Audience Of Text Research Articles

The Implied Imperative: Poetry as Ethics in the Proverbs of the Tirukkuṟaḷ

ABSTRACTThe Tirukkuṟaḷ is a text of Tamil proverbs that circulates widely in South India today. While the first two sections of the text contain practical pieces of ethical advice, the third section contains an extended love poem. This variation in content has resulted in a dichotomous view of the text in which ethics and poetry are viewed as fundamentally distinct. This paper blurs the distinction between ethics and poetry by showing how the poetic form of the Tirukkuṟaḷ's proverbs not only enhances the text's ethical message but also participates in the ethical formation of the text's audience. Building on Geoffrey Galt Harpham's notion of sub‐ethics, I argue that the Tirukkuṟaḷ uses three literary strategies—metaphor, inference, and suspense—to engage the audience in modes of “sub‐ethical” reflection by raising ethical questions and framing ethical choices.

The Metamorphosis of an Ass

The Metamorphosis of an Ass Shadi Bartsch Peter Singer, ed. and Ellen Finkelpearl, trans. Apuleius: The Golden Ass. London: Norton, 2021. ix + 219 pp. $19.95. 1. IN WHICH THE AUTHOR MUST DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO WRITE A REVIEW The Lucius of Apuleius' The Golden Ass is not delighted at his transformation into an ass, but the many juicy stories he overhears during his stay in animal form provide a silver lining—stories which, once he has returned to human form, he incorporates into a book about his experience. The resulting narrative offers countless opportunities for interpretation. In it, realistic depictions of animal suffering caused by humans jostle with the most light-hearted X-rated romps; the contents of a ribald "Milesian tale" stud the confessions of a priest; a complicated allegory about love is questioned by its framing narrative. The novel's central questions demand serious thought: why would a devotee of Isis include raunchy tales in his autobiography? Is the author/ass simply the last victim of all the religious scams he sees? Does the battered donkey stand as testimony to the suffering of ancient slaves? How does the Cupid and Psyche story reflect on Lucius' curiosity? This complexity—and the fact that The Golden Ass makes for a fabulous read—renders the experience of reading the work pretty much inenarrabile. Enter Peter Singer, the Princeton utilitarian and bio-ethicist, who has recently published a curtailed version of the novel with a translation by classicist Ellen Finkelpearl. It's unusual for bio-ethicists to publish editions of classical texts, but the motivation here was personal. In an essay published in the online Classics journal Antigone, Singer tells of his astonishment upon encountering this work.1 Here, from the 2nd [End Page 169] century c.e., was an account of a man transformed into an ass who suffered much in that unhappy pelt. To Singer, the point seemed clear. As he writes in an essay on "The Ethical Significance of the Golden Ass" included in his edition, "almost two millennia ago, a writer and philosopher chose to tell a story from the point of view of a donkey, seeing that animal as a sentient being with a life of his own to lead" (211). It was a message worth repeating, given that Singer hoped we would think about the implications for our own view of animals. But since the message was obscured by the presence of the titillating stories heard by the ass along the way, Singer also decided to prune away from the book anything unrelated to the donkey's direct experience.2 (He notes that Finkelpearl did not approve of the cuts; her decision to go ahead with the translation reflected her desire to broaden the text's audience.)3 As the reader will know, Peter Singer has been an eloquent advocate both for philanthropic giving in The Life You Can Save (Singer 2009) and, more pertinently here, animal rights (starting with his foundational Animal Liberation (Singer 1975). Much as in Bentham's famous argument that "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"4 Singer has argued that using criteria such as rational capacity to create a hierarchy of animals and humans is, simply put, immoral. On his view, we should privilege instead a living being's capacity to suffer, and, since animals can most certainly suffer, we are obliged to offer them the same consideration as we do humans.5 The publication of this Golden Ass is in support of this cause, and Singer's essay in the volume also offers a brief history of philosophical views on animal rights and dwells on the very real horrors of factory farming. As it happens, this reviewer is also a passionate advocate of animal rights. I believe that factory farming is indeed the great moral evil of [End Page 170] our times, and that our descendants will look back on it with the horror we feel now for slavery. Should I therefore applaud the publication of the athetized Ass? Surely not. After all, if we're letting ethics enter into consideration...

The Impact of Aramaic (especially Syriac) on the Qur'ān

AbstractThe impact of Aramaic (especially Syriac) on the Qur'ān has long been a matter of debate among scholars, especially among those of the western academe but also within circles of traditional Muslim scholarship. Central to this discussion is the language and audience of the Qur'ān. Studies on the Qur'ān's foreign vocabulary gradually gave way to more in depth analyses on the text's relationship to Syriac Christian literature as well as debates surrounding the Jewish‐Christian dimensions, the text's audience. The textual theories employed in studying the Qur'ān's relationship to the Syriac language and Biblical canon contain the strongest debate concerning the impact of Aramaic (especially Syriac) on the Qur'ān. These textual theories have been given consideration in recent scholarship, which reads the Qur'ān in light of the Aramaic translations of the Gospels, as well as the Syriac translation of the Didascalia Apostolorum.

On the Historiography of Philosophy

This issue of Philosophy Today presents of papers from the International Workshop on the Historiography of Philosophy: Representations and Cultural Constructions, held in September 2012 at the West University of Timic oara, Romania. This meeting was organized under the Romanian Funding Authority for the Higher Education and Scientific Research (UEFISCDU), Bucharest, and resulted in the papers published here. The organizing committee included Gyo rgy Gere by, Associate Professor at the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest; Claudiu Mesaroc, from the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, West University, Timijoara; Florin Lobonf, fellow at the Royal Holloway, London; Robert Lazu, researcher at New Europe College, Bucharest; and Teodora Artimon, Central European University, Budapest.The project began from the idea that an innovative exploration of recent calls for an updated public image of philosophy was necessary and of interest.1 We therefore aimed to investigate trends regarding possible reconfigurations in the methodology used in the History of Philosophy. Moreover, our main ambition was to investigate these trends in a comparative manner with respect to the history of ideas and images, within the framework of an interdisciplinary set of investigation methods.We granted that it is nowadays difficult to decide (or, it is a matter of taste) what the constitutive problems of philosophy are. On one hand, many hold that philosophical problems are no longer canonical but rather are reconstructed meanings and acts. On the other hand, philosophy has for a long time been practiced as Geistesgeschichte or as canon-formation meant to further the development of meaningful vocation. From this perspective, the external public of philosophy depended on accepting these canons as inescapable material to study and understand. But such debates on the identity and the legitimate object of philosophy will always depend on the so-called schools and, ultimately, on tastes and cultural context of the philosophers.Jorge E. Gracia, for example, responding to Richard Rorty's emphasis on the problem-solving mission of Philosophy, in an attempt to recover the gap between incompatibilists and continentalists, has said that solutions and arguments built by philosophers are not obtainable by any alternative means; therefore philosophy has its own scientific and cultural monopoly.2 But on the very same basis we can claim the right to interdisciplinarity for philosophy itself. Charles Taylor, too, has argued that philosophy must be understood as the reinterpretation or rewriting of its own fundamental texts, authors, concepts, and ideas.' Yet one may link this thesis to Gracia's further claim that the product of this re-phrasing is a part of the text itself*-therefore, the philosophical text (even the historical text) and philosophical practice are not separable. We do philosophy to the extent that we rephrase or rewrite; it is consequently not legitimate to think that once the meaning or context was lost, reading the text remains useless-to hold, for example, that since Kant or Aristotle do not solve contemporary problems, it is not worth reading them. In fact, the philosopher as the historical author, and the general or specialized public that interacts with the text and alters its form, are equally authors according to Gracia's ontology of text.5 The two categories are parts of the same ontological structure; therefore, the ontological question of a text's audience will include subjects like identity (types, composi- tion), function, necessity, character (subversive and repressive), and subjectivity. Gracia's model, in this sense, presents a position that endorses the authorship of interpretative communities of readers. But it is then questionable whether the so-called historical author is the only one responsible for the ideas signified by his/her text or whether this responsibility dissipates and becomes something like a shared vision between the historical author and the different types of public. …

The Historia Orientalis of Jacques de Vitry: Visual and Written Commentaries as Evidence of a Text's Audience, Reception, and Utilization

The Historia Orientalis of Jacques de Vitry: Visual and Written Commentaries as Evidence of a Text's Audience, Reception, and Utilization

The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey

This article studies the notion of “national character” as it is formulated in literature and as it influences literary praxis. Starting from the insights of image studies or “imagology” (a comparatist specialism developed over the last five decades, mainly in France and Germany), national thought, as one of the most pervasive and enduring cultural ideologies, should be critically and systematically studied in its literary manifestation. In order to propose an agenda for such a study, I survey the existing constructivist and structuralist literary practice, drawing two general conclusions: (1) It is possible to make an analytical distinction,based on cogent textual observation, between the discursive registers of factual reporting and stereotyping. That distinction revolves not only around the commonplace nature and intertextual dissemination of certain characterizations but also around the individual text's strategies of characterization: the quasi-psychological (“character”-based)motivation that a given text may adduce for cultural patterns, and the way a text constructs salient features concerning a given nation as“typical” or “characteristic.” (2) “Deep structures” in national stereotyping, involving the construction of binaries around oppositional pairs such as North/South, strong/weak, and central/peripheral, should be addressed diachronically and historically. The end result of such (historically variable but unfalsifiable) stereotypical oppositions is that most imputed national characteristics will exhibit a binary nature, capable of attributing strongly contradictory characteristics to any given national group (“is a nation of contrasts”). I propose that national stereotyping be studied at a more fundamental level as a pattern of Janus-faced “imagemes,” stereotypical schemata characterized by their inherent temperamental ambivalence and capable of being triggered into different actual manifestations.On the basis of these insights, it must be possible to move from textual analysis and intertextual inventory to a pragmatic/rhetorical study of national characterization and national stereotyping, taking into account a text's audience function. This ambition (i.e., to address the dynamics of national stereotyping as a historical, audience-oriented praxis rather than as a textual feature) raises a challenge of its own, largely revolving around the hermeneutic and/or historical distance between a text's provenance and its audience; but some possible ways to address that challenge are also indicated.

Rhetoric and Rational Enterprises

Traditional views of organizational communication have fallen short because they misapprehended and oversimplified the realities of rhetorical behavior in organizations and because they offered weak theoretical underpinnings for the study of business communication. Recent developments in rhetorical theory spearheaded by the work of Toulmin, Perelman, Polanyi, and others offer a coherent, theoretically sound, and productive way of analyzing discourse in organizations. Applying constructs of the “new rhetoric” to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation illustrates the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse. Rhetoric in organizations, just as in other “rational enterprises” (such as the disciplines of science and law), reveals underlying paradigms that are determined by the nature of communal behavior and by the nature of thinking man.