Just talk

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Tullio Pagano

This volume provides the first comprehensive comparative study of two major representatives of naturalism: Emile Zola and the Italian "verist" novelist, Giovanni Verga. The development of Verga's narrative, from the early romantic novels to his mature verist fiction, is to be understood in connection with French Naturalism, and Zola in particular. The author thus challenges the canonical interpretation of Verga's fiction (dominant among Italian critics) which sees it in antithetical opposition to Zola's.

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Robert Eisenhauer

"Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts approaches literary and visual texts from the perspective of Hesperian identification and representation. Included is the first translation into English of Fichte's Supplement of 1801, a document whose content sheds light not only on the atheism controversy of the 1790s, but also on literary/philosophical polarizations in the "Republic of Letters." Condensed from the Hesperian atmospherics of Italy and Latin elegy, Faust II entails a Goethean celebration of auditory and visual sensation. In a text devoted to Shelley, Gregory Corso is seen elaborating a prosopopoeia involving Hypnos, god of sleep, a figure dispelling the effects of reading - the hypnoticon. Eisenhauer reads Holderlin in the context of Pindar, philosophical idealism, and autobiographical projection."--BOOK JACKET.

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David Lodge

"Human Consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping - even rediscovery - by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. As the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of understanding that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in light of recent investigations in the sciences."--BOOK JACKET.

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John Guillory

In Cultural Capital, John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over "multiculturalism" and the current "crisis of the humanities.". Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of representing social groups in the canon than of distributing "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, the practices of reading and writing. He declines to reduce the history of canon formation to one of individual reputations or the ideological contents of particular works, arguing that a critique of the canon fixated on the concept of authorial identity overlooks historical transformations in the forms of cultural capital that have underwritten judgments of individual authors. The most important of these transformations is the emergence of "literature" in the later eighteenth century as the name of the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. In three case studies, Guillory charts the rise and decline of the category of "literature" as the organizing principle of canon formation in the modern period. He considers the institutionalization of the English vernacular canon in eighteenth-century primary schools; the polemic on behalf of a New Critical modernist canon in the university; and the appearance of a "canon of theory" supplementing the literary curriculum in the graduate schools and marking the onset of a terminal crisis of literature as the dominant form of cultural capital in the schools. The final chapter of Cultural Capital examines recent theories of value judgment, which have strongly reaffirmed cultural relativism as the necessary implication of canon critique. Contrasting the relativist position with Pierre Bourdieu's very different sociology of judgment, Guillory concludes that the object of a revisionary critique of aesthetic evaluation should not be to discredit judgment, but to reform the conditions of its practice in the schools by universalizing access to the means of literary production and consumption.