." Rising above all of the pettiness of his apparently venal civilization, Emerson finds his holy object: "For what are they all, in their high conceit, / When man in the bush with God may meet?" In "Into My Own," Frost also finds God, so to speak. But there is a marked difference in approach between Frost and Emerson. Frost does not find God, or truth, by rejecting the ties that bind. Rather, he imagines his loved ones "who should miss me here / … And long to know if still I held them dear" coming to find him in the woods. And when they do, the voice of the poem proclaims, "They would not find me changed from him they knew—/Only more sure of all I thought was true." Like Emerson, Frost fantasizes about escaping from mundane reality. But Frost's is a troubled conscience—he knows that there is a solitude that is selfishness. Frost loves the truth of the woods, [End Page 328] which is beyond the truth (and illusions) of the town. But he knows that he cannot stay there. He has no interest in meeting God if to stare in the face of divinity would alienate him from the responsibilities and loves of the everyday world. ________ Frost was a great admirer of Emerson—he called the Concord Sage's "Uriel" "the best Western poem yet" and recalled in a letter that "some twenty-two lines in 'Monadnoc'… meant almost more to me than anything else on the art of writing when I was a youngster." Many of Frost's poems bear the mark of engagement with Emerson, and the affinities between the two poets go well beyond their shared New England soil. And yet, in a lecture entitled "On Emerson," in which Frost most fully details his affection for Emerson, he also makes clear what he takes to be his forebear's key weaknesses. Chief among Frost's problems is that he is "not quite satisfied with the easy way Emerson takes disloyalty." He continues, "He didn't know or ignored his own Blackstone. It is one thing for the deserter and another for the deserted. Loyalty is that for the lack of which your gang will shoot you without benefit of trial by jury. And serves you right. Be as treacherous as you must be for your ideals, but don't expect to be kissed good-bye by the idol you go back on." This is fairly vitriolic language for Frost, which leaves the reader of "On Emerson" with a question—why is "disloyalty" such a concern for Frost? And just what does he mean by Emerson's "disloyalty"? The contrast between "Good-Bye" and "Into My Own," with which this essay opens, is instructive in this connection, but incomplete. To bring out further what Frost might have meant by Emerson's "disloyalty," I will examine another famous Emerson poem, "Give All to Love," together with remarks from two of Emerson's early essays, "Friendship" and "Circles." Through all of these writings, Emerson puts forward a worldview that prizes individual growth, experimentation, and spiritual striving above commitments to human love or social responsibilities. To understand Frost's objection to Emerson, I will [End Page 329] consider three of Frost's own...

Not Noticing, Infallibly: The Critical Liaisons of Henry James, French Decadence, and Honoré de Balzac

Henry James published nearly a hundred articles on French literature, yet he rarely commented on its decadent doyens. After several early essays on Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, he turned a public cold shoulder to their fin-de-siècle progeny. Scholarship on Jamesian decadence has thus remained largely separate from discussions of his French criticism. This essay brings together those traditions by linking James’s sidelining of figures like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Pierre Louÿs with his concomitant volte-face on Honoré de Balzac. James’s late essays, I argue, creatively misread Balzac as pseudo-decadent, transmuting him into a mediating object for James’s coy, critical liaisons.

Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism by Nicholas Brown

Reviewed by: Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism by Nicholas Brown Peter Hitchcock Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism Durham: Duke, 2019, 232 pp. The cover of Nicholas Brown's latest book, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism, features an image of Viktoria Binschtok's artwork "Chanel" (2016), a handmade rendering of a Chanel No. 5 perfume box. Brown's cultural theory offers a metacommentary on a work of art that is already a metacommentary on the commodity aesthetics of advertising. There are lots of ways to disrupt the baleful entanglements of art and commodity culture although, as we know, many a strident intervention has participated in the marketization of its own standpoint (fill in as many blanks as you wish). There is an inexorability to capitalist contamination—for Walter Benjamin this is part of its cultic utility, a point made, coincidentally, in an essay of 1921 (the year Chanel No. 5 was launched). But Brown's fabulous critique is less interested in the familiar strategy of tracking the pitfalls of virtuous withdrawals from all taint of market sensibilities (in this religion, it cannot be a commodity if I have withheld my labor power) and is more focused on the social being of contemporary art, simultaneously paratactic and stunningly perspectival. This still requires significant ground-clearing on art's relationship to the commodity of course, and Brown approaches this with both technical and stylistic gusto. Leigh-Claire La Berge, whose own work on art and the commodity is exemplary, has suggested Brown's work is part of a larger tendency to position art in terms of economics rather than politics, in order to distinguish the nature of aesthetic provocation in actually existing capitalism. Actually, going to Brown's earlier essay and clearly the conceptual basis for this book, "The Work of Art in the Age of Labor's Real Subsumption to Capital" (2012)—Benjamin's aura once more—the dialectics of real subsumption prohibit such super-separation. Indeed, it is worth reminding ourselves, as Brown does here, that autonomy does not mean the rarified air of absolute distinction but is a means to critique forms of relation through and around art, which can both distance the political and mediate its understanding under specific conditions (art, and again in Benjaminian fashion, as an "instrument of magic"). This is not the relative autonomy once invoked by Althusserianism, nor does it spring from the workerism of Italian Autonomia, although [End Page 372] one does not need to purge either from Marxist genealogy (especially around concepts of ideology). What then, does Brown mean by "autonomy" and why is its rearticulation vital to contemporary cultural discourse? Acknowledging that the "resistance within" argument common to modernism works now only as a historical or anachronistic oddity, Brown suggests art is autonomous in its freedom from rationalizing autonomy. It can even be, and here Brown's prose becomes purposefully purple, "historicist": "Such a historicism is null as historicism, since what it does not produce is precisely anything like history. But it is practically bursting with excitement at being allowed to apply its galvanic fluid to the great gallery of dead forms …" (19). Yet even this level of pastiche assumes a new level of conformity, one more style in the advertising panoply of capital (see Lily-Rose Depp getting meta-meta in Chanel No. 5's holiday ad, 2019). As an alternative, "After postmodernism, autonomy cannot be assumed, even by works produced for a restricted field. It must instead be asserted" (22). For those who suspect that the cake here might be had and eaten too, the material conditions of art remain dialectical, which is to say that the assertion does not pivot necessarily on the consciousness of the artist alone, nor even on the passionate prose of the critic. Yet, if there is a problem with Brown's insistence that the autonomy at stake is riven by "immanent purposiveness" it is the sense that that is being adjudicated, after all, in perhaps a more normative fashion. To put it another way, the brilliant distinction that Brown draws that the correlative for the UK show "The Office" is not is its...

Babies and Bathwater

Babies and Bathwater Harriet Hartman (bio) Let me begin by expressing my admiration for the passion and coherence with which Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl present their argument, and how they have addressed many of the criticisms of the first publication of this argument, to strengthen its impact even more.1 I do take issue with some of the steps and assumptions in the argument, as I will detail below. At the same time, I do believe that, in the end, I agree with many of the conclusions that must be drawn from its implications and their implicit call to action. Let me begin with some disclaimers. I am a woman. Not only that, but I am a woman who, both in collaboration with and independently of my husband, Moshe Hartman, z"l, has engaged in the same kind of fertility and intermarriage quantitative analyses of the NJPS and the ensuing PEW surveys that Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl critique.2 In footnote thirty-four of their current article, Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl mention our work, perhaps with some puzzlement and uncertainty about what to conclude from the fact that our analysis was not tied to the communal policy discourses directly. While both my husband and I were very concerned about Jewish continuity broadly (and not only specifically in terms of fertility and intermarriage implications—but not excluding them either), we saw our roles as social scientists to produce the knowledge and let someone else use it as they saw fit. Parenthetically, that kept some "shalom bayit" (household peace) since I doubt that the two of us would have agreed on the same policy recommendations, coming as we did from different religious, national, and gendered backgrounds. So why do I bring it up now? Because I also have come to understand how for all of us, our personal and professional narratives are intertwined, and that it behooves us to weigh that interaction when [End Page 235] we interpret research directions, interpretations, and conclusions. I fully embraced Debra Kaufman's guest-edited special issue of Contemporary Jewry, "Demographers on Demography: The Place of Narrative in Jewish Identity Research"3 on the role of narrative in demography. And that is how I understood Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jews, as well both the current and the earlier essay by Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl referred to above.4 All science is driven by some agenda, and the more we are aware of it, the better we are able to fill in the broader picture with either more appropriate data or more appropriate interpretations. So, I applaud this exposé. But I am also concerned about where it's going. I am concerned because it threatens to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak (and I'm sorry if the metaphor makes someone cringe, but it's apt). I agree that fertility and intermarriage should not constitute the sole or overriding communal approaches to the problematic of Jewish continuity, nor the sole endeavors of social science as it seeks to reveal the truth of a thriving community. But population size is related to fertility, and population vitality is related to population size, as well as morbidity and mortality. Population dynamics contribute to the numbers, energy, and resources of a population and need to be given due attention. We do need data, and careful interpretation of it, to reveal how intermarriage is related to traditional—and non-traditional—practices of Judaism, as well as how this relationship is changing over time.5 The national surveys have received appropriate criticism for adhering too closely to traditional religious measures of Jewish engagement (such as keeping kosher, lighting Shabbat candles, fasting on Yom Kippur); we also have data that incorporates less traditional measures, but maybe not enough of it, both qualitatively and quantitatively. And here the bias toward quantitative measures comes under appropriate fire. But it isn't a bias borne out by the wealth of social science published in Contemporary Jewry, the primary venue for scholarly publications in the social science of Jewry, as I discuss below. [End Page 236] Some of you may be aware that Contemporary Jewry responded to the revelations of Steven M...

The Place, the Poem, and the Jew: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan

The Place, the Poem, and the Jew: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan Vivian Liska (bio) Translated by Ashraf Noor The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is often—and justifiably—associated with suspicion with regard to visual art, aesthetics, and literature, which he considers as secondary if not antagonistic to ethics. It is thus all the more significant that he maintains a constant interest in the work of a rare few writers and poets, particularly, in the early 1970s, that of the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, whose mother tongue was German. What is at stake in Levinas’s reading of Celan goes far beyond a simple commentary on this major oeuvre of post-war European literature. It aims at the heart of the relation between poetry and philosophy and of a frequently controversial interrogation in which important figures of modern Western philosophy participate. In the following remarks, the traces of this debate in Levinas’s writings, particularly in those relating to Judaism, will be delineated in view of a central motif: the question of place. Levinas’s rare writings on poetry configure the place and the non-place at the intersection—or rather at the locus of interaction—of history, philosophy, and poetry between Greek and Jew. A reflection on Emmanuel Levinas’s approach to poetry leads to a constellation of the following names: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan. These four figures conjoined paratactically form a chiasm as to the relationship between the poem, the place, and the Jew. Levinas and Celan meet at the outer poles of this figure of thought, at extremities whose relation is illuminated by the other two names, Blanchot and Hölderlin, which both unite and separate them. At the center of the chiasm is a name that is not expressed explicitly, but which nevertheless [End Page 699] constitutes the axis of this poetico-philosophical constellation: Martin Heidegger. This chiasm will be deployed in terms of a central motif: the question of place, more particularly the conceptual pairs of exile and Heimat, errancy and rootedness, homelessness and dwelling, all considered in respect to the poem, to poetry. In his essay titled “Paul Celan. De l’être à l’autre” (Paul Celan: From Being to the Other), first published in La Revue des Belles Letters in 1972, shortly after the poet’s suicide, Emmanuel Levinas implicitly retrieves and illustrates a central idea formulated in his earlier essay “La Trace de l’Autre” (The Trace of the Other). In this essay, Levi-nas distinguishes between Greek and Jew via the opposition between Ulysses’ and Abraham’s respective relations to place. Presenting a stark dichotomy, Levinas writes: “To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land” (1986, 348).1 Ulysses’ journey is directed towards the eventual return to his native land, his Heimat; for Levinas, this orientation signifies a turning in upon oneself and contrasts with Abraham’s departure, which is oriented solely towards a foreign destination, a territory that is, so far, nothing but a promise. Between Ulysses and Abraham, as envisaged by Levinas, the fundamental difference between Greek and Jew, between Homer and the Hebrew Bible is at stake. The Greek route remains that of Ulysses, whose protracted, adventure-laden journey through the world is in fact nothing other than a return to himself, to his native island—“complying with the Same, misapprehending the Other” 2—as opposed to “the Biblical movement of the Same towards the Other” (Levinas, 1996a, 51). The closure and totality re-established through the return homewards as final destination in the Greek experience contrast with the Jewish destination, which corresponds to an incessant movement towards the other. Levinas describes this movement, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, as an indifference to land and soil: “Judaism has always been free with regard to place” (1990, 231).3 With this laudatory statement, Levinas seems to not only support the traditional idea of the Jew as the eternal wanderer, but also to affirm [End Page 700] exile as both a positive mode of existence and, metaphorically, as an ethical modality of thought opening towards a non-retrievable alterity. Levinas’s claim would...

Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius by Robert L. Marshall

Reviewed by: Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius by Robert L. Marshall Marshall Brown (bio) Robert L. Marshall. Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019). xxi, 330 pp. Robert L. Marshall’s Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius collects essays originally published since 1990, as a sequel to the 1989 collection The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which assembled essays from 1973 forward.1 In both books, some of the essays have brief added postscripts to bring them up to date, and the new essays are also lightly adapted to avoid anachronism and to incorporate cross-references. Marshall is surely well known to readers of this journal, and at least two of the essays from the earlier book, “Bach the Progressive” and “On Bach’s Universality,” are justifiably classics. There are no major departures in the new book, but there are some significant shifts in approach. Most of the essays in Marshall’s earlier book are philological, concerned (as the section titles have it) with evidence for Bach’s compositional process, with “Questions of Authenticity and Chronology,” and with performance practice. The earlier essays in the new book continue in that vein. Brief essays on the Wilhelm Friedrich Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach notebooks and on Mozart’s unfinished compositions review the evidence meticulously and draw modest conclusions, working toward serious reflection (e.g., “it appears that the creative act was always driven forward, step by step, along the unfolding form,” 251). While the notebook essay ends in hyperbole (“The historical value of the notebooks .. . can hardly be exaggerated,” 37), I welcome the impulse to employ the essayist’s encyclopedic knowledge toward some general reflections. Conversely, the longest essay, a survey of Bach’s keyboard music, is in the vein of the earlier volume’s survey of his music for flute, a set of learned and judicious annotations with only a brief final gesture toward a larger argument. Judicious learning has always been Marshall’s forte. Some triumphs here are: 1) a brief compromise with “my good friend [Joshua] [End Page 306] Rifkin” (115) on the size of Bach’s chorus (Marshall concedes that probably the choral movements were sometimes performed with Rifkin’s single voices, but surely also sometimes with larger groups); 2) a defense of the St. John Passion that leaves room for Jewish discomfort with the antisemitic Gospel text (Marshall himself is Jewish); 3) a welcoming review of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus on the occasion of the release of the film version (yes, the facts are distorted to accentuate Salieri’s presumed perspective, but it’s good entertainment and aroused substantial interest in Mozart); and especially 4) the book’s liveliest read, a wry survey of the scant information leading to critics’ innuendos about Johann Christian Bach’s sexuality. Earlier, Marshall dug into archives and scrutinized manuscripts. Bach and Mozart chiefly draws on book stacks, with an encyclopedic command of information old and new, unruffled by rare errors. Adorno did not coin the term Spätstil (149), but that hardly matters. Somewhat more consequential is the claim of affinity that “Bach, like Luther, was a native Thuringian” (54). Luther’s birthplace, Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld, is in the modern state of Sachsen-Anhalt, near the border of Thuringia but not in it, now or then, and while Luther was exiled to Eisenach in Thuringia for one crucial year, he lived chiefly in Wittenberg, in the heart of Saxony. And I don’t know of any warrant for the proposal in the Luther chapter that “one would like to think that for the formally gifted Johann Sebastian Bach [aufführen didn’t just mean perform but] also implied ‘to create’” (38). This last example is an instance of the book’s core mode, a somewhat loose weave of persuasive conjecture supported by endless information, not damaged by the very occasional out-of-place stitch. In a given paragraph—and there are many such—one may find: “if we are willing to lend any credence at all .. . and if we are willing to indulge a degree of plausible speculation in the absence...

Редукция поэтического текста в критическом эссе В. Набокова «Владислав Ходасевич. Собрание стихов»

The highlighting of Nabokov’s interpretational strategies in other literary texts is a relevant problem for Russian and European Nabokov studies. The goal of the article is to scrutinize the methods of reduction of a poetic text used by Nabokov in his early essay Vladislav Khodasevich. Collected Verse. The approach developed by receptive poetics allows author to describe Nabokov’s practices of reading and writing as an experience of creative game with literature of his contemporaries and predecessors. The narrative analysis is productive to characterize the point of view, to highlight the role of narrator in the structure of Nabokov's essay and his own literary work and the techniques for the transformation of Khodasevich’s poems into the prose. There are different methods of literary text reduction in Nabokov’s essay: creation of meta-plot not immanent in the original poems; selective sampling of literary contexts common for both authors; ignoring of artistic issue of ethics of beauty important for V. Khodasevich. For Nabokov, the reduction and transfer of his own techniques into the space of Khodasevich’s text is a way of approbation of patterns of artistic reality in texts of the poet, which conceptualizes the problem of boundaries of artistic talent, important for Nabokov himself.

MONTE AMIATA VOLCANO (TUSCANY, ITALY) IN THE HISTORY OF VOLCANOLOGY, PART 1: ITS ROLE IN THE DEBATES ON EXTINCT VOLCANOES, SOURCES OF MAGMA, AND ERUPTIVE MECHANISMS (1733–1935)

A review of the main contributions to the scientific literature between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries concerning the geology and volcanology of Monte Amiata volcano (Tuscany, central Italy) is presented. Monte Amiata, and the nearby volcano of Radicofani, are of great interest for the history of volcanology because they have the primacy of being the first to be recognized of volcanic origin in a region (Tuscany) which was not volcanically active, thirty years before Guettard's studies on the Auvergne region in France. Indeed, the Florentine botanist Pier Antonio Micheli identified as extinct volcanoes Radicofani in 1722 and Monte Amiata in 1733. Moreover, the merit of Micheli's work resides in interpreting Monte Amiata as an extinct volcano despite the absence of a conventional cone-shaped volcano morphology, and in his recognizing its rocks as lavas despite their marked differences to those produced by the known active volcanoes of its times, such as the iconic Vesuvius. During the eighteenth century and until the first half of the nineteenth century, Monte Amiata was a destination for scientific journeys by Tuscan and foreign scholars (e.g. Micheli, Baldassarri, Arduino, Fortis, Ferber, Dolomieu, Santi, Repetti, Hoffmann). In addition, its rocks were part of important collections throughout Europe visited by illustrious mineralogists. Furthermore, samples from Monte Amiata were used to illustrate the general discussions on the nature and origin of rocks such as basalt and granite. In the nineteenth century, Monte Amiata was included in the lists of known volcanoes recorded in the early treatises on volcanology made by Scrope, Daubeny, and Hoffmann, and its ‘trachyte’ was the subject of early essays on microscope petrography and chemical analysis of rocks, performed by vom Rath, Rosenbusch, Williams, Lacroix, and Washington. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century, the volcano geologists of the Comitato Geologico Italiano, especially Verri, Lotti, and Sabatini, carried out field-surveys on Monte Amiata resulting in geological maps and volcano-stratigraphies. Moreover, modern petrographic (Novarese, Artini, Rodolico) and geographical (Dainelli and Olinto Marinelli) scientific studies were carried out on this volcano. Nevertheless, up to the middle part of the twentieth century, the major interest in Monte Amiata was related not to its volcanological aspects but to its natural resources: drinking waters, diatomaceous earths, earth pigments, and mercury ore-minerals.

MODERN TUNUS ROMANINA BİR BAKIŞ

MODERN TUNUS ROMANINA BİR BAKIŞ

Planet Earth: Crumbling Metaphysical Illusion*

Planet Earth:Crumbling Metaphysical Illusion* Robert D. Stolorow (bio) Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) characterized philosophy as "a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language" (section 109). In an earlier essay (Stolorow & Atwood, 2017), George Atwood and I employed Wittgenstein's conception of such bewitchment to give an account of the genesis of various forms of metaphysical illusion. In place of a word a picture is projected, which is then imagined as a thing-in-itself, an everlasting entity. Such metaphysical illusion, mediated by words and reified pictures, replaces the tragic finitude and transience of existence with a permanent and eternally changeless reality. As was recognized precociously by Wilhelm Dilthey (1910/2002), this illusory metaphysicalization of experience is pervasive in human life. An entity central to our everyday well-being is planet earth itself. The earth, both literally and ontologically, gives us the ground we stand on. It grounds our way of being. Martin Heidegger, in his later work, is said to have moved away from phenomenology and toward a metaphysical realism. It is probably more accurate to say that he moved toward a complex amalgam of the two. This characterization certainly holds for his lecture "Building dwelling thinking" (1951), which gives important glimpses into the ontological significance of the earth. Indeed, Heidegger claims in this essay that the fundamental character of the human kind of being (existence) is dwelling. Such dwelling requires a space, a location, a home; and that home is the earth. In this vision, the earth provides grounding for the human kind of being. For humans, to be is to dwell on earth, and to dwell requires that they safeguard and preserve the earth that grounds them. Characteristically, such protectedness is sought in metaphysical illusion—the transformation [End Page 105] of this vulnerable planet into an invincible everlasting entity. This age-old metaphysical illusion is not faring well in the face of the perils of climate change. Heidegger uses several interrelated phrases to characterize the comportment of dwelling on earth: To dwell there is to cherish, to protect, to preserve, to care for, to nourish, to nurture, to nurse, to keep safe, to spare, to save. "Mortals dwell in that they save the earth" (Heidegger, 1951, p. 148). What is most noteworthy to me is that all of these manifestations of dwelling entail recognition of and responsiveness to earth's vulnerability, rather than an evasive turning away. They entail, in other words, renunciation of comforting metaphysical illusions of earth's everlasting invincibility. A personal vignette (Stolorow, 2018) alludes to the enormous impact of having earth's permanence and changelessness thrown open to question: More than three decades ago I took my young son to a planetarium show at the New York Museum of Natural History. During that show it was predicted that a billion years from now the sun will become a 'red giant' that will engulf and destroy our entire solar system. This prospect filled me with intense horror [...] [T]he sun's becoming an engulfing red giant represents not just the destruction of individual human beings but of human civilization itself [...] I want to call the horror that announces such a possibility apocalyptic anxiety. (p. 12) It also announces, I now add, the shattering of metaphysical illusions of earth's permanence and indestructability. The human way of being cannot survive the impending homelessness with which climate change threatens us, a prospect so horrifying that people turn away from it altogether, thereby evading the threat and abandoning the search for solutions.1 What can help us face up to the horrors with which climate change threatens us? I suggest a form of dwelling with one another that I call emotional dwelling (Stolorow & Atwood, 2018), an active, engaged, participatory comportment that I have recommended for the therapeutic approach to emotional [End Page 106] trauma. In dwelling, one leans into the other's emotional pain and participates in it. The language that one uses to address another's experience of trauma meets the trauma head-on, articulating the unbearable and the unendurable, saying the unsayable, unmitigated by any efforts to soothe, comfort, encourage, or reassure—such efforts invariably being experienced by the other as...

The Practical Past as a Field of Metahistorical Approach. Some Remarks on the Contemporary Situation of Historical Theory

Abstract The narrative theory of history that studies historical works from the viewpoint of their narrative, rhetorical devices, and ideological strategies highly emphasized the necessity of renewing historiography. In his early essays, the trend’s founding father, Hayden White, positioned history between art and science or fiction and reality and defined the role of historical theory as a kind of “critical historiography” that is both a criticism of actual historical works and a prescriptive theoretical approach with which the contemporary historical discipline can reform itself. This renewal basically meant a formal reorganization with which the historical works and the historical discipline itself could come closer to literature by using narrative methods and rhetorical devices of recent literary works and films. However, after the 1990s, White and his followers had to face some radical problems that compelled them to rethink the role of recent historiography and their theoretical positions as well. Firstly, the so-called “new” historiography did not actually come into existence, or at least not in a way they suggested. Secondly, new forms of “unofficial” history, from varieties of public history through conspiracy theories to contemporary historical fictions, forced to reconceptualize the task of historical theory and its approach to the social and ideological functions of “official” history. Analysing some recently published works of this trend (above all, Hayden White’s concept of “modernist event” and his distinction between two forms of the past, theoretical and practical), my essay tries to define the situation of historical theory among the forms of contemporary historical experience.

Wahrsprechen, lügen und glauben

Abstract All speech is a form of self-presentation, a performance on the stage of life, and since antiquity this has been accepted as much as lamented and rejected on moral grounds. Do we today, once again, live in times that justify this complaint? So-called ‘fake news’ are, first and foremost, simply ‘news,’ that is, information whose truth claims everyone needs to judge according to their own prejudices. Nietzsche’s skepticism about truth, at least since the early essay Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, draws radical conclusions from this apparently nihilistic diagnosis of our cognitive abilities which never reach their goal, that is, truth. But Nietzsche does not despair about the fact that our thinking has no power over truth; rather, he transforms lying into a product of the creative intellect that seeks to serve life. As such, we have to rethink truth’s relationship to lying. Both, truth and lying, thus lose their respective meaning. Against the background of Kant’s famous distinction between opining, believing, and knowing as three different modes of holding-to-be-true, I argue that Nietzsche does indeed provide a both timely and constructive answer to the question how to think about ‘lying.’

Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, by Rebecca Hutcheon

Reviewed by: Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing by Rebecca Hutcheon Tom Ue (bio) Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, by Rebecca Hutcheon; pp. xiv + 233. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £120.00, $145.00. Midway through Veranilda (1904), George Gissing's unfinished novel about Rome in the sixth century, we learn about the hero Basil's roots and how poorly his privileged position had prepared him for his beloved Veranilda's disappearance and for the war between the Roman emperor Justinian and the Gothic king Totila. Gissing explains how Basil's "dispirited idleness" is occasioned by want of a bath: "for all the Roman's exercises and amusements were associated with the practice of luxurious bathing, and without that refreshment the gymnasium, the tennis-court, the lounge, no longer charmed as before" ([The Harvester Press, 1987], 153). Once responsible for the cleanliness of the Romans and for promoting social interaction, the bath is now a relic, and vanishing with it is a way of life to which Basil had grown accustomed: "Now, to enter the Thermae was to hear one's footsteps resound in a marble wilderness; to have statues for companions and a sense of ruin for one's solace" (153). Places, as we see here, serve multiple rhetorical functions: the Thermae enables Basil (and Gissing) to reminisce about earlier and better times. Its abandonment leads to the changes in Basil's appearance and colors his current views. Basil's lament for, and internalization of, such losses—he "thought more than the average Roman about these changes" (153)—liken him to the cast of sensitive and conscientious figures that people Gissing's fiction, characters who, like Edwin Reardon and Henry Ryecroft, have felt the weight of the world on their shoulders. This episode would have been at home in Rebecca Hutcheon's rich and insightful study, Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, which attends to some of the ways in which Gissing resists clear spatial demarcations and which illuminates some of the nuances in his writing. "In Gissing," Hutcheon argues, "sites are subject to shifts and fluxes that challenge the reader's preset expectations" (2). Gissing ruminated on these [End Page 492] dynamics throughout his career. In the essay "On Battersea Bridge," which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (30 November 1883) many years before he wrote Veranilda, he describes pedestrians heading home, "too weary to spend one thought upon the noble picture to be seen for a turning of the head" (Collected Essays, edited by Pierre Coustillas [Grayswood Press, 2015], 102). The first-person narrator finds company in a working man, who "was more awake to leisurely sympathies than his fellows" (104). The narrator projects his own interests onto his neighbor, imagining him to be of like mind. The conceit, of course, is that no two people can see the same thing in the same way. When the man notices the narrator's appeal, he nods downward, and observes, "Throws up a deal o'mud don't it?" (104). Identification does not necessarily mean consensus, and Gissing, even in this early essay, suggests dialogic relationships between literature and geography, between seeing and reading. Scholarship by Michelle Elizabeth Allen, Richard Dennis, Jason Finch, Jeremy Tambling, David Welsh, Julian Wolfreys, Tim Youngs, and others has opened new ways of reading Gissing geographically. Yet, as Hutcheon suggests, criticism has routinely revolved around three dominant strands—biography, the urban, and chronology—all of which imply mimesis. These narrow foci may spur us to overlook some of the imaginative aspects of Gissing's fiction and to concentrate on a select number of texts and locations. Writing Place contributes to scholarship by canvasing larger literary and geographical terrains. The four chapters assembled here examine Gissing's treatment of the North and the South, London in the 1880s, the country, and the Mediterranean. The conclusion offers a spatial chronology by considering representative works from three phases of Gissing's career. The rewards of this study lie in Hutcheon's ability to extract every drop of meaning from different passages, the poetic quality of her own...

Women in the Early Years of the American Economic Association

We use the archives of the American Economic Association to examine the participation of women in the association from its foundation in 1885 to the Great Depression. Women participated actively in the formation of the association, contributed several monographs to its early publications, and won some of its early essay competitions. We find that the membership drives of 1900–1902 (aimed at academics and businessmen) and of 1909–13 (aimed at lawyers, bankers, and businessmen) neglected women interested in social causes and home economics as potential members. Together with the abolition of local branches, these first two membership drives diluted the role of women in the association. In contrast, the membership drive of 1922–26 reflected a growing interest in graduate students and young instructors that somewhat increased the proportion of women among members.

Culture, Identity, and Power

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I documented the importance of the work of Stuart Hall in the development of critical theories in education, in our understanding of “race,” and in the development of much more nuanced analyses of cultural politics. I focused on two books: Familiar Stranger, Hall’s personal memoir of political and cultural commitment; and Cultural Studies 1983, his lectures that provided the conceptual and political basis for a good deal of critical and nonreductive social and cultural analyses of the relationship between economic dynamics and structures and the rest of society. The two new books I discuss in the current essay provide us with a selection of many of the core reasons why he has been so influential in an entire range of critically oriented work in sociology, cultural studies, theories of race, “multiculturalism,” and identity, and increasingly in education.

Hans-Georg Gadamer sobre el Protréptico aristotélico

El objetivo de este artículo es presentar y analizar las principales hipótesis de Hans-Georg Gadamer en Der aristotelische Protreptikos und die entwicklungsgeschichtliche Betrachtung der aristotelischen Ethik (1928), poniendo énfasis en la recuperación gadameriana de las nociones de phrónesis, hedoné y, en menor medida, phýsis. Se intenta demostrar que en este trabajo temprano de Gadamer hay, en términos metodológicos e interpretativos, más que una discusión con Werner Jaeger en relación con el Protréptico y la ética aristotélica. Finalmente, este artículo sostiene que es posible leer en las principales argumentaciones del ensayo la primera maduración intelectual de relevancia de Gadamer, expresada en forma de diálogo crítico con sus grandes maestros (Paul Natorp, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, Paul Friedländer), a partir de las nuevas posibilidades interpretativas que la filología y fenomenología le abrieron para el estudio de la filosofía ético-política de Platón y Aristóteles. Las consecuencias teóricas de este temprano artículo habrían signado tanto el camino de sus siguientes intervenciones teóricas en torno a la filosofía política platónica como también los futuros desarrollos de la hermenéutica filosófica.

A aproximação a Pierre Menard: Tradução no primeiro Borges (1925-36)

Muito debate nos estudos de tradução tem sua origem na obra de Jorge Luis Borges, sendo que geralmente o ponto inicial da discussão é a ficção Pierre Menard, autor do Quixote (1939) e a produção que se seguiu. No entanto, ele já se ocupara intensamente com questões de tradução em seus escritos iniciais, nos quinze anos anteriores àquele grande divisor de águas da sua obra. Entre 1925 e 1936, Borges escreveu um pequeno grupo de ensaios diretamente relacionado à tradução, em grande parte baseados em empreitadas pessoais (uma versão em espanhol da última página do Ulisses, de Joyce) ou traduções de clássicos feitas por terceiros (nomeadamente, as obras de Homero e As mil e uma noites). Este artigo passa em revista esses ensaios iniciais de Borges e esquematiza as principais questões tradutológicas abordadas neles. Busca-se demonstrar que, direta ou indiretamente, as reflexões e contribuições posteriores de Borges sobre questões de tradução já estavam contidas em gérmen na sua primeira produção ensaística.

Theology, Evolution, and the Figural Imagination: Teilhard de Chardin and His Theological Critics

Teilhard de Chardin has been criticized by both Roman Catholic (Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Dietrich von Hildebrand) and Protestant (David Lane and Jurgen Moltmann) theologians for allegedly promulgating a heterodox, modernist version of Gnosticism that substitutes a naturalistic account of evolution for the supernatural Christian story of redemption in Christ, departs from scriptural and classical theological norms, gives primacy to scientific over theological reasoning, and articulates a vision of pure immanence. Teilhard’s theological integration of salvation and evolution in The Human Phenomenon and other works is, however, grounded in an implicitly figural interpretation of history that is both scriptural and classical in inspiration. Reading Teilhard’s early essay, ‘Cosmic Life,’ through the studies of Erich Auerbach, Leonard Goppelt, and Tibor Fabiny on figural interpretation demonstrates that Teilhard describes evolutionary history as a typological anticipation for the coming Christ, thus refuting misconstruals of his theology as gnostic, heterodox, naturalistic, and immanentalist.

The Catholic case against unregulated competition: an essay for Catholic and other Educators

In an earlier essay (Sibley, Angus. 2016. “Can there be a Catholic economics?” International Studies in Catholic Education 8 (2), 211) I observed that ‘the Church has a long record of consistently criticisng the obsession with competition that has such a dominant place in orthodox economic thinking and practice’. Inordinate emphasis on competition is so prevalent in current economic behaviour, and has so many adverse consequences, that a more detailed examination of this phenomenon, and of the Church’s arguments against it, seems to be timely.