Modern Mindset Research Articles

Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe

Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe Maximillian E. Novak Let me begin by saying that I am writing as à defender of Defoe's place in what has sometimes been called "the rise ofthe novel." A few years ago, at a meeting of the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, I heard a diatribe against Defoe and his creation Moll Flanders as an example of male usurpation. By assuming the voice of a female narrator, so the argument went, Defoe had insulted women in general. The work was not so much writing as ventriloquism, and Defoe was simply exploiting the character of Moll and womankind to make money and for some obscure nefarious purposes. This attack resembled, but went far beyond, the accusations against Defoe in Madeleine Kahn's Narrative Transvestism ; Defoe's writing amounted to narrative villainy.1 Shortly thereafter, I read a book which advocated replacing Robinson Crusoe with what was apparently a much more satisfying work—Charles Martin's Passages from Friday—that is, replacing a book that has maintained an audience throughout the world for 280 years with a work having a more appropriate message for us. Who, after all, would want to read a work that is clearly prejudiced against cannibals and opposed to vegetarian principles (among 1 Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kahn's section on Defoe (pp. 57-102) concentrates on reminding us that Defoe is always the masculine creator behind Moll Flanders and Roxana and that his position as a writer is manipulative. The notion that Defoe experienced both "fear and envy" in assuming the voices of these characters is extremely interesting. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the charges levelled against Crusoe were that he eats the goats on his island and appears to feel a distinct dislike for the Caribs who use what he had come to think of as his island for the purpose of devouring the natives of other tribes)? That the cannibals would most willingly hack his body into pieces with their wooden swords and indeed, eventually, engage in an attack upon the nascent colony in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is not seen as an excuse. What is most at issue here is the vicious mind of the colonialist which must be castigated against all common sense.2 The basic notion behind this attack appears to be that there is no real value in Robinson Crusoe as a work of literature, that only the myth is interesting, and that we have the right to select a version of the myth that better suits our modern mind-set. Michel Tournier's Vendredi and J.M. Coetzee's Foe are not to be seen as wonderful commentaries on Defoe's original, through which we can measure the ideas ofthe eighteenth century with those of our own, but rather as salubrious replacements for a flawed view of the world.3 Some scholars are dropping Defoe from discussions of the novel. That Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story of the Novel (1996) mentions Defoe a scant three times strikes me as an historical aberration in a work claiming to offer a "true" history of the novel. How comfortable should we feel about replacing the realities of literary history and criticism with autobiographical fantasies?4 Similarly, William Beatty Warner's Licensing Entertainment, while denying any counter-hegemonic intentions, clearly wants to replace the usual Defoe-Richardson-Fielding paradigm for the origins ofthe novel with a Behn-Manley-Haywood-Richardson-Fielding pattern.5 2 Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge's Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994). See esp, pp. 117-23 on Martin's Passages from Friday; and Charles Martin, Passagesfrom Friday, in Steal the Bacon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 21-50. 3 Notable as these works are, they lack the combination of creativity and imagination that made Robinson Crusoe an inspirational work for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Vincent Van Gogh. 4 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story ofthe...

Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (review)

Reviews 251 Hillman, Richard, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage, Basingstoke, Macrnillan, 1997; cloth; pp. x, 309; R.R.P. not known. The use of modern theory with regard to pre-modern texts usually evokes one of two responses; for some, such a strategy can be daring, creative, and genuinely insightful, whereas for others it seems like a nonsensical project from the outset. Richard Hillman's book will no doubt drive most readers firmly to one conclusion or the other, as it makes no excuses for applying complex Lacanian theory to a range of medieval and Early Modern texts, in a largely non-historical fashion. Hillrnan argues for this non-historical examination of dramatic self-speaking (loosely defined as the representation of subjectivity), using a combination of intertextual study of Early Modern dramatic texts and the application of Jacques Lacan's subject formation. H e appropriates Lacan intertextually rather than historically, yet at the same time he suggests that 'some of Lacan's fundamental ideas and discourses of subjectivity . . . were very m u c h present to contemporary audiences (if not always seen for what they were)' (p. 13). This is a radical departure from the strong historicist trend of N e w Historicism, Cultural Materialism and some feminist criticism of Early Modern drama, all of which Hillman explicitly defines Wmself against, albeit not very convincingly (Jonathan Dollimore, Catherine Belsey and Stephen Greenblatt are difficult to undennine in a mere few pages). In his introduction, Hillman sets u p a number of connections between Early Modern dramatic self-speaking and Lacan's subject formation. H e suggests that the Renaissance uses of the mirror and book as m e t o n y m y for identity '[intersect] with the Lacanian paradigm' for the constitution of subjectivity. In the textual analysis 252 Reviews that follows, his readings, particularly of medieval uses of the mirror and the book, dofitwell with Lacanian theory, but seem no more insightful than other studies of these metonymic devices. He also makes m u c h use of the poorly explained term 'aphanisis' as central to his readings of the texts, but often this too fails to illuminate the text. Hillman focuses on the myth of Babel and its prominence in the Renaissance period, taking the view 'that the Early Modern hermeneutics of Babel anticipate poststructuralism's problematization of the processes of signification' (pp. 24-5). Again he attributes Early Modern thinking with thoroughly anachronistic poststructuralist understandings of the signified and the signifier, the result of which seems to either point to the Early M o d e m period and its texts as the hint for the ideas of Derrida and Lacan, or make the reader highly suspicious of Hillman's project as a whole. Overall I found Hillman's application of Lacanian theory difficult to follow, which could be due in part to its highly complex nature, but also, I suspect, due to the problems of Hillman's overreferencing and turgid, convoluted style. A great number of other critics are mentioned in the introduction either to be discarded or appropriated, but this creates a sense of eccentric eclecticism that undermines the radical nature of the approach, rather than clearing a distinct path the reader m a y follow. H e also uses (and rather facetiously defends) an irritating convention of quoting everything in the original language and then translating it himself, which is cumbersome and a little pretentious. O n a more positive note, Hillman does come up with some rather interesting close readings of the individual texts which, i f not strong arguments for a Lacanian view of the given text, certainly offer something worthwhile. For example, he puts an intriguing and, I thought, convincing case for masturbation as the defining theme of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost (pp. 246ff.). Reviews 253 However, his introductory discussion of masturbation as 'a specific sexual activity, shown in the process of becoming psychologically fraught' (p. 246) again asks the reader to assent to either a brilliantly transhistoricist Lacan, or a precociously modern Early Modern mindset. Also, while the extended intertextual examination of the use of the owl...

Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers (review)

Reviews 253 However, his introductory discussion of masturbation as 'a specific sexual activity, shown in the process of becoming psychologically fraught' (p. 246) again asks the reader to assent to either a brilliantly transhistoricist Lacan, or a precociously modern Early Modern mindset. Also, while the extended intertextual examination of the use of the owl in Early Modern texts shows an admirable attention to detail and intertextual breadth, it unfortunately offers thin proof for Hillman's contentions. Like much of this book, Hillman's enthusiasm and flair for close textual and intertextual reading (evident in his previous books) are often weakened by the obligatory theoretical gloss. Still, those w h o are very well versed in either Lacan, or any (or all) of the texts Hillman focuses on should find this book useful to some degree. Christine Couche Scarborough Western Australia Horrocks, Geoffrey, Greek: A History of the Language and its Speaker (Longman Linguistic .Library), L o n d o n and N e w York, Longman, 1997; pp. xxi, 393; 1 map; R.R.P. £19.99. This is a fascinating volume which gives a thorough overview of the history of developments in the Greek language within their cultural context from the Mycenaean period until the present day. Each section is illustrated by one of more passages from selected texts, which are given in the original, translated into English, and transcribed in the pronunciation of their time with a further literal translation following the word order of the original. Furthermore, detailed historical summaries introduce the reader to the civilisations of Byzantium and Modern Greece and the factors 254 Reviews within them which influenced linguistic change. Though there are sections of some technical complexity, the work as a whole is extremely readable. The brief summary of the prehistory and early development of Greek is followed by a look at the official and literary 'standards' of classical Greek and the rise of Attic as a literary standard and administrative language. Horrocks then continues with an in-depth study of Greek in the Hellenistic world, not omitting a discussion of the ancient Greek dialects, including Macedonian. Inscriptions from the Hellenistic and R o m a n worlds, such as IG VII 3352, IX.ii.517, and SIG 11.646, illustrate dialectical" variation within the koine, sound changes, and morphological developments. The Septuagint is also discussed as an example of the koine as a literary dialect. Private documents of the relatively uneducated provide valuable information about the evolution of the spoken koine in the R o m a n period, while Epictetus, the N e w Testament and later Christian literature are used as examples of 'colloquial' literature and different stylistic levels. The passages studied under the heading of 'Byzantines belles lettres', illustrating the 'centrality of the ancient Greek literary tradition in high Byzantine culture', comprise the three rather obvious examples of Procopius, Psellos, and Anna Komnene. (Niketas Choniates, that master of Byzantine prose writing, is not even in the index.) The chapter on 'Middle Styles in Byzantium', however, is far more imaginatively constructed, and sections from Malalas, Theophanes Confessor, Moschos, St Germanos (Patr. 71530 ), Constantine Porphyrogennetos' De administrando imperio, and Kekaumenos are used to demonstrate the characteristic features of the chronographic and hagiographic style. Further in-depth knowledge of Byzantine civilisation is shown by the appearance of a passage from the Palaiologan 'metaphrasis' of the Alexiad, in Reviews 255 which Anna Komnene's work was rewritten into a more readerfriendly register, thus demonstrating the return of a wider reading public in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries w h o were unable to cope with the intricacies of archaising literature. Academic Greek in the late period is here represented by Maximos Planudes and official Greek of the later empire by a decree of Andronikos II ( M M VI, 248). Horrocks argues that the range of middle-register writing in Byzantium was 'not the product of more or less incompetent archaizing, but rather reflected a continuously evolving tradition that was subject to conventions controlling the mix of ancient and modern according to period, register, and style' (p. 204). A key theme of this work is the development of the koine into a single standard language...

The Mediterranean Trajectory of Aristotle's Economic Canon

In Greece of the fourth century BCE, Xenophon was a famous author of practical textbooks on household management and on the financial management of the polis; but in the conceptual domain Aristotle was a richer source since he pioneered in fundamentals. In his works on practical philosophy he initiated an analytical thematization on three cardinal topics, namely on the transition from a natural household economy towards a society moved by the chrematistic spirit; on justice in the terms of trade; and on the nature of money. For almost a millennium and a half the scholars of the succeeding civilizations in the Mediterranean gave but little attention to and even criticized Aristotle s analytical schemes. With the advent of the Late Middle Ages, however, the Stagirite's constructs underwent a spectacular revival with the novel and trend-setting commentaries of the Arab scholar Ibn Rushd. And in the "summae" of the Latin Scholastics his "peri economias" flowered into a canon. In the Latin Scholastic texts the Aristotelian canon was amended by Christian ethics with a medieval flavour. The Latin Scholastics, more than preceding schools of moral philosophy, came to grips with the challenge of explaining the new and disturbing market forces in their feudal societies. The rhetoric schools of the Italian humanists re-interpreted Aristotle 's political and economic thematizations from their own historical context. With a greater emphasis on utility and hedonism, the humanists produced significant hermeneutical shifts. In the reworkings of the "Quattrocento ", economic attitudes and humanistic culture met halfway. The humanists announced the spirit of modern times, characterized by the assumption that human beings possess an innate self-interested and economic mentality. With the breakthrough of this modern mindset, Aristotle's concept of development went into decline.

Consciousness, complexity, and self in postmodern times

The purpose of this paper is twofold. One is rejecting and deconstructive—functionalism, philosophy of mind, and the modern mindset are presented as interrelated, inadequate explanations of human consciousness and personal identity. The other is accepting and reconstructive—complexity theory and postmodernism are offered as more useful descriptions of “what is really going on.” Modernism and functionalism belong to an age of increasingly narrow specialization. Indeed, philosophical and scientific discourse has become so specialized that even within different subspecialties of the same field, experts have difficulty understanding each other. In contrast, complexity theory, and the new field of consciousness studies, take a holistic, interdisciplinary approach, while postmodernism welcomes a plurality of voices.