Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil

Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil
Author: Jorge Estrada
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2019-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110656949

Experiencing ethics not only refers to being confronted with a situation in which one must choose a course of action; it also makes reference to giving a narrative account of the circumstances and chain of events leading to such crossroads. Between both there is a chasm, a space of indeterminacy into which R. Musil and L. Sterne delve with aesthetic means. Their poetics move in opposite directions, but by following them to their last critical consequences this study reveals a kindred ethical stance. This interpretation sheds light on the ethics revolving around character construction by examining the constraints thwarting any attempt to complete a biographical account or convey a protagonist that led his or her life. Neither Musil nor Sterne posit a narrative agenda that could reach a last chapter or lead to a groundwork determining their ethics. A closer look into their tight-knit prose reveals that both rely on the narrating, on a skill that must be incessantly cultivated through a digressive or essayistic style. Equipped with a vast theoretical repertoire, this approach makes a strong case for a new constellation in comparative literature.

The Void of Ethics

The Void of Ethics
Author: Patrizia McBride
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810121093

In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, The Man without Qualities, is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century. In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia McBride reconstructs Musil's understanding of ethics as a realm of experience that eludes language and thought. After situating Musil's work within its contemporary cultural-philosophical horizon, as well as the historical background of rising National Socialism, McBride shows how the writer's notion of ethics as a void can be understood as a coherent and innovative response to the crises haunting Europe after World War I. She explores how Musil rejected the outdated, rationalistic morality of humanism, while simultaneously critiquing the irrationalism of contemporary art movements, including symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism. Her work reveals Musil's remarkable relevance today-particularly those aspects of his thought that made him unfashionable in his own time: a commitment to fighting ethical fundamentalism and a literary imagination that validates the pluralistic character of modern life.

Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age

Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age
Author: Emory Elliott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2002-01-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198033443

Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age examines a variety of significant multidisciplinary and multicultural topics within the subject of aesthetics. Addressing the vexed relation of the arts and criticism to current political and cultural concerns, the contributors to this volume attempt to bridge the two decades-old gap between scholars and critics who hold conflicting views of the purposes of art and criticism. By exploring some of the ways in which global migration and expanding ethnic diversity are affecting cultural productions and prompting reassessment of the nature and role of aesthetic discourse, this volume provides a new evaluation of aesthetic ideas and practices within contemporary arts and letters.

Accident

Accident
Author: Ross Hamilton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2008-02-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226817598

From ancient philosophy to Tristram Shandy and Buster Keaton movies, this book tells the engaging history of accident as an idea. An accidental glance at a newspaper notice causes Rousseau to collapse under the force of a vision. A car accidentally hits Giacometti, and he experiences an epiphany. Darwin introduces accident to the basic process of life, and Freud looks to accident as the expression of unconscious desire. Accident, Ross Hamilton claims, is the force that makes us modern. Tracing the story of accident from Aristotle to Buster Keaton and beyond, Hamilton’s daring book revives the tradition of the grand history of ideas. Accident tells an original history of Western thought from the perspective of Aristotle’s remarkably durable categories of accident and substance. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s distinction underwrote an insistence on order and subordination of the inessential. In a groundbreaking innovation, Hamilton argues that after the Reformation, the concept of accident began to change places with that of substance: accident became a life-transforming event and effectively a person’s essence. For moderns, it is the accidental, seemingly trivial moments of consciousness that, like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” create constellations of meaning in our lives. Touching on a broad array of images and texts—Augustine, Dante, the frescoes of Raphael, Descartes, Jane Austen, the work of the surrealists, and twentieth-century cinema—Hamilton provides a new way to map the mutations of personal identity and subjectivity.

Young Törless

Young Törless
Author: Robert Musil
Publisher: Harvill Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1971
Genre: German fiction
ISBN:

Paul Ricoeur’s Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology

Paul Ricoeur’s Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology
Author: Marc de Leeuw
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2021-12-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498595596

In Paul Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology: Vulnerability, Capability, Justice, Marc de Leeuw argues that Ricoeur’s philosophical project integrates the anthropological tradition while renewing its importance as a hermeneutic anthropology of human capability. Ricoeur posits that our cogito is neither its own absolute master, nor fully transparent to itself, inflicting a “wound” (brisé) and fracturing the center of Cartesian self-certainty. But the Nietzschean disillusionment that ensues does not simply amount to a victorious anti-cogito; it opens another path towards self-understanding. In place of the direct route of intuition is found a more complex way forward, one guided by interpretation. The task of philosophical anthropology is to understand the human through its interpretative, critical, and imaginative ability as well as its capacity to act towards, with, and for others; the interpretation of the world in front of us, the interpretation of “who we are,” and the interpretation of what it means to be among others (as "other selves") coalesces in an anthropology that binds the question of the self to a moral, ethical, and political project, one aiming to reflect our existence-in-common. For Ricoeur, the basic question of our subjective and normative “standing” demands a fundamental response—a response toward our own otherness and to responsibilities triggered by the appeal of Others. In both cases, our vulnerability is inescapable: we can never have an absolute self-knowledge nor an absolute knowledge of Others. Ricoeur turns this fundamental aporia into an affirmative philosophical anthropology of human action, attestation, and justice.

The Sot-Weed Factor

The Sot-Weed Factor
Author: John Barth
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1628972009

This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy -is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late 17th century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father's tobacco (or "sot weed") plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists - Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth's language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale -revealed to us in the "secret" journals of Capt. John Smith - that anyone has ever dared to tell." —Time Magazine