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7Passion, Counter‐Passion, Catharsis: Flaubert (and Beckett) on Feeling NothingIn Garry L. Hagberg & Walter Jost (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.This chapter presents Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy as modern fictions with ancient-skeptical ambitions. Whether in the affective domain (Flaubert) or in the cognitive (Beckett), the aim is to help the reader achieve a position of studied neutrality—ataraxia, époché—thanks not to an a priori decision but to the mutual cancellation of opposing tendencies. Understanding Flaubert and Beckett in this way allows us, first, to enrich our sense of what “catharsis” may …Read more
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365Don't Feed the Liars! On Fraudulent Memoirs, and Why They're BadPhilosophy and Literature 46 (1): 137-161. 2022.Some infamous memoirs have turned out to be chock-full of fibs. Should we care? Why not say—as many have—that all autobiography is fiction, that accurate memory is impossible, that we start lying as soon as we start narrating, and that it doesn’t matter anyway, since made-up stories are just as good as true ones? Because, well, every part of that is misleading. First, we don’t misremember absolutely everything; second, we have other sources to draw on; third, story form affects only significance…Read more
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369Lyric Self-Fashioning: Sonnet 35 as Formal ModelPhilosophy and Literature 45 (1): 224-248. 2021.Each of us is not just a set of actions, experiences, and plans but also a set of traits, capacities, and attitudes; we are as much our character as our life. And while story form can help unify a messy life, when it comes to a messy character, we may need something like the form of a poem. Could we model our self-conception, then, on a work like Sonnet 35? In finding deep-going unity—and even bittersweet beauty—beneath surface-level ambivalence, Sonnet 35 arguably offers a perfect formal model,…Read more
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256Art, Intention, and Everyday PsychologyNonsite 1 (32). 2020.Responding to a set of essays by Walter Benn Michaels, this paper argues that we can solve some interesting puzzles about intention in photography without the need for any fancy Anscombian footwork. Three distinctions are enough to do the job. First, with Alexander Nehamas, we should separate the empirical photographer from the postulated artist. Next we should mark off generic intentions (such as the intention to make a work of art) from specific intentions (such as the intention to critique ca…Read more
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42The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (edited book)Stanford University Press. 2009.The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so …Read more
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38"Les Moi en Moi": The Proustian Self in Philosophical PerspectiveNew Literary History 1 ( 32): 91-132. 2001.This essay discusses Proust’s theory of selfhood. Throughout the novel, it argues, Proust’s protagonist struggles with the problem of finding or constructing a self that is both unique and enduring, in the face not only of change across time but also of serious division at any given moment, as the various faculties vie for control. Involuntary memory offers a partial solution, by revealing the existence within us of an aspect that is both individuating and stable—namely, our perspective. Our …Read more
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43The Varieties of Modern EnchantmentIn Joshua Landy & Michael Saler (eds.), The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, . pp. 1-14. 2009.This chapter argues that there is a variety of secular and conscious strategies for re-enchantment, held together by a common aim of filling a God-shaped void. The discussion also introduces three approaches to affirm the claim and offer a more nuanced understanding of the nature of modernity. The first is to reject the notion that any lingering enchantment within Western culture must of necessity be a relic (the binary approach). The second is to reject the notion that modernity is itself encha…Read more
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10Modern Magic: Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and Stéphane MallarméIn Joshua Landy & Michael Saler (eds.), The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, . pp. 102-29. 2009.This chapter outlines a response to the world's thoroughgoing arbitrariness, looking at the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the performances of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and Mallarmé set out to remedy the predicament by creating an alternative world, one which exists only in and through poetry, one where everything has to be exactly what and where it is. He also provided his readers with a formal model and the skills required for the creation of their own. In pointing to their own fictionality, …Read more
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259The Abyss of Freedom: Love and Legitimacy in Constant’s AdolpheNineteenth Century French Studies 3 (37): 193-213. 2009.Despite its superficial similarities with Rousseau's _Confessions_, Constant's _Adolphe_ functions in fact as a devastating critique from within of the entire autobiographical project. Proceeding from the threefold assumption that the soul is irremediably divided, self-opaque, and untranslatable into language, it interrogates the very feasibility of autobiography, implicitly presenting its protagonist's maxims (which only appear to be the fruits of experience altruistically shared) and his claim…Read more
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172Corruption by LiteratureRepublics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 2 (1). 2010.This essay argues not just that literature can corrupt its readers—if literature can improve, it can also corrupt—but that some of that is our fault: by telling people to extract moral lessons from fictions, we’ve set them up to be led astray by writers like Ayn Rand. A global attitude of message-mining sets readers up to be misled, confused, or complacent (because they “gave at the office”), as well as to reject some excellent books. Ironically, the best way to make sure that literature sometim…Read more
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359Formative Fictions: Imaginative Literature and the Training of the CapacitiesPoetics Today 2 (33): 167-214. 2012.While it is often assumed that fictions must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit to us, certain texts defy this assumption by functioning as training grounds for the capacities: in engaging with them, we stand to become not more knowledgeable or more virtuous but more skilled, whether at rational thinking, at maintaining necessary illusions, at achieving tranquility of mind, or even at religious faith. Instead of offering us propositional knowledge, these texts…Read more
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268Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians ExistRepublics of Letters 1 (3). 2012.I read René Girard so you don't have to.
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200Drawing on what we know about priming effects, informational encapsulation, lucid dreaming, imaginative practice, and the “mirror box” illusion, this article argues that self-reflexive fictions may enhance our capacity for simultaneous belief and disbelief, a capacity of surprising importance for human flourishing.
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232To Thine Own Selves be True-ish: Shakespeare’s Hamlet as Formal ModelIn Tzachi Zamir (ed.), Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, . pp. 154-87. 2018.This chapter presents the core challenge before Hamlet as that of achieving authenticity in the face of inner multiplicity. Authenticity—which this chapter will take to mean (1) acting on the (2) knowledge of (3) what one truly is, beneath one’s various masks and social roles—becomes a particularly pressing need under conditions of (early) modernity, when traditional forms of action-guidance are at least halfway off the table. But authenticity is highly problematic when the self that is discover…Read more
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235In Praise of Depth: or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the HiddenNew Literary History 1 (51): 145-76. 2020.[Proofs; please cite published version] In recent years, some prominent scholars have been making a surprising claim: examining literary texts for hidden depths is overblown, misguided, or indeed downright dangerous. Such examination, they’ve warned us, may lead to the loss of world Heidegger warned of (Gumbrecht), to the world-denying metaphysics Nietzsche warned of (Nehamas), or to the suspicious form of hermeneutics Ricoeur warned of (Best, Marcus, Moi). This paper seeks to suggest that, thou…Read more
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385The Most Overrated Article of All Time?Philosophy and Literature 41 (2): 465-470. 2017.Roland Barthes' famous essay "The Death of the Author" packs an astonishing number of logical howlers into its blessedly few pages. How did it become so firmly entrenched in the canon of literary theory?
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467Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman's AdaptationCritical Inquiry 37 (3): 497-514. 2011.We are living in an age that is narratively obsessed: both in the academy and in popular culture, temporally articulated phenomena currently exert a vice-like grip over the collective imagination. Under such conditions, how may non-narrative sources of aesthetic power be made available once again to human observers? Charlie Kaufman’s response, in Adaptation, takes the form not of statements but of actions, of “philosophical therapy” for our insatiable narrative hunger. It leaves us, in the en…Read more
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7The Cruel Gift: Lucid Self-Delusion in French Literature and German Philosophy, 1851-1914Dissertation, Princeton University. 1997.The present study examines the idea of lucid self-delusion in late nineteenth and early twentieth century French literature. It traces its gradual incorporation at every level of the text--author, narrator and reader--and connects this tendency to trends in contemporary German philosophy . As a primary vehicle for lucid self-delusion, story-telling becomes a central theme in the confessional prose and symbolist poetry of the period. Here the narrative voice often performs a deliberate and consci…Read more
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245The Devil, the Master-Criminal, and the Re-enchantment of the World (On The Usual Suspects)Philosophy and Literature 36 (1): 37-57. 2012.What is so appealing about the figure of the master criminal? The answer lies in the kind of solution he provides to the problem of suffering. Rather than just accounting for affliction—as, for example, does Leibniz’s theodicy—such a figure enchants it, transforming mundane objects into actual or potential clues, everyday incidents into moves in a cosmic conflict, random misery into a purposeful pattern. The master criminal (the shadowy villain of _The Usual Suspects_, say) thus constitutes a se…Read more
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64Philosophical Training Grounds: Socratic Sophistry and Platonic Perfection in Symposium_ and _GorgiasArion 15 (1): 63-122. 2007.Plato’s character Socrates is clearly a sophisticated logician. Why then does he fall, at times, into the most elementary fallacies? It is, I propose, because the end goal for Plato is not the mere acquisition of superior understanding but instead a well-lived life, a life lived in harmony with oneself. For such an end, accurate opinions are necessary but not sufficient: what we crucially need is a method, a procedure for ridding ourselves of those opinions that are false. Now learning a method …Read more
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466Passion, Counter-Passion, Catharsis : Beckett and Flaubert on feeling nothingIn Garry Hagberg & Walter Jost (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.This chapter presents Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy as modern fictions with ancient-skeptical ambitions. Whether in the affective domain (Flaubert) or in the cognitive (Beckett), the aim is to help the reader achieve a position of studied neutrality—ataraxia, époché—thanks not to an a priori decision but to the mutual cancellation of opposing tendencies. Understanding Flaubert and Beckett in this way allows us, first, to enrich our sense of what “catharsis” may …Read more
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169Proust Among the Psychologists (review)Philosophy and Literature 35 (2): 375-387. 2011.Review of Edward Bizub, Proust et le moi divisé: La Recherche, creuset de la psychologie expérimentale
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448Philosophy as fiction: self, deception, and knowledge in ProustOxford University Press. 2004.Philosophy as Fiction seeks to account for the peculiar power of philosophical literature by taking as its case study the paradigmatic generic hybrid of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. At once philosophical--in that it presents claims, and even deploys arguments concerning such traditionally philosophical issues as knowledge, self-deception, selfhood, love, friendship, and art--and literary, in that its situations are imaginary and its stylization inescapably promi…Read more
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98Nietzsche, Proust, and will-to-ignorancePhilosophy and Literature 26 (1): 1-23. 2002.“The will to truth,” says Nietzsche, “is merely a form of the will to illusion”; it’s not the opposite of “the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue,” but instead “its refinement.” What can this mean? How could a quest for knowledge ever serve a desire to remain in the dark? I answer this question by means of an example in Proust, whose protagonist expends huge quantities of energy apparently trying to find out whether his love partner is faithful. The efforts, it turns out, are de…Read more
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568Conditional Goods and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: How Literature (as a Whole) Could Matter AgainSubstance 42 (2): 48-60. 2013.This essay argues that literature is neither an intrinsic good (like oxygen) nor a constructed good (like a teddy-bear) but instead a conditional good, like a blueprint. It has immense potential value, but that potential can be actualized only if readers do a certain kind of work; and readers are likely to do that work only if, as a culture, we retain an understanding of what novels and poems both need from us and can give us. This means we need to be wary of theories that are excessively defl…Read more
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45How to Do Things with FictionsOxford University Press. 2012.How to Do Things with Fictions considers how fictional works, ranging from Chaucer to Beckett, subject readers to a series of exercises meant to fortify their mental capacities. While it is often assumed that fictions must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit to us, certain texts defy this assumption by functioning as training-grounds for the capacities: in engaging with them we stand not to become more knowledgeable or more virtuous but more skilled, whether at…Read more
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103Philosophy to the Rescue (review)Philosophy and Literature 31 (2): 405-419. 2007.Review of Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the Twenty-First Century, and Frank B. Farrell, Why Does Literature Matter?
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648A Nation of Madame Bovarys : on the possibility and desirability of moral improvement through fictionIn Garry Hagberg (ed.), Art and Ethical Criticism, Blackwell. pp. 63--94. 2008.This chapter contains sections titled: Prudence or Oneiromancy? A Parody of Didacticism Preaching to the Converted The Asymmetry of “Imaginative Resistance” Virtue Ethics and Gossip Qualifications Positive Views.
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46Accidental Kinsmen: Proust and Nietzsche (review)Philosophy and Literature 27 (2): 450-455. 2003.Review of Duncan Large, Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study