Henry James at the Ethical Turn

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Ethical Approaches ◽  
Ethical Thinking

Matthew Flaherty, “Henry James at the Ethical Turn: Vivification and Ironization in The Ambassadors” (pp. 366–393) Taking its cue from recent work by Dorothy J. Hale, this paper begins by exploring the extent to which Levinasian, deconstructive, and Aristotelian critical approaches have associated Henry James’s fiction, and the ethical import of reading literature more broadly, with an array of related values including particularity, impulsiveness, and indeterminacy. Seeking to complicate this characterization of the ethical effects of Jamesian fiction, this paper emphasizes the debt of The Ambassadors (1903) to a form of dialectical narration that privileges an array of antithetical values including abstraction, analysis, and understanding. Attending in particular to the novel’s opposition between Lambert Strether’s imagination and Maria Gostrey’s discrimination, I argue that The Ambassadors uses perspectival relations between characters to clarify and challenge the judgments of its characters and, by extension, its readers. By building dialectical oppositions like these into his novels, James does not disrupt structures of thought with immediate feeling so much as he shapes immediate feelings into structures of thought. The paper makes the case that it is through juxtaposition to characters like Maria that the full significance of Strether’s feeling—that is, the perspective of value that motivates his practice—can be grasped by readers seeking to refine their own ethical thinking. By emphasizing how James’s fiction facilitates thoughts that attend to the whole, rather than just provoking feelings that attend to the particular, the paper seeks to expand both received understandings of James’s fiction and of ethical approaches to literary criticism more broadly.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Moral Experience ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Ideological Criticism ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Psychological Dimensions

Although it is widely observed that a consequential “turn to ethics” took place in the field of literary criticism beginning in the late 1980s, this book argues that a broader cultural privileging of psychological and therapeutic frameworks has led to a displacement of the importance of moral reflection and moral judgment in the literary field. Between the pervasive influence of psychology on intellectual paradigms and cultural life, and the critique of morality within ideological criticism, key elements of the moral life, and of moral experience within the time of a life, have been lost to view. This introduction maps out the recent work on ethics in literary studies, introduces the moral significance of British object relations theory (an outlier among the psychological frameworks under analysis), and concludes by discussing Kant and Nietzsche’s divergent understandings of the psychological dimensions of moral life.

scholarly journals On the construction of an artificial paradox: A critical commentary on Diefendorf and Bridges’ ‘On the enduring relationship between masculinity and homophobia’

Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 1285-1298
Author(s):  
Mark McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Attitudes Toward Homosexuality ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Trend ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Citation Practices ◽  
Qualitative Literature

The social trend of decreasing homophobia and liberalizing attitudes toward homosexuality is a contentious sociological issue. In a recent article in this journal, Diefendorf and Bridges contend that differences in findings of quantitative and qualitative research related to masculinities and homophobia demand new theories and methods to chart the enduring relationship between homophobia and masculinity. In this critical commentary, I demonstrate the flaws of the methodological framing and refute the characterization of qualitative literature provided. I argue that the theoretical errors in the original article are a result of inattention to social and historical context. Drawing attention to problematic citation practices, I call for critical approaches that recognize both positive social change and contexts where problematic dynamics persist.

INEFFABILITY AND REVENGE

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-809
Author(s):  
CHRIS SCAMBLER
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Philosophical Significance

AbstractIn recent work Philip Welch has proven the existence of ‘ineffable liars’ for Hartry Field’s theory of truth. These are offered as liar-like sentences that escape classification in Field’s transfinite hierarchy of determinateness operators. In this article I present a slightly more general characterization of the ineffability phenomenon, and discuss its philosophical significance. I show the ineffable sentences to be less ‘liar-like’ than they appear in Welch’s presentation. I also point to some open technical problems whose resolution would greatly clarify the philosophical issues raised by the ineffability phenomenon.

WEAK ORBIT EQUIVALENCE OF CANTOR MINIMAL SYSTEMS

1995 ◽  
Vol 06 (04) ◽  
pp. 559-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELI GLASNER ◽  
BENJAMIN WEISS
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Orbit Equivalence ◽  
C Algebra ◽  
Dimension Groups ◽  
Cantor Minimal Systems

This paper is a commentary on the recent work [4]. It has two goals: the first is to eliminate the C*-algebra machinery from the proofs of the results of [4]; the second, to provide a characterization of weak orbit equivalence of Cantor minimal systems in terms of their dimension groups.

scholarly journals Marstrand-type Theorems for the Counting and Mass Dimensions in ℤ

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 700-743 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL GLASSCOCK
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Orthogonal Projection ◽  
Side Length ◽  
Orthogonal Projections ◽  
Mass Dimension ◽  
Image Position ◽  
Almost All

The counting and (upper) mass dimensions of a set A ⊆ $\mathbb{R}^d$ are $$D(A) = \limsup_{\|C\| \to \infty} \frac{\log | \lfloor A \rfloor \cap C |}{\log \|C\|}, \quad \smash{\overline{D}}\vphantom{D}(A) = \limsup_{\ell \to \infty} \frac{\log | \lfloor A \rfloor \cap [-\ell,\ell)^d |}{\log (2 \ell)},$$ where ⌊A⌋ denotes the set of elements of A rounded down in each coordinate and where the limit supremum in the counting dimension is taken over cubes C ⊆ $\mathbb{R}^d$ with side length ‖C‖ → ∞. We give a characterization of the counting dimension via coverings: $$D(A) = \text{inf} \{ \alpha \geq 0 \mid {d_{H}^{\alpha}}(A) = 0 \},$$ where $${d_{H}^{\alpha}}(A) = \lim_{r \rightarrow 0} \limsup_{\|C\| \rightarrow \infty} \inf \biggl\{ \sum_i \biggl(\frac{\|C_i\|}{\|C\|} \biggr)^\alpha \ \bigg| \ 1 \leq \|C_i\| \leq r \|C\| \biggr\}$$ in which the infimum is taken over cubic coverings {Ci} of A ∩ C. Then we prove Marstrand-type theorems for both dimensions. For example, almost all images of A ⊆ $\mathbb{R}^d$ under orthogonal projections with range of dimension k have counting dimension at least min(k, D(A)); if we assume D(A) = D(A), then the mass dimension of A under the typical orthogonal projection is equal to min(k, D(A)). This work extends recent work of Y. Lima and C. G. Moreira.

scholarly journals "Solomon's Salacious Song": Foucault's Author Function and the Early Christian Interpretation of the Canticum Canticorum

1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Song Of Songs ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
Interpretive Mode ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
The Erotic

AbstractThe transformation of the erotic Song of Songs into a mystical tract on the soul's love for Christ was surely one of the great exegetical feats of late ancient Christianity. Recent work on the politics of meaning leads us to interrogate more closely the processes by which early Christian exegetes achieved that feat, and how their interpretations encoded and produced particular forms of socially mediated power and knowledge. Michel Foucault has proposed for modern literary criticism the interpretive mode of the "author function," by which literary critics can domesticate or reject a text that is potentially transgressive. This "author function" supplied one method by which difficult canonical texts, like the Song of Songs, were tamed, and furthermore produced authoritative (and authorial) meaning that mediated contested boundaries of Christian cultural identity.

Tragic form and feeling in theIliad

1982 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Way

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.Henry James,The Bostonians, ch. xxxixThis paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs.

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