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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer
Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
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 …
Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions Of A Romantic Nature [Review], Michael Fischer
Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions Of A Romantic Nature [Review], Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
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.
Accepting The Romantics As Philosophers, Michael Fischer
Accepting The Romantics As Philosophers, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
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 …
Blake, Hegel And Dialectic [Review], Michael Fischer
Blake, Hegel And Dialectic [Review], Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
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. …