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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Stanley Cavell And Criticizing The University From Within, Michael Fischer
Stanley Cavell And Criticizing The University From Within, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
This article discusses the views of professor Stanley Cavell on academic philosophy and corporate universality. He regards academic philosophy as the genuine present of the impulse and the history of philosophy which represents in public intellectual life. He is worried whether values and philosophy are teachable in universities and colleges. He stayed in the profession to show how to withstand moral cynicism and respond to the failures of academic institutions.
Wittgenstein As A Modernist Philosopher, Michael Fischer
Wittgenstein As A Modernist Philosopher, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
Much attention has recently been given to Martin Heidegger and his disturbing relationship to fascism. I want here to look at another philosopher in this context: Ludwig Wittgenstein. As a source of insight into the politics of modernism, Wittgenstein would seem to have at least three strikes against him. His explicit political pronouncements are rare; his relationship to literary modernism is unclear; and the political implications of his philosophical writings are notoriously difficult to assess. Perhaps for these reasons, discussions of modernism usually omit Wittgenstein, and discussions of Wittgenstein usually ignore modernism. Stanley Cavell is an important exception to this …
Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities [Review], Michael Fischer
Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities Martha Nussbaum joins many observers in arguing that the arts and humanities are under siege, threatened by budget cuts and a growing emphasis on professional training. When budget cuts do not eliminate university programs in the arts and humanities, they swell class size to the point that the traditional hallmarks of a humanistic education—class discussion, essay examinations, research assignments demanding critical thinking—become untenable. Instead, PowerPoint lecturing and multiple-choice exercises dominate, reinforcing the rote learning that standardized testing has already made the norm in K–12 education. A recent Wall Street Journal article, …
Blake, Hegel And Dialectic [Review], Michael Fischer
Blake, Hegel And Dialectic [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
According to David Punter, "Blake's dialectic and Hegel's share a number of crucial features" (p. 11), making Hegel's Phenomenology the "closest parallel to [Blake's] work" (p. 17). By emphasizing progression through contraries, both Blake and Hegel transform the dialectical tradition that they presumably inherit from Heraclitus, Giordano Bruno, and Jakob Böhme, all of whom Punter analyzes in his opening chapter. Subsequent chapters trace the similarities that Punter finds among such works as the Phenomenology, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and The Four Zoas. Although Punter calls his comparison of Blake and Hegel "important and fruitful" (p. …
Accepting The Romantics As Philosophers, Michael Fischer
Accepting The Romantics As Philosophers, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
The Romantics are not widely regarded as philosophers, at least not in philosophy departments, where they are seldom taught. Some of the reasons behind this exclusion of the Romantics involve a general disdain for literature; other reasons suggest a more specific uneasiness with Romanticism itself—with its apparent interest in animism, its self-indulgence, its coolness toward reason, and, perhaps above all, its refusal to abide by Kant's containment of skepticism. These complaints are not the invention of paranoid or obtuse academic philosophers (as some literary critics might like to think). In fact, some of these objections have dogged the Romantics from …
The Reader In The Text: Essays On Audience And Interpretation [Review], Michael Fischer
The Reader In The Text: Essays On Audience And Interpretation [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
The Reader in the Text is a useful collection of essays on an important topic in contemporary criticism—the role of readers in interpreting literary works. Contributors include some of the most widely-read writers on the subject (Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Gerald Prince, Norman Holland) as well as several critics less familiar to American readers (Jacques Leenhardt and Karlheinz Stierle, among many others). Susan Suleiman adds a helpful introduction on the "varieties of audience-oriented criticism" and Inge Crosman provides an annotated bibliography.
Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions Of A Romantic Nature [Review], Michael Fischer
Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions Of A Romantic Nature [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
Samuel R. Levin's Metaphoric Worlds is an ambitious book. The author proposes a controversial theory of metaphor motivated by a bold reading of Wordsworth's poetry but his theory sometimes falls short of the poetry it is designed to explicate. His respect for Wordsworth, however, redeems these occasional lapses.
The Death Of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy Of His Last Days [Review], Michael Fischer
The Death Of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy Of His Last Days [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
Sigmund Freud has been on Mark Edmundson’s mind at least since his 1990 book, Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud. In that book, Edmundson uncovers a tension between two sides of Freud: the normative Freud committed to a rigid understanding of human behavior, and the romantic Freud whose restlessness with all given conventions inspired endless self-reinvention in his own writing. This side of Freud shows his kinship to Wordsworth, Emerson, and other writers and provides grounds of resistance to what is most stultifying in his own work. In Edmundson’s view, we need the imaginative …
Wittgenstein And Derrida [Review], Michael Fischer
Wittgenstein And Derrida [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
Wittgenstein and Derrida, the subjects of Henry Staten's important new book, have met before in contemporary literary theory, usually, however, as enemies or at least as philosophers with antithetical approaches to language. In several articles and at greater length in Act and Quality (1981), Charles Altieri, for example, has found in Wittgenstein a powerful challenge to Derridean literary theory, while Christopher Norris in The Deconstructive Turn (1983) has argued that Wittgenstein's writings are infected with the skeptical doubts that they supposedly cure. Unlike these critics, Staten proposes allying Wittgenstein with Derrida, an effort that depends on contesting what I would …
Emerson And Skepticism: The Cipher Of The World [Review], Michael Fischer
Emerson And Skepticism: The Cipher Of The World [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
In Emerson and Skepticism John Michael argues that even in Emerson's early works his famous self-reliance was more a dream than an achievement. For Michael this dream dates from Emerson's initial quarrel with Unitarianism. In Emerson's "The Lord's Supper," the skeptical arguments that Unitarians had turned against orthodox Christianity come back to haunt Unitarianism itself. We are presumably left with the autonomous individual, the Emerson who can confidendy say to his Unitarian teachers, "This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it" (p. 17). But, as Michael points out, this …
Defending Compromise, Michael Fischer
Defending Compromise, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
The article focuses on the opinion of James Wagner, president of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, about the role of compromise in founding and sustaining the American political system. The reaction of the public to the article he published in the Winter 2013 issue of the "Emory Magazine" entitled "As American as...Compromise" is discussed. The view of professor Avishai Margalit about the idea of rotten compromises outlined in the article is also noted.
Wordsworth: The Sense Of History [Review], Michael Fischer
Wordsworth: The Sense Of History [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
Alan Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History is a large book containing a multitude of materials on a wide range of subjects: Napoleon's military tactics, the indebtedness of Lake District weavers, the social history of criminal punishment, the class structure of Lakeland agricultural society, and the floor plans of late eighteenth-century rural cottages (to name only a few). As if all this were not enough, Liu often apologizes for not providing more, as when he admits that "full proof" of one of his hypotheses "opens to view ... a research field not as fully investigated as others and too vast …
Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer
Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
We are still trying to sort out the complex legacy of romanticism. "We" here includes philosophers Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and a remarkable variety of literary theorists, from Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom through Hazard Adams and Jerome J. McGann. Julie Ellison's important book, Delicate Subjects, focuses on an especially difficult problem we have inherited from the romantics: the problem of defining the ethics of interpretation. According to Ellison, male romantic writers worry that in literary interpretation, we murder to dissect (to paraphrase Wordsworth). Criticism, from …
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language And The Strangeness Of The Ordinary, Michael Fischer
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language And The Strangeness Of The Ordinary, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
In a frequently quoted remark from Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein comments on our overlooking things because they are familiar, or right in front of us every day: "One is unable to notice something-because it is always before one's eyes" (§129). We take these things for granted instead of appreciating their strangeness. For readers of this journal, one of these familiar things might be the very project of drawing on philosophy while discussing works of literature. Not every critic does this; the New Critics, for instance, hardly ever did. From a certain point of view, turning to philosophy feels forced or odd, …
Using Stanley Cavell, Michael Fischer
Using Stanley Cavell, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
Stanley Cavell often speaks of inheriting and carrying on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other writers. These writers help him move on in his own thinking, turning him around when he feels lost, provoking him when he gets discouraged or stuck. His indebtedness to J. L. Austin in the acknowledgements to Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) captures one way he benefits from all the writers who have influenced him: “To the late J. L. Austin I owe, beyond what I hope is plain in my work, whatever is owed the teacher …
Literature And The Question Of Philosophy [Review], Michael Fischer
Literature And The Question Of Philosophy [Review], Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
However defined theoretically, literature and philosophy also designate two departments in most North American universities. The paths of these departments occasionally cross, say in a philosophy and literature course, then go their separate ways: toward logic, in the case of philosophy, and toward some variant of the still powerful New Criticism in literature departments, where poetry is considered as poetry and not as another thing. Combining literature and philosophy, or seeing them as always already intertwined, thus involves transgressing departmental boundaries and runs the risk of seeming dilettantish to those colleagues who remain within each discipline. Literature and the Question …
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
Imagine a community where constructive dialogue across political, class, and other differences is rare. Threatened by disagreement, individuals cluster together with like-minded believers, often egging one another on into taking even more extreme positions, usually against their ideological opponents. Sources of information are selected to ratify existing views instead of challenging them. Shielded from external perspectives, individuals stay stuck in anger, opposition, and resentment, recycling grievances against their enemies and spinning out fantasies of revenge.
Wordsworth And The Recovery Of Hope, Michael Fischer
Wordsworth And The Recovery Of Hope, Michael Fischer
Michael Fischer
No abstract provided.