tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54292282026-07-24T13:42:18.999-04:00NotesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger137125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-14896201474038106272010-04-22T11:01:00.001-04:002010-04-22T11:03:19.735-04:00

It seems as if the idea that protestantism shunts religion off to the private sphere is somewhat wrong because there is no private sphere in the requisite sense for religion to be shunted to until the late 17thc. The emergence of the modern private sphere is connected to protestantism but only through its negotiation with state constitutions. Hence the importance of the 1688 settlement for the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-6758307122357938242009-11-23T07:13:00.000-05:002009-11-23T07:13:46.422-05:00

I've been reading and rereading a little Rancière in preperation for my graduate class. It's not my kind of thing: it's too tinged with Maoism for me. (Against Rancière's will no doubt, it effectively forms a bridge between Maoism a la 1968 and cultural populism.)  And much of it is written in a heavy-handed, pompous, unnecessarily obfuscating, academic prose which often makes too much of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-7335054965553741432009-11-16T07:05:00.002-05:002009-11-16T07:32:11.178-05:00

Let's see if this works. Our lives are filtered through and shaped by our use of language.  And language (not least as a tool of imagination) allows us to live where what is insects and fuses with what is not.  Philosophy and literature are where this intersection become conceptually organized and self-conscious.  What distinguishes them? Philosophy is organized with reference to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-1806548093745188302009-11-13T10:19:00.000-05:002009-11-13T10:19:19.856-05:00

Another bedtime reading illumination: Saki's social comedy, based on the pranks and ploys of alienated, insoucient and cruel young men is established in Trollope's Barchester Towers and in particular in the scene where Bertie Stanhope first attends a party at the Bishop's palace.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-16321223409070170332009-11-10T11:04:00.003-05:002009-11-11T07:07:29.361-05:00

Read a couple of interesting works of theory recently. 1. Cavell's 1969 essay on King Lear, the last chapter of Must we mean what we say? It now reads very much as a document in America's Vietnam-war era culture: it's marked by an unusual pessimism and animus towards government. But it's also a virtuoso piece of intellectual chutzpah and energy. What struck me most in it was its account of the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-18550193115976352192009-11-10T10:49:00.003-05:002009-11-16T08:24:36.239-05:00

James does not much concern himself with the Anglican church in his fictions (or, if it comes to that, in his life) I think. But there are some exceptions.  These include 'The Author of Beltraffio" which is about a perfidious wife who effectively  murders her son to protect him against her husband, Mark Ambient, a sophisticated aesthete and novelist a la James himself.  Ambient

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-68110760359588339132009-10-21T07:31:00.000-04:002009-10-21T07:31:45.651-04:00

A thought after an interesting talk by Michael North yesterday on the catchphrase, "Make it new!". One branch of what will become "modernism" happens when the oppositions between 1) the general and the particular, 2) the abstract and the concrete; 3) the old and the new begin not just to coalesce but to join together under the force of a will to what is in effect a cultural revolution. 

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-1374867546089834862009-10-19T10:09:00.000-04:002009-10-19T10:09:34.002-04:00

Here's a proposal for an essay I have been asked to write. It's a bit vague at the moment, but I hope to use this space to firm it out in the year I have to submit it. I guess it's an attempt to align my current work on modernist literary criticism and on Blanchot to the demands of postcolonialism. Coetzee and the problem of origination. At the beginning of modernist theorization of literature,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-9182942817060752972009-10-18T12:31:00.002-04:002009-11-16T07:27:13.172-05:00

I've been reading Eric Weil's 1951 essay on the French Revolution's intellectual impact on Britain and Germany, published in Essais sur la nature, l'histoire et la politique. I hadn't before realized how important Fichte was as a state theorist.  According to Weil, Fichte, in his book on the Commercial State, was the first really to theorize the relations between state and society in modern

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-86019335564732955812009-10-18T12:28:00.002-04:002009-11-11T07:19:39.324-05:00

I've long been fascinated by one author's  unfathomable passion for another. It's the unfathomability that counts: obvious or often-written-about cases (James's admiration for Flaubert or Pope's for Horace for instance) may be important historically but usually aren't fascinating of themselves. (Except sometimes: why did Wordsworth's poems hit the young de Quincey (and Hazlitt too for that

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-21436814572628578052009-10-11T09:25:00.000-04:002009-10-11T09:25:12.550-04:00

One answer: literature is that use of language in which impersonal propositions can be properly asserted without evidence or reason.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-64546851506727250932009-09-30T10:55:00.002-04:002009-09-30T11:00:11.423-04:00

I haven't read Brian Boyd's Literature and Evolution: a biocultural approach, and don't intend to. But I've read a number of reviews, including Terry Eagleton's in the latest London Review of Books. And reading that, it occured to me: how do we in fact know that literature is part of the species's apparatus for survival, an tool for adaptation? Mightn't it in fact belong to those of our

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-12205456046810166332009-09-11T09:11:00.003-04:002009-09-11T09:21:58.787-04:00

A central problem with arguments like that of Charles Taylor's in A Secular Age can be put like this: if man has an inherent appetite for God and transcendence, how come we (i.e. man) lost him (i.e. God)? It follows that, if we are to accept a spiritual anthropology that assumes mankind's hunger for the transcendent, the story of human secularization can only be told coherently from God's side

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-47746730838738885122009-09-07T07:50:00.003-04:002009-10-08T21:38:43.326-04:00

I tend to read a few pages before I go to sleep, it's an old habit. At the moment I have by my bedside two books: Saki's Collected Stories and Lydia Davis's collection of short fictions, Almost no Memory. I love both. Each night, I read a story by Saki, and then a story by Davis. This makes for the strangest of literary experiences: fictions by Davis, US-centred, written around now,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-13851431976530752009-08-15T06:38:00.004-04:002009-08-15T07:01:29.992-04:00

Here's my paper, as it stands.Is literary criticism a failed project? Is academic literary criticism a failed project? If so, what might that failure mean for literary studies more generally?There are many reasons for asking these questions, but they have a particular urgency under current modes of university governance, in which the humanities in particular are under managerial pressure to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-15269014246859417772009-08-08T07:54:00.003-04:002009-08-08T07:57:37.464-04:00

The fifties? Leavis, the new critics, Sartre, Blanchot. And it's surely the university English dept's great decade.And if the fifties are the decade when literature has its greatest cultural authority, why should this be?And what about the actual writing?Is it a case of a lag? Social democracy absorbing modernism?

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-18103767612572019602009-08-06T09:59:00.003-04:002009-08-08T07:54:40.859-04:00

A fascinating piece in the June 19 2009 TLS by Richard Seaford. It argues that, around the end of the seventh century BCE, the ancient Greeks first invented money as coinage—at least for the West towards. By the sixth century, it had spread across the penisula. And that was the exact same century when the genres of tragedy and philosophy were invented. Indeed they first appear in the very first

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-61792127073185900852009-07-27T07:36:00.004-04:002009-07-27T17:32:03.005-04:00

The question of what a Badiouian reading of a novel might be is a complicated one, Badiou's own account of Beckett notwithstanding. Quite unexpectedly then, while reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) it occurred to me that this is indeed a Badiouian novel. The story, of course, is set in Parma after Napolean's defeat, in a small absolutist state whose sovereign (Prince

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-78470880658839789672009-07-13T13:35:00.005-04:002009-08-15T16:46:02.717-04:00

The answer to this seems to me: no. Or at best, hardly ever.Here at the SCT at Cornell when I asked Leela Gandhi why she chose the ethical position of what she calls philophusikia (i.e. (renouncing the self and celebrating the world) over phusikaphobia (i.e. renouncing the world and celebrating the self) she said it was because she preferred the former's metaphysics. (This in a paper in which

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-72391469602715491282009-07-13T13:27:00.004-04:002009-07-13T14:10:10.148-04:00

Could it be that after Burke it becomes possible to insert an individual's life into a history which is no longer to be thought of as constituted in discrete traditions (a la Alasdair Macintyre for instance) but as political in the sense that two fundamentally opposed parties have two interpretations of it? And that individuals can make a choice between enlightened modernity, on the one side,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-22011917532426925242009-06-29T19:52:00.003-04:002009-07-13T13:27:39.789-04:00

irresistible; insupportable

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-81088491709143027072009-06-27T13:46:00.007-04:002009-07-13T14:02:09.455-04:00

On first playing with an iphone. Utterly exhilarating, the way that playing with my first Macintosh was around 1984 I think, or the first time I opened a web browser—Mosaic—in 1993. In each case, the first moments of fiddling about showed that important aspects of life were going to change radically and forever and for the better. The world had instantly a new size and scope (smaller and

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-18065965687163729302009-06-27T13:44:00.002-04:002009-06-27T13:46:38.821-04:00

Hulme's concept of a "critique of satsifaction", which is related to the religious notion of the "vanity of desire". (See Collected Works, 210-11). This is not what I mean by living apart.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-42284327216425514402009-06-09T06:40:00.002-04:002009-06-09T06:51:41.194-04:00

Were the 19thc and early 20thc English mountaineers often programmatic humanists, climbing for secular spiritual reasons? I am thinking of Leslie Stephen and I.A. Richards. If so, do traces of this link linger? Petrarch, the great Renaissance humanist, is often thought of as the first modern (i.e. aesthetic) alpinist. Shelley's Mont Blanc is clearly another important moment in the connection

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5429228.post-9961769117970172482009-06-06T11:52:00.004-04:002009-06-06T13:07:09.570-04:00

Have been reading Karl Mannheim's Habilitationsschrift on Conservatism,one of the founding document of the sociology of knowledge. It was written under the spell of Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and is a really remarkable book, it deserves to be better known. Basically it attempts to connect different ways of thinking and experience to particular social groups and to understand the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0