1. Introduction: Subjectivity, Modernity, and the Uses of Literature
1. If one is interested in fixing the extension of “literature” in such a way that all plausible cases are covered, one will end up with something like the radically disjunctive definition offered by Robert Stecker: “A work w is a work of literature if and only if w is produced in a linguistic medium, and, (1) w is a novel, short story, tale, drama, or poem, and the writer of w intended that it possess aesthetic, cognitive or interpretation-centered value, and the work is written with sufficient technical skill for it to be possible to take that intention seriously, or (2) w possesses aesthetic, cognitive, or interpretation-centered value to a significant degree, or (3) w falls under a predecessor concept to our concept of literature and was written while the predecessor concept held sway, or (4) w belongs to the work of a great writer” (“What is Literature?” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 50 [1996]: 694). This may be correct enough, but it offers little illumination about how literature achieves aesthetic, cognitive, or interpretation-centered value or about how the achievement of such values matters for human life.
2. This is roughly the view of Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Books are like friends who help us to widen the range of points of view we can occupy. While this suggestion has some truth to it, it underrates the formal, cognitive, and affective intensities of literary structure and distinctively literary craft.
3. Bill Readings usefully surveys the rise and decline of the humanities within the modern university from Humboldt to the present as central disciplines devoted to teaching national literatures in The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
4. Frank Ferrell, Why Does Literature Matter? (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). See 213 ff. for a summary of the “modern” developments listed in the remainder of this paragraph.
5. Ibid., 201.
6. Farrell summarizes the registers of recovery that literary works offer us on ibid., 9–19.
7. Ibid., 187.
8. Ibid., 72.
9. David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Lyric and Early Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 48.
10. The complete text of “Maifest” in German and in English translation appears on 28–29 of ibid.
11. Ibid., 49.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33.
15. J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 45.
16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 406.
17. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 8.
18. Ibid., 9.
19. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 392, cited in Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 9.
20. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 11.
21. Philip Weinstein powerfully and usefully surveys the registering of trauma and resistance to overly stable Bildungsroman plots on the parts of Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner in his Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005).
22. Tzachi Zamir powerfully traces various forms of this slippage as they are expressed in the careers of the protagonists of the major Shakespearean tragedies in his Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
23. See Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). For a summary of this work that brings it into connection with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, see Richard Eldridge, “Wittgenstein on Aspect-Seeing, the Nature of Discursive Consciousness, and the Experience of Agency,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing, ed. William Day and Victor Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming.
24. This is the main argument, as I read it, of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. See Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
25. J. L. Austin, “Truth,” in Austin, Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 126 n. 1.
26. René Descartes, The Search After Truth by the Light of Nature, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 1:305.
27. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 3 n. 1.
28. Here I follow Stanley Cavell’s reading, itself developed in response to Emerson’s readings of Descartes and Kant, of Descartes’ account in the Meditations of his knowledge of his own existence. See Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe)” in Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 105–130.
29. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 1:150.
30. Ibid., 1:151–152.
31. Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 107.
32. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 159.
33. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 107–108.
34. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Kant, On History, 22.
35. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), 140.
36. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” 3.
37. Thomas Pfau, “The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition After Kant,” part 1, in Romantic Circles Praxis Series, available online at http://www.rc.umd/edu/praxis/philosophy/pfau1/tp1.html.
38. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1987), excerpted in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridly (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 490. A slightly different wording appears in Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, in Aristotle, Poetics, together with Longinus, On the Sublime, and Demetrius, On Style (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 37.
39. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 12; emphasis and interjection added.
40. Ibid., 13.
41. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 131.
42. Catherine Wilson, “Literature and Knowledge,” Philosophy 58 (1983). Reprinted in Philosophy of Literature, ed. Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 327.
43. Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
44. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd. ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: The Macmillan Company [1953], 1958), §122, 49e. See also Richard Eldridge, “Hypotheses, Criterial Claims, and Perspicuous Representations: Wittgenstein’s ‘Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough,’” in Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 127–144.
45. See chapter 5, note 9.
46. Richard Eldridge, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 259 and passim.
47. Ibid., 260.
48. Wolfgang Huemer, “Introduction: Wittgenstein, Language, Philosophy of Literature,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 5.
49. Ibid., 6–7.
50. See Spinoza, Ethics, in Spinoza, Selections, ed. John Wild (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), part 5, propositions 3–10, pp. 369–377. Compare also both R. G. Collingwood on artistic expression, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 282–283; and William Wordsworth, “Preface to Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 448, on how a poet may uncover “what is really important to men” through thinking “long and deeply” in relation to our feelings.
51. William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 19.
52. A wonderful essay on these parallel identifications is Ted Cohen’s “Identifying with Metaphor: Metaphors of Personal Identification,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 4 (1999): 399–409, on identifying with Lily Bart, Jake Gittis, and Marlowe, as well as Shakespeare, Mozart, and Conrad.
53. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 348b, p. 24.
2. Romanticism, Cartesianism, Humeanism, Byronism: Stoppard’s Arcadia
1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980 [1934]), 337–338.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), §185, p. 123.
3. See Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), book 7, 557a–563e, pp. 227–234.
4. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 5–14.
5. Rene Descartes, preface to The Search After Truth by the Light of Nature, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 1:305.
6. Frye, The Great Code, 52.
7. Donald G. Marshall, “Foreword: Wordsworth and Post-Enlightenment Culture,” in Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), vii.
8. Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
9. See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 81.
10. See Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
11. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977), section 12, p. 111.
12. W. V. O. Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” in Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 61.
13. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 151, 154.
14. Descartes, Discourse on Method, in Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 14.
15. Ibid., 14, 15.
16. Ibid., 13.
17. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 747.
18. Byron, George Gordon, Baron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in Byron’s Poetry, ed. Frank D. McConnell (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), Canto the First, II, p. 26.
19. Ibid., Canto the First, V, p. 26.
20. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: A Study Guide from Gale’s Drama for Students, vol. 5, chap. 2, e-text PDF document (Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2002), DOI 10.1223/GALFSDSF0000074, p. 48.
21. See Gary Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
22. William Wordsworth, The Prelude [1850], in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), XIV, 446–447, p. 366.
23. Ibid., I, 302, p. 199.
24. Ibid., II, 233–234, p. 212.
25. Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2:349–360, at 2:357.
26. Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to The Preface” [1815], in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 471–481, at 477.
27. Wordsworth, The Prelude, IX, 8, p. 304.
28. Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. H. Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 3–24.
29. Tom Stoppard, in Mel Gussow, Conversations with Tom Stoppard (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 91.
30. Stoppard, cited in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: A Study Guide from Gale’s Drama for Students, 56.
31. Stoppard, Conversations with Tom Stoppard, 3.
32. Ibid., 14.
33. Ibid., 74.
34. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 2.
35. See the unfavorable review by John Simon, cited in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: A Study Guide from Gale’s Drama for Students, 54.
36. See the reviews cited in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: A Study Guide from Gale’s Drama for Students, 34, 54–55, 56, 59.
37. Tim Appelo, “Review of Arcadia,” The Nation, Jan. 5, 1995, reprinted in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: A Study Guide from Gale’s Drama for Students, 54A.
38. Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), II, 5, p. 62.
39. Ibid., II, 7, p. 76.
40. Ibid., II, 7, p. 84.
41. Ibid., I, 2, p. 33.
42. Ibid., II, 7, pp. 75, 76.
43. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 60.
44. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. S. W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:41.
45. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 414.
3. Romantic Subjectivity in Goethe and Wittgenstein
1. See M. W. Rowe, “Goethe and Wittgenstein,” Philosophy 66 (1991); Joachim Schulte, “Chor und Gesetz: Zur ‘Morphologischen Methode’ bei Goethe and Wittgenstein,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 21 (1984); and G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 537–540. I summarize and comment on this work in my Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 177–181.
2. Thomas Mann, “On Goethe’s Werther,” trans. Elizabeth Corra, in The Sufferings of Young Werther and Elective Affinities, ed. Victor Lange (New York: Continuum, 1990), 2.
3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), x.
4. Ibid., 18.
5. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 31.
6. Ibid., 12. The subject term of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s clauses is “literary production,” not “articulation,” but with the migration of human self-production toward the literary, in a mix of discovery and invention, the latter, more general term makes their characterizations appropriate to human moral efforts in general.
7. Rodolphe Gasché, foreword to Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xix.
8. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1.: The Poetry of Desire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 176.
9. Ibid., 124.
10. Ibid., 110.
11. Ibid., 177.
12. Ibid., 162.
13. Ibid., 176.
14. Mann, “On Goethe’s Werther,” 9.
15. Ibid., 9, 10.
16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in Goethe: The Collected Works, ed. David E. Wellbery, trans. Victor Lange (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 11:72. Subsequent references to Werther will all be to this edition and will be indicated in the text by page number.
17. Mann, “On Goethe’s Werther,” 8.
18. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 25.
19. Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig 1889–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 156.
20. Ibid., 50.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 156, citing Tolstoy, “A Confession.”
23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 1e. Subsequent references to this work will be given by page numbers in parentheses.
24. This remark is about “an ordinary conventional figure” at the end of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” but it captures well Wittgenstein’s attitude toward the manual work he repeatedly urged on others.
25. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1948), 147. Werther actually adds one more line to Wilhelm: “wir sehen uns wieder und freudiger” (147). But “Lebt wohl!” alone is what lives in the memory of his readers as his valedictory to life, particularly since his last diary entry, addressed to Lotte, concludes “Es schlägt zwölfe. So sei es denn!—Lotte! Lotte, lebe wohl! lebe wohl!” (150).
26. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), §125, pp. 50, 50e. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text by section number.
27. Wittgenstein, cited in Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 100.
4. Attention, Expressive Power, and Interest in Life: Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
1. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), §1, 33.
2. While some may argue that Jesus is an ideal human being, he is at best ideal as a person and personification, not as 5’2”, eyes of blue.
3. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §14, 91.
4. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), 1050.
5. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §1, 33.
6. Ibid., §7, 59.
7. Ibid., §7, 60.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., §7, 58.
11. Ibid.
12. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 51b1, p. 12.
13. For a defense of this reading of Aristotle’s account of the nature of the hamartia or “tragic flaw” as an excess of virtue ill-suited to the circumstances of action, see Richard Eldridge, “How Can Tragedy Matter for Us?” in Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 146–164.
14. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §7, 58.
15. Ibid.
16. William Wordsworth, The Prelude [1850], in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), book 14, ll. 161–162, p. 360.
17. Wordsworth, “From The Recluse” [Prospectus], in Selected Poems and Prefaces, l. 808, p. 46.
18. On Wordsworth’s conjecturalism, see Eldridge, “Internal Transcendentalism: Wordsworth and ‘A New Condition of Philosophy,’” in Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism, 102–123.
19. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1, ll. 267–269, p. 199.
20. Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,” in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 446, 447. Subsequent references to the “Preface” will be given by page number in the text.
21. Stanley Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life,” in Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,), 7.
22. Cavell, “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” in Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 36. See also Cavell, “Texts of Recovery,” 52–53.
23. Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even,” in Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 115–116.
24. Cavell notes the interest of the formulation “communicate with” and its difference from “communicate about” in “Texts of Recovery,” 71–72.
25. David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 39.
26. See ibid., 11.
27. Ibid., 55.
28. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 14, ll. 439–443, p. 366.
29. Wordsworth, Alfoxden Notebook, 21v, in The Ruined Cottage and the Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 125.
30. David S. Miall, “Locating Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the Community with Nature,” Romanticism on the Net 20 (November 2000), available online at http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2000/v/n20/005949ar.html, p. 1.
31. Cavell, “Postscript B: Poe’s Perversity and the Imp(ulse) of Skepticism,” in Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 143.
32. Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798,” in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 108–111. References to the poem will be to this edition and will be given by line number in the text.
33. David Bromwich, “The French Revolution and ‘Tintern Abbey,’” Raritan 10, no. 3 (Winter 1991): 1–23.
34. This suggestion is made most notably by Marjorie Levinson in “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey,’” in Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14–57, esp. 37: “the primary poetic action [of ‘Tintern Abbey’] is the suppression of the social” in favor of a ‘fiercely private vision.’” See also Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 85–88.
35. Miall, “Locating Wordsworth,” 3.
36. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 2, ll. 277–281, p. 213.
37. For further discussion of this famous sentence from chapter 4 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), para. 167, p. 105, see Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 27–32.
38. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 2, ll. 228–232, p. 212.
39. Bromwich, “The French Revolution and ‘Tintern Abbey,’” 8.
40. John Barrell, Poetry, Language, and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 162.
41. Ibid.
42. I seem to recall having learned this interpretation of “never did” from reading Geoffrey Hartman, but I cannot now locate the reference.
43. John Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” in Later Works (Carbondale, Ind.: The Center for Dewey Studies, 1988), 5:125–146. I thank Nikolas Kompridis for directing my attention to this remark.
44. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, 2nd. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), xv.
45. Ibid., 190.
46. Ibid., 104.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 218.
49. Ibid., 38.
5. The Ends of Literary Narrative: Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
1. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1996), 369–378. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the main text by page numbers in parentheses.
2. Lamarque and Olsen are quoting Theseus, in Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1.
3. John Gibson, “Reality and the Language of Fiction,” in Writing the Austrian Traditions: Themes in Philosophy and Literature, ed. Wolfgang Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 63. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the main text by page numbers in parentheses.
4. Gibson takes up these questions in much greater detail, in ways that fill in a story about human life in ways I find congenial, in his Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford University Press, 2008) and “Literature and Knowledge,” in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Both these pieces develop a version of the working-through conception that I am urging.
5. The cognitive developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello has recently developed a rich account of language learning as depending essentially on intention-reading in his The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) and Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). His account builds in part on Wittgenstein’s work on seeing-as in part 2 of Philosophical Investigations, 3rd. ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958). I survey the affinities between the views of Tomasello and Wittgenstein in “Wittgenstein on Aspect-Seeing, the Nature of Discursive Consciousness, and the Experience of Agency,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing, ed. William Day and Victor Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). R. G. Collingwood treats language learning and concept learning in similar terms, as a matter of learning by interacting with others and how to attend to aspects, in Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1938), esp. 239–241.
6. I take the idea that language must be both stable in providing us with ways of thinking of things that we use internally and unhesitatingly and tolerant of new usages from Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 185–186.
7. I take up the essential “immigrancy” involved in our inheritance of language and development of conceptual consciousness in “Cavell and Hölderlin on Human Immigrancy,” in Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 229–245.
8. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 239. Collingwood is almost surely thinking here also of Freud’s account of the development of the ego in and through plays of mutual attention and contestation. See Freud on the fortda game in Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam Books, 1961).
9. See Spinoza, Benedict de, Ethics, in Spinoza, Selections, ed. John Wild (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), part 5, propositions 3–10, pp. 369–377.
10. Cavell develops his account of the truth of skepticism in various major writings, including “Knowing and Acknowledging” (1969), The Claim of Reason (1979), “Being Odd, Getting Even” (1986), and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (1990). For an overview of Cavell’s thoughts about skepticism, see Richard Eldridge, “‘A Continuing Task’: Cavell and the Truth of Skepticism,” in Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism, 189–204.
11. Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 107.
12. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 448.
13. See Friedrich Hölderlin, “On Religion,” in Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 90–91.
14. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 1980), esp. chapter 3, “Having an Experience,” and 17–19.
15. See Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6–7; The Persistence of Romanticism, 19–20, 55–57, 158–163, 235; and An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7–12, 262.
16. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 36. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the main text by page numbers in parentheses.
17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1949), 5.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, excerpted in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 479.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 59. In The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse argues that “aesthetic affirmation” in life that is not a matter of escapist fantasizing must include a sense of the ontologically “irreconcilable” and that it is expressed aptly in the last words of the “Song of the Tower Warden” in Goethe’s Faust: “Es war doch so schön.” Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 59. See also the concluding discussion of gratitude as a response to the experience of the truth of skepticism in Eldridge, Leading a Human Life, 286–290.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebook, ed. Rüdiger Bittner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 159–160.
21. Steven Winn, “Endings Are a Catharsis,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 1, 2005. Available online at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/01/DDG7VAJAL81.DTL.
22. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 138. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the main text by page numbers in parentheses.
23. Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 82.
24. Ibid., 89.
25. Ibid., 98.
26. Ibid., 83–84.
27. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 60–61.
28. Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition, 36.
29. Ibid., 83.
30. Ibid., 84.
31. Ibid., 86.
6. “New Centers of Reflection Are Continually Forming”: Benjamin, Sebald, and Modern Human Life in Time
1. The quotation that forms the title of this chapter is from Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland, and Ian Balfour, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 156.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 31.
3. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), para. 32, p. 19.
4. An attentive reader for Columbia University Press urged this formulation on me.
5. Stephen Houlgate, “Introduction: An Overview of Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), xxv.
6. Terry Pinkard, “Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic Art,” in Hegel and the Arts, 5.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:97.
8. Ibid., 98.
9. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14.
10. In emphasizing the “good-enough” reconciliation theme in Hegel, I have been influenced by Michael O. Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
11. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, 73, 70.
12. Ibid., 73.
13. See Donald Davidson’s classic “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” and “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” both in Davidson, Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), for an argument to this effect. For a commentary on the powers but also on the limits of this argument, specifically how it leaves specifically problems of practical engagement between subjects unaddressed, see Alasdair MacIntyre, “Relativism, Power, and Philosophy,” in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), and Richard Eldridge, “Metaphysics and the Interpretation of Persons: Davidson on Thinking and Conceptual Schemes,” Synthese 66, no. 3 (March 1986): 477–503.
14. Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 66.
15. Michael Rosen, “Benjamin, Adorno, and the Decline of the Aura,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46.
16. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 460.
17. Anthony Lane, “Higher Ground: Adventures in Fact and Fiction from W. G. Sebald,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2000.
18. Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 41.
19. Ibid., 46, 48, 46.
20. Franz Loquai, “Vom Beinhaus der Geschichte ins wiedergefundene Paradies: Zu Werk und Poetik W. G. Sebalds,” in Sebald. Lektüren, ed. Marcel Atze and Franz Loquai (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2005), 244. My translation.
21. See Farrell, Why Does Literature Matter?, 199.
22. Ibid., 197.
23. Ibid., 200.
24. Mark R. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 19.
25. W. G. Sebald, Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Klett, 1980), 58; cited in McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 148. McCulloh’s translation.
26. Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 49.
27. Ibid., 114, n. 20.
28. Ibid., 20.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 71.
31. Ibid., 74.
32. Ibid., 81, 84; in the latter passage Santner is drawing on Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003), 49.
33. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), book 7, ll. 725–728, p. 288.
34. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, para. 185, p. 222.
35. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 134.
36. Ibid., 133.
37. Ibid., 136, citing Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 129.
38. Ibid., 203.
39. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verson, 1985), 42; cited in Santner, On Creaturely Life, 134, n. 54.
40. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 75.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 81.
43. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 216. Sebald cites this passage in Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt am Main: Fisscher, 1994), 132. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 155, n. 11, notes this citation.
44. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 3.
45. Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, 116–200. All references to this work will be given by page number in the text.
46. In the opening lines of his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin remarks that “it is characteristic of philosophical writing that at every turn it must confront the question of representation [Darstellung] anew.” On the significance of this remark, see Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Martha B. Helfer, The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
47. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 59.
48. See also the slightly different translation in Friedrich Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” trans. Joyce Crick, in Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 273.
49. W. G. Sebald, “Paul Bereyter,” in The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), 25–63; W. G. Sebald, “Paul Bereyter,” in Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 39–93. Citations to these works will be given in the text by English page number followed by German page number.
50. “Manchem göttliche Gemüte wird vom Schicksal eine unförmliche Form aufgedrungen, wie dem Sokrates der Satyr-Leib; denn über die Form, nicht über den innern Stoff regiert die Zeit. So hing der poetische Spiegel, womit Jakob Böhme Himmel und Erde wiedergibt, in einem dunklen Orte; auch mangelt dem Glase an einigen Stellen die Folie. So ist der große Hamann ein tiefer Himmel voll teleskopischer Sterne, und manche Nebelflecken löset kein Auge auf.” Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3 (Paris, 1836–1837); English translation in Jean Paul Richter, Horn of Oberon, trans. Margaret R. Hale, (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 41–42.
51. Dante, The Divine Comedy I: Hell, trans. Dorothy Sayers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), canto 1, ll. 1–3, p. 71.