Greg Currie Nj

Is there a sensible version of the slogan “Art for art’s sake”? If there is, does it apply to anything? I believe that the answers to these questions are Yes and Yes. A positive answer to the first question alone would not be of interest; an intelligible claim without application does not do us much good. It’s the positive answer to the second question which is, I think, more important and perhaps surprising, since I claim to find art for art’s sake at a time well before most authorities would allow that there was any art at all. But I begin more recently than that.

Adaptations have varied relations to their source material, making it hard to formulate a general theory. Avoiding the attempt, we characterize a narrower, more unified class of reflective adaptations which communicate an active and sometimes critical relation to the source's framework. We identify the features of reflective adaptations which give them their distinctive interest. We show how these features are embodied in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, an adaptation with a radically shifted perspective on the relation between character and situation compared to its Shakespearean source. We identify some of the artistic choices through which this response to the source is conveyed, such choices being a characteristic feature of reflective adaptations.

Human aesthetic practices show a sensitivity to the ways that the appearance of an artefact manifests skills and other qualities of the maker. We investigate a possible origin for this kind of sensibility, locating it in the need for co-ordination of skill-transmission in the Acheulean stone tool culture. We argue that our narrative supports the idea that Acheulian agents were aesthetic agents. In line with this we offer what may seem an absurd comparison: between the Acheulian and the Quattrocento. In making it we display some hidden richness in what counts as an aesthetic response to an artefact. We conclude with a brief review of rival explanations—biological and/or cultural—of how this skills-based sensibility became a regular feature of human aesthetic practices.

In earlier work (“Why irony is pretence”, in S. Nichols (ed) The Architecture of Imagination, Oxford University Press, 2006) I have argued for a version of the pretence theory of irony — a version according to which the ironist is pretending to adopt a perspective which is defective in some way. I also contrasted this version of the pretence theory with the echoic theory of Sperber and Wilson, concluding that the pretence theory is superior. Deirdre Wilson has now responded to this paper (“The pragmatics of verbal irony : echo or pretence?” Lingua 116 (2006) 1722-1743). In the present paper I respond to Wilson’s counterarguments. I also generate a counterexample to the echoic theory which helps to show that, contrary to what some have thought, the echoic and pretence theories are not equivalent. Finally, I consider some of the consequences for literary theory of thinking of irony as pretending to have a defective point of view.

I shall argue that cinematic images do not have tense: not, at least, in the sense that has been ascribed to them by film theorists. This does not abolish time in cinema, for there can be temporal relations without tense, and temporal relations between cinematic images can indicate temporal relations between events depicted. But the dispensability of tense will require us to rethink our assumptions about what is sometimes called anachrony in cinema: the reordering of story-time by narrative, of which the flashback is the most common example

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WORKS OF FICTION AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS by Gregory Currie ii O peech act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what ficOtion is." So says Kendall Walton.1 My purpose here is to showjust how wrong diis judgment is. Not that I want to endorse all die attempts there have been to connect fiction with the notion of a speech act. Elsewhere I have argued diat the most prominent attempt at such a theory, the one due to John Searle, fails.2 But my complaint is not mat Searle employs the idea of a speech act; rather it is that he employs it in too half-hearted a fashion. The idea of Searle and odiers is diat to write fiction is not to perform a speech act, but rather to pretend to do so. I, on the odier hand, take the view that the writer of fiction engages in an act of speech diat is distinctively fictional, and distinctively different from speech acts such as asserting, requesting, questioning, and so forth. What follows is a much simplified account of this idea.3 Following die program of Strawson and Grice, I believe diat the different kinds of speech acts are to be individuated in terms of the utterer's intentions.4 The intention of the one who asserts is to get a certain kind of response; perhaps to get the audience to believe the proposition asserted.5 The one who commands wants the audience to obey, die requester wants the audience to answer, etc. And in all these cases the utterer intends to get the response partly as a result of the audience's recognition of diat very intention. (This is the familiar Gricean mechanism.) The utterer of fiction, on the odier hand, wants to get the audience to make-believe die proposition uttered.6 Thus we have an act structurally similar to 304 Gregory Currie305 paradigmatic speech acts like asserting, commanding, and requesting (die structural similarity being given by the use in all cases of the Gricean intention ), but differing from diese odiers with respect to die content of the utterer's intention. Let us call such an act a.fictive illocutionary act. Pursuing this line in more detail leads to an intuitively satisfactory taxonomy of speech acts which places the uttering (usually writing) of fiction fully widiin die purview of the theory, rather dian shutting it off to one side as a pseudo-performance, as widi Searle. Is such a theory susceptible to the objections diat Walton brings? Walton is quite right to say (and here I suppose he has Searle in mind) that fiction is not simply the absence ofillocutionary force: "it is something positive, something special" (p. 79). As already indicated, my theory gives a positive account of fiction as a special kind of speech act. But Walton presses the issue further by suggesting that the essence of fiction has nodiing to do with die absence of assertive force. It is possible, he says, "to make an assertion by writing fiction." His point is not merely that fictional stories are sometimes told in order to get across some serious but not explicit point — everyone can agree to that. It is rather diat fictional works contain explicit assertions — e.g., some of Tolstoy's sentences about Napoleon in War and Peace — and that a fiction might contain nothing but assertions. He imagines a genre of historical fiction in which "authors are allowed no liberties with the facts, and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write" (p. 80). Let us grant that this is a possibility. What, dien, would distinguish a piece of fiction belonging to this genre from, say, a work of historical scholarship? The answer comes when we see that the same utterance can be used to perform more than one illocutionary act. Thus if I say to someone "I have no money" it may be that I want him both to believe that I have no money and to give me the goods on credit. And in both cases I intend to get die desired responses via his recognition of my intentions. The same utterance can count both as an assertion...

In this important and impressive book, Gregory Currie tackles several fundamental topics in the philosophy of film and says much of general interest about the nature of imagination. The first part examines the nature of film representation, rejecting the view that spectators are subject to any kind of cognitive or perceptual illusions. Currie also argues against Walton’s transparency claim, which holds that when we look at a photograph we are literally seeing the object photographed. He instead defends perceptual realism, the thesis that photographs resemble the objects they depict, where the resemblance is a matter of photographs triggering the same recognitional response as would the object photographed. He also argues convincingly that films should not be thought of as a language-like form of communication.

This chapter defends the thesis that irony is a form of pretence. It traces the development of this view, and presents a stronger version of it than has previously been available. It contrasts the pretence theory with its strongest rival: the echoic theory. The similarities and differences between the theories are described, and the conclusion reached is that the pretence theory is better. Empirical evidence used to support the echoic theory is examined; this evidence supports the pretence theory at least as well. While the pretence theory does not apply directly to what are called dramatic and situational irony, it can be seen that these are closely related to irony proper as the pretence theory characterizes it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gregory Currie TEXT WITHOUT CONTEXT: SOME ERRORS OF STANLEY FISH "Intuition told him that the vast ineptitude of the venture would serve as proof that no fraud was afoot." —Jorge Luis Borges, "Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter," in A Universal History ofInfamy There are those of us who seek unity, universality, patterns of invariance in any diverse multitude of particulars. With the interpretation of texts, the diversity is evident, the unity, universality and invariance less so. Still, we have the text itself, a sequence of determinately meaningful signs, independent of, and a constraint on, the activities of interpreters. We universalists might want more than that, but it's a start. It's a start some people are not prepared to give us. Stanley Fish is one of them. According to him we are looking for something which does not exist, and which we do not need. I shall argue that Fish is wrong on both counts. According to Stanley Fish, there are no constraints on interpretation that transcend particular, local interpretive communities. Indeed, there is no truth or validity that is community transcendent, no standard of lightness, proof or confirmation that has any warrant other than community approval. Intellectual ascendency is always ultimately a matter of rhetorical power, and the locus of power shifts as the norms of the community change. Yet we need not worry that this implies any dangerous kind ofrelativism or subjectivism. Each ofus is deeply immersed Philosophy and Literature, © 1991, 15: 212-228 Gregory Currie213 in his or her own community. Our thoughts, intentions, and actions gain their very identity from the structure of public, communitarian relations we enter into, and the community imposes on us a tight structure of norms and intellectual options that "situate" us (a favored word in the Fish vocabulary) in such a way that it is always clear what interpretive move is appropriate.1 Fish is no epistemological anarchist in the style of Feyerabend: it is not the case, for him, that "anything goes." There is always a clear distinction between what goes and what does not; it is just that the rules, the structure, the hierarchy of options are not invariant across time or communities.2 Now we do it like this, tomorrow we may do it like that; we do it this way, they do it that way. Wherever you are, the rules are always clear, but the rules depend on where you are. I shall call this thesis "internalism." It bears some resemblance to views of the later Wittgenstein, and rather closely parallels Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms. It has a negative and a positive aspect. The negative aspect is that community-specific constraints on interpretation are all we have. The positive aspect is that they are all we need. Is internalism correct? I say it is not. I say that the positive claim is false, because internal constraints alone can never answer the relativist's challenge, when that challenge is properly understood; more about that in a moment. But this merely serves to highlight the importance of the negative thesis: if that is correct then relativism carries the day. So my primary concern here is with the negative thesis. Fish's main argument for the negative thesis is that what seems to most of us to be an obvious external constraint on interpretation—the literal meaning of the text in question—is no such thing. And he bases this claim on some arguments which purport to show that there L· no such thing as literal meaning. So my aim, it emerges at last, is to defend the idea of literal meaning. But first, I shall say something about the question of relativism. II Fish's answer to relativism, it will be remembered, is that interpretive communities constrain the interpretive choices of their members in such away that there can always be seen tobe nonarbitrary ways ofproceeding when it comes to formulating and choosing between interpretive hypotheses. This claim, the positive claim of Fish's internalism, raises two questions: Is Fish right, as a matter of fact, about the ways in which interpretive, and more generally intellectual communities constrain the 214Philosophy and Literature thoughts and actions...