Download or read book Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions written by Cathy Caruth and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-08-24 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the prevailing account of English empiricism, Locke conceived of self-understanding as a matter of mere observation, bound closely to the laws of physical perception. English Romantic poets and German critical philosophers challenged Locke's conception, arguing that it failed to account adequately for the power of thought to turn upon itself—to detach itself from the laws of the physical world. Cathy Caruth reinterprets questions at the heart of empiricism by treating Locke's text not simply as philosophical doctrine but also as a narrative in which "experience" plays an unexpected and uncanny role. Rediscovering traces and transformations of this narrative in Wordsworth, Kant, and Freud, Caruth argues that these authors must not be read only as rejecting or overcoming empirical doctrine but also as reencountering in their own narratives the complex and difficult relation between language and experience. Beginning her inquiry with the moment of empirical self-reflection in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding—when a mad mother mourns her dead child—Caruth asks what it means that empiricism represents itself as an act of mourning and explores why scenes of mourning reappear in later texts such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and Freud's Civilization. From these readings Caruth traces a recurring narrative of radical loss and the continual displacement of the object or the agent of loss. In Locke it is the mother who mourns her dead child, while in Wordsworth it is the child who mourns the dead mother. In Kant the father murders the son, while in Freud the sons murder the father. As she traces this pattern, Caruth shows that the conceptual claims of each text to move beyond empiricism are implicit claims to move beyond reference. Yet the narrative of death in each text, she argues, leaves a referential residue that cannot be reclaimed by empirical or conceptual logic. Caruth thus reveals, in each of these authors, a tension between the abstraction of a conceptual language freed from reference and the compelling referential resistance of particular stories to abstraction.

Download or read book Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions written by Cathy Caruth and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the prevailing account of English empiricism, Locke conceived of self-understanding as a matter of mere observation, bound closely to the laws of physical perception. English Romantic poets and German critical philosophers challenged Locke's conception, arguing that it failed to account adequately for the power of thought to turn upon itself & mdash;to detach itself from the laws of the physical world. Cathy Caruth reinterprets questions at the heart of empiricism by treating Locke's text not simply as philosophical doctrine but also as a narrative in which "experience" plays an unexpected and uncanny role. Rediscovering traces and transformations of this narrative in Wordsworth, Kant, and Freud, Caruth argues that these authors must not be read only as rejecting or overcoming empirical doctrine but also as reencountering in their own narratives the complex and difficult relation between language and experience. Beginning her inquiry with the moment of empirical self-reflection in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding & mdash;when a mad mother mourns her dead child & mdash;Caruth asks what it means that empiricism represents itself as an act of mourning and explores why scenes of mourning reappear in later texts such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and Freud's Civilization . From these readings Caruth traces a recurring narrative of radical loss and the continual displacement of the object or the agent of loss. In Locke it is the mother who mourns her dead child, while in Wordsworth it is the child who mourns the dead mother. In Kant the father murders the son, while in Freud the sons murder the father. As she traces this pattern, Caruth shows that the conceptual claims of each text to move beyond empiricism are implicit claims to move beyond reference. Yet the narrative of death in each text, she argues, leaves a referential residue that cannot be reclaimed by empirical or conceptual logic. Caruth thus reveals, in each of these authors, a tension between the abstraction of a conceptual language freed from reference and the compelling referential resistance of particular stories to abstraction.

Download or read book Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions written by Cathy Caruth and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the prevailing account of English empiricism, Locke conceived of self-understanding as a matter of mere observation, bound closely to the laws of physical perception. English Romantic poets and German critical philosophers challenged Locke's conception, arguing that it failed to account adequately for the power of thought to turn upon itself—to detach itself from the laws of the physical world. Cathy Caruth reinterprets questions at the heart of empiricism by treating Locke's text not simply as philosophical doctrine but also as a narrative in which "experience" plays an unexpected and uncanny role. Rediscovering traces and transformations of this narrative in Wordsworth, Kant, and Freud, Caruth argues that these authors must not be read only as rejecting or overcoming empirical doctrine but also as reencountering in their own narratives the complex and difficult relation between language and experience. Beginning her inquiry with the moment of empirical self-reflection in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding—when a mad mother mourns her dead child—Caruth asks what it means that empiricism represents itself as an act of mourning and explores why scenes of mourning reappear in later texts such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and Freud's Civilization. From these readings Caruth traces a recurring narrative of radical loss and the continual displacement of the object or the agent of loss. In Locke it is the mother who mourns her dead child, while in Wordsworth it is the child who mourns the dead mother. In Kant the father murders the son, while in Freud the sons murder the father. As she traces this pattern, Caruth shows that the conceptual claims of each text to move beyond empiricism are implicit claims to move beyond reference. Yet the narrative of death in each text, she argues, leaves a referential residue that cannot be reclaimed by empirical or conceptual logic. Caruth thus reveals, in each of these authors, a tension between the abstraction of a conceptual language freed from reference and the compelling referential resistance of particular stories to abstraction.

Download or read book Nervous Fictions written by Jess Keiser and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The brain contains ten thousand cells," wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1718, "in each some active fancy dwells." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as scientists began to better understand the workings of the nerves, the nervous system became the site for a series of elaborate fantasies. The pineal gland is transformed into a throne for the sovereign soul. Animal spirits march the nerves like parading soldiers. An internal archivist searches through cerebral impressions to locate certain memories. An anatomist discovers that the brain of a fashionable man is stuffed full of beautiful clothes and billet-doux. A hypochondriac worries that his own brain will be disassembled like a watch. A sentimentalist sees the entire world as a giant nervous system comprising sympathetic spectators. Nervous Fictions is the first account of the Enlightenment origins of neuroscience and the "active fancies" it generated. By surveying the work of scientists (Willis, Newton, Cheyne), philosophers (Descartes, Cavendish, Locke), satirists (Swift, Pope), and novelists (Haywood, Fielding, Sterne), Keiser shows how attempts to understand the brain’s relationship to the mind produced in turn new literary forms. Early brain anatomists turned to tropes to explicate psyche and cerebrum, just as poets and novelists found themselves exploring new kinds of mental and physical interiority. In this respect, literary language became a tool to aid scientific investigation, while science spurred literary invention.

Download or read book Modern North American Criticism and Theory written by Julian Wolfreys and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-21 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern North American Criticism and Theory presents the reader with a comprehensive and critical introduction to the development and institutionalization of literary and cultural studies throughout the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Focusing on the growth and expansion of critical trends and methodologies, with particular essays addressing key figures in their historical and cultural contexts, the book offers a narrative of change, transformation, and the continuous quest for and affirmation of multiple cultural voices and identities. From semiotics and the New Criticism to the identity politics of whiteness studies and the cultural study of masculinity, this book provides an overview of literary and cultural study in North America as a history of questioning, debate, and exploration.

Download or read book Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism written by Maud Ellmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays provides students of literary critical theory with an introduction to Freudian methods of interpretation, and shows how those methods have been transformed by recent developments in French psychoanalysis, particularly by the influence of Jacques Lacan. It explains how classical Freudian criticism tended to focus on the thematic content of the literary text, whereas Lacanian criticism focuses on its linguistic structure, redirecting the reader to the words themselves. Concepts and methods are defined by tracing the role played by the drama of Oedipus in the development of psychoanalytic theory and criticism. The essays cover a wide generic scope and are divided into three parts: drama, narrative and poetry. Each is accompanied by explanatory headnotes giving clear definitions of complex terms.

Download or read book Cultural Melancholia US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9 11 written by Christina Cavedon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11, Christina Cavedon frames her examination of 9/11 fiction, especially Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, with a thorough discussion of what US reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 disclose about American culture. Offering a comparative reading of pre- and post-9/11 literary, public, and academic discourses, she deconstructs the still commonly held belief that cultural repercussions of the attacks primarily testify to a cultural trauma in the wake of the collectively witnessed media event. She innovatively re-interprets discourses to be symptomatic of a malaise which had afflicted American culture already prior to 9/11 and can best be approached with melancholia as an analytical concept.

Download or read book The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism written by Laurie Ruth Johnson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-02-06 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the ways in which memory is understood and aestheticized in Romantic texts, and argues that these works reveal serious doubt about the explanatory ability of the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic discourses against which modern thought is constructed. The Jena Romantics represent the experience and presentation of memory as privileged and creative, but also as not always capable of giving reliable information about the actual past. But rather than depicting signifiers with no stable referents, their portrayal of memory and remembering as creative displays a belief that meaning is accessible through its representations. This belief results in an emphasis on originality over imitation, but also blurs distinctions between memory and historiography. The form of the fragment embodies the dilemmas and possibilities that the Romantics associate with memory. The book includes a survey of theories of memory and how they contribute to a specifically Romantic model for memory that can lead to new interpretations of Romantic fragments; chapters on eighteenth-century aesthetic and psychological theories of memory that precede and influence Romantic texts, and on understandings of memory in critical and idealist philosophy; interpretations of the poetic and philosophical production of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel; and a conclusion that demonstrates the persistence of the Romantic model for memory in contemporary memory theory and cultural production.

Download or read book Iterations of Loss written by Jeffrey Sacks and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-02-25 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, Sacks demonstrates the reiterated incursion of loss into the time of life—losses that language declines to mourn. Language occurs as the iteration of loss, confounding its domestication in the form of the monolingual state in the Arabic nineteenth century’s fallout. Reading the late lyric poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in relation to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, Sacks reconsiders the nineteenth century Arabic nahda and its relation to colonialism, philology, and the European Enlightenment. He argues that this event is one of catastrophic loss, wherein the past suddenly appears as if it belonged to another time. Reading al-Shidyaq’s al-Saq ‘ala al-saq (1855) and the legacies to which it points in post-1948 writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, Sacks underlines a displacement and relocation of the Arabic word adab and its practice, offering a novel contribution to Arabic and Middle East Studies, critical theory, poetics, aesthetics, and comparative literature. Drawing on writings of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno, and Edward W. Said, Iterations of Loss shows that language interrupts its pacification as an event of aesthetic coherency, to suggest that literary comparison does not privilege a renewed giving of sense but gives place to a new sense of relation.

Download or read book Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization written by Jennifer Ballengee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While globalization is often associated with economic and social progress, it has also brought new forms of terrorism, permanent states of emergency, demographic displacement, climate change, and other "natural" disasters. Given these contemporary concerns, one might also view the current time as an age of traumatism. Yet what—or how—does the traumatic event mean in an age of global catastrophe? This volume explores trauma theory in an age of globalization by means of the practice of comparative literature. The essays and interviews in this volume ask how literary studies and the literary anticipate, imagine, or theorize the current global climate, especially in an age when the links between violence, amorphous traumatic events, and economic concerns are felt increasingly in everyday experience. Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization turns a literary perspective upon the most urgent issues of globalization—problems of borders, language, inequality, and institutionalized violence—and considers from a variety of perspectives how such events impact our lived experience and its representation in language and literature.

Download or read book Romanticism written by Cynthia Chase and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume have all been carefully chosen by Cynthia Chase to exemplify the most important strands in contemporary critical thought on Romantic literature, in particular the best of recent feminist, deconstructive, and new historicist writing. They include contributions from critics such as Paul de Man, Mary Jacobus, Marjorie Levinson and Jerome Christensen. The collection, with its substantial introduction and judicious selection of key work, explains the significance of recent critical debate by relating it to fundamental critical questions that define Romanticism. Through the course of their analyses the essays offer answers to perhaps the most essential question posed by the Romantic period: what is the role of language in history?

Download or read book Locke Literary Criticism and Philosophy written by William Walker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-12 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridges the gap between philosophical and literary-critical discussions of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma written by Colin Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book Isolated Cases written by Nancy Yousef and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature of the romantic period has consistently been seen as the source of modern concepts of the individual. Nancy Yousef maintains, however, that the dominant account of the self in romanticism is in need of profound revision. While individuals presented in central texts of the period are indeed often alone or separated from others, Yousef regards this isolation as a problem the texts attempt to illuminate, rather than a condition they construct as normative or desirable. As her argument moves from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, through both philosophical and literary writing, her book offers a new account of autonomy and of the complex romantic inheritance of enlightenment preoccupations with the origins of human association and the course of human development. In her richly interdisciplinary book, Nancy Yousef addresses the emergence of autonomy, demonstrating that the ideal was beset from its beginnings by profound concerns over the possibilities and grounds of human relations and interdependence. Isolated Cases draws attention to the strain of intersubjective anxieties and longings hidden within representations of the individual as self-sufficient and self-defining. Among the writers and thinkers Yousef treats at length are John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Shelley, and William Wordsworth.

Download or read book A Neutral Being Between the Sexes written by Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By contrast, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many women intellectuals who were familiar with Johnson's works considered him a champion of women, an able defender in the ongoing debate about female nature and ability that had been going on since the middle ages, the querelle des femmes.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Empiricism written by Jules David Law and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empiricism favors the visual over the verbal, the literal over the rhetorical, the static over the temporal: This is the standard charge leveled by literary theorists and writers. It is, Jules David Law demonstrates, remarkably misguided. His ambitious and challenging book explores the interplay of language and visual perception at the heart of empiricism. A re-evaluation of the British empiricist tradition from the perspective of contemporary literary theory, it also offers a sustained challenge to theory itself. In failing to grasp the issues confronting early empiricist writers or to be fully aware of their rhetorical strategies, Law says, theory has defined itself needlessly in opposition to empiricism. -- Description from http://www.booktopia.com.au (April 19, 2012).

Download or read book Locke s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science written by Peter Walmsley and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how, in his enormously influential 'Essay concerning Human Understanding' (1689), John Locke embraces the new rhetoric of seventeenth-century natrual philosophy, adopting the strategies of his scientific contemporaries to create a highly original natural history of the human mind. With the help of Locke's notebooks, letters and journals, Peter Walmsley reconstructs Locke's scientific career, including his early work with the chemist Robert Boyle and the physician Thomas Sydenham. He also shows how the 'Essay' embodies in its form and language many of the preoccupations of the science of its day, from the emerging discourses of experimentation and empirical taxonomy to developments in embryology and the history of trades. The result is a new reading of Locke, one that shows both his brilliance as a writer and his originality in turning to science to effect a radical reinvention of the study of the mind.