Paisley Livingston

Late twentieth-century discussion of the nature of communicative intention was dominated by the theories of British philosopher Herbert Paul Grice. Grice initially argued that the primary intended effect of an indicative utterance was to get the hearer to believe the proposition expressed; an essential component of this communicative intention was the intention to have this effect be achieved through the hearer's recognition of that intention. He eventually acknowledged that there were counterexamples to this analysis and subsequently proposed that the primary communicative intention must be that the hearer should at least come to believe that the utterer has some particular thought or belief. Grice also allowed that speakers need not intend to change the attitudes of some specific, actual audience; instead, this part of the communicative intention concerns what is meant to happen should there be an audience having such-and-such characteristics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authorship Redux:On Some Recent and Not-So-Recent Work in Literary TheoryPaisley LivingstonThe Empty Cage: Inquiry into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author, by Carla Benedetti, translated by William J. Hartley, 232 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, $52.50Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, by Antoine Compagnon, translated by Carol Cosman, 224 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, $41.00The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, edited by William Irwin, 237 pp. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002, $32.95.Did Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or other "poststructuralist" theorists writing in the wake of May '68 come up with any good ideas about authorship and related topics in the philosophy of literature? The three volumes under review have a common point of departure in that broad question, but offer a number of contrasting responses to it. In what follows I describe and assess some of the various perspectives on offer in these 700 or so pages. The short answer to my initial question comes at the end.Carla Benedetti's book was first published in 1999 in Milan as L'ombra lunga dell'autore: Indagine su una figura cancellata. Professor of Italian and Theory of Literature at the University of Pisa, and Recurrent Visiting Professor at NYU, she clearly shares some of Foucault's basic assumptions about authorship: "It is the reader or viewer who transforms the artist's selections, which in themselves may even be random or compelled, into subjective choices endowed with intentionality: that intentionality [End Page 191] that is capable of providing meaning and artistic value to what we are viewing or reading" (p. 12). Benedetti contends that such attributions are a necessary part of the literary and artistic discursive formation of modernity, and she persuasively demonstrates that the author has not "disappeared," in spite of what Barthes and others may have thought or wished.According to Benedetti, authorialism, or the thesis that artistic value can only derive from original authorship, is the product of a modern ideology. She contends that a self-reflexive, late modernist train of thought generates a highly problematic relation to authorship and such related notions as genius, novelty, and creativity. More specifically, Benedetti finds a Batesonian double bind or paradoxical injunction in modernity's incessant demand for an extreme form of novelty. As soon as something innovative has been done, yet another innovation is desired. Not only does it become harder and harder to make a radically new move in the game, but the entire pursuit appears to be hopeless. Although Benedetti does not say so, the key thought was neatly captured by Oscar Wilde when he quipped: "Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly." To be old-fashioned is abhorrent, yet to try to obey the injunction to be "absolutely modern" is to risk becoming old-fashioned in a hurry, so failure seems inevitable. One of the constitutive myths of late modernity has it, then, that artistic activity must be recognized as authorless because it is impossible to create some sort of fundamentally novel work of lasting value. For those in the grip of this unsound thought, it seems necessary to conclude that the writer-no-longer-author must be recognized as an essentially uncreative epigone. Benedetti comments rather sweepingly, "All that poststructuralist thought speaks of, in its multifarious elaborations, is merely our supposed irreversible impossibility to create" (p. 202). She links Derrida's rejection of the possibility of decisive epistemological "ruptures" to the same late modernist mythology.Benedetti concludes her book by saying that the late modernist mythology conflates one kind of novelty with the new in general. This distinction sounds promising, but is not developed any further, and this reader was left wondering how the putative crippling error of a vast artistic dispensation could be revealed by means of a distinction between two kinds of newness. I also wonder whether her diagnosis probes deeply enough into the sources and nature of the modish sensibility that leads perversely to the Last Year in Marienbad syndrome. Not everyone is equally interested in trying to be dazzlingly innovative and fashionable; some [End Page 192] who do...

Cinematic fictions often depict characters who face a remarkable variety of natural and otherworldly dangers, such as attacks by aliens, dinosaurs, zombies, killer puppets, and swarms of insects. The risk of physical injury and death is the staple of the horror, crime, war, and action genres, while in art films, the focus tends to be on psychological and moral perils. Risk is such a pervasive subject in fi lm that one is tempted to conjecture that this is the main attraction of that seemingly low-risk activity, fi lm spectatorship. In what follows I investigate several issues related to this conjecture, beginning with the problem of identifying and classifying risk, both in the actual world and as it is represented in cinematic works. In my first section I introduce a distinction between taking and running risks and discuss epistemic problems related to the classification of events as risks or rewards. Next I discuss some of the challenges—and artistic risks—that filmmakers confront as they attempt to represent risks in works of fiction. With regard to artistic tradeoff s related to the representation of risk, in the third section I provide a more detailed discussion of two cases: Pleasantville and La visione del sabba. Finally I ask how we might explain why risk is such a pervasive subject in the cinema. What is at stake in the spectator’s seemingly low-risk engagement in spectacles of extreme risk?

We may begin to grasp the importance of exploring the relations between literary studies and the sciences by reflecting on some of the implications of a recent scholarly publication in literary theory. The example that I have in mind is an article by Ruth Salvaggio, entitled "Shakespeare in the Wilderness; or Deconstruction ithe Classroom," which was included in an anthology called Demarcating the Disciplines. In her article Salvaggio reproduces and comments on a paper written by Andrew Scott Jennings, a second-year student in an American university who was enrolled in her survey course on British literature. The paper, she convincingly argues, ably embodies five major features of deconstructive criticism. Although she admits to having taught deconstruction ithe course, she claims that she did not encourage the members of the class to write deconstructive papers, and thus was quite surprised when she received a student essay that boldly reduced Shakespeare's sonnet 104 to the formula: "i + i + i = + 0," concluding that interpreting the poem is a "silly game." Salvaggio comments: "Iwasn't quite prepared. But I am now moving toward acceptance, maybe even welcome. And I am changing many of my assumptions". In his introduction to the volume, Samuel Weber would seem to approve of Salvaggio's willingness to let the sophomore's essay demolish her previous assumptions about the goals and meaning of literary criticism. According to Weber, his volume "assembles protocols of an alteration at work in what is perhaps the beginning of an institution turning itself inside out". It would seem that Salvaggio's account of what Weber refers to as "the confrontationf a college teacher of literature with a strange and remarkable undergraduate paper" deserves to be printed along with one of Derrida's readings of Hegel because both texts contribute to the deconstructive enterprise by exploring the relations between the reading and writing of texts and the operations of the institution.

According to what is now the standard account in the history of psychology, in the 1880s William James and the Danish physician Carl Georg Lange independently developed a strikingly new theory, commonly referred to as the ‘James–Lange’ theory of emotion. In this paper it is argued that this standard account is highly misleading. Lange's views on affect in his Om Sindsbevægelser were more cautious than James allowed, and not open to criticisms that have often been levelled against the theory of emotion that James claimed he shared with Lange. In fact, Lange argued for distinctions that James did not mention in his discussion of Lange's work. Even with regard to the primary emotions, the two thinkers’ explanatory models diverged significantly. The contrast between James and Lange on affect is especially striking in their respective discussions of topics in aesthetics, as is established with reference to Lange's little-known Bidrag til Nydelsernes fysiologi som grundlag for en rationel æstetik.

Paisley Livingston here addresses contemporary controversies over the role of "theory" within the humanistic disciplines. In the process, he suggests ways in which significant modern texts in the philosophy of science relate to the study of literature. Livingston first surveys prevalent views of theory, and then proposes an alternative: theory, an indispensable element in the study of literature, should be understood as a Cogently argued and informed in its judgments, this book points the way to a fuller understanding of the special contribution that literary knowledge may make within the human sciences.

In an essay first published in 1959, Roland Barthes declared that modern literature had become “a mask pointing to itself ”.1 Barthes described this self-reflexivity as an anxious, even tragic condition, a tortured process in which literature divides itself into the two logically distinct, yet inter-related levels of object-language and meta-language. Asking itself continually the single, self-absorbing question of its own identity, literature becomes a meta-language and thereby ceases to be an object-language capable of depicting or describing anything other than itself. “It follows”, Barthes proclaims, that “for over one hundred years our literature has played a dangerous game with its own death, or in other words, with a manner of living through its own death”. Barthes conjectures in passing that this perpetual self-questioning began with the bourgeoisie’s loss of its bonne conscience. Literature’s self-reflexive turn has resulted in a variety of fascinating writerly strategies, but has also had the global effect of precluding the emergence of a literature of action and engagement. Ceasing to ask: ‘What is to be done?’, the artist can only utter the words: ‘Who am I?’

Although Ingmar Bergman figures on everyone’s list of philosophical filmmakers, attempts to specify the philosophical implications of his films have yielded highly divergent results. One reason why this is the case is that interpreters disagree over how the philosophical content of a cinematic oeuvre is to be identified. Some interpreters clearly believe it best to work with their own philosophical views when interpreting a film’s story and themes, while others contend that the content of a work is at least partly constituted by the filmmaker’s own ideas and background, which the interpreter should try to reconstruct on the basis of the available evidence. This entry focuses on claims made by interpreters who share the latter premise. Such interpreters often disagree about the content of a given film because they do not have the same evidence about its context, or because they reason about the evidence differently. I survey such disagreements among Bergman’s interpreters and then shed new light on his actual philosophical sources and ideas.