Ethics and literary studies

This essay considers virtue ethics and universalism in the wisdom literature of Musharrif al-Din Muṣliḥ Saʿdī (d. ca. 690/1291). Published in Renovatio, Spring (2018). If possible, please use this link to access: https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-secret-of-the-morality-tale

The version uploaded here is a proof with minor errors.

Citation: Zargar, Cyrus Ali. “The Secret of the Morality Tale: Saʿdī on What It Means To Be Human.” Renovatio 2:1 (Spring 2018), pp. 81-88.

The purpose of our collection of essays is to frame Shakespeare’s representation of human moral choice within the context of intellectual history. The contributors extend the Cambridge method of moderate contextualism from its origins, the study of political philosophy, to a parallel study of Shakespeare’s thought about ethics, situating Shakespeare’s ideas within contemporary debate about rival, overlapping moral paradigms. Christianity, Skepticism, Epicureanism: these and other such schools of thought serve as examples of Pocock’s “languages,” but in the realm of moral philosophy, rather than political. The collection also places Shakespeare in dialogue with a representative Continental analogue, Montaigne. Our animating premise is that Shakespeare's ideas about ethics can be best understood within a larger historical frame: sources, paradigms, and problems already extant and even highly elaborated, well before Shakespeare himself ever set pen to page. The terminus a quo is just as important as the terminus ad quem: as Bacon writes, “Things in themselves new will yet be apprehended with reference to what is old." Shakespeare’s perspective on morality does not emerge ex nihilo, the product of an inexplicable rupture, but instead draws upon a rich variety of intellectual traditions, Christian as well as classical, even in its moments of most ardent critique. The choice of the term “Renaissance” for the title, for example, rather than “early modern,” is deliberate: our hope is to foreground the resurgence of classical paradigms in this period. Over the course of Shakespeare’s life, new moral systems such as Neo-Stoicism and Epicureanism challenged prevailing ethical assumptions, began to contest the preeminence of Christianity, and laid the groundwork for what we now call “modernity”: Charles Taylor’s “secular age.”

In this article I offer an overview and assessment of “Wallace Studies” in the wake of the author’s death, and outline the historically novel forces, technological and critical, that have shaped the early academic reception of Wallace’s work. I survey existing criticism, identify emerging trends at the two conferences in 2009, and identify overlaps between Wallace criticism and wider debates in literary study in the early twenty-first century.

C Co om mb bi ie en n d d' 'a au ut te eu ur rs s y y a a--t t--i il l d da an ns s c ce et tt te e oe oeu uv vr re e ? ? R Ra ap ph ha aë ël l B Ba ar ro on ni i D De e q qu ue el ll le e m ma an ni iè èr re e l l' 'a au ut te eu ur r h ha ab bi it te e--t t--i il l s sa a f fi ic ct ti io on n ? ? 1L'oeuvre de Michel Houellebecq s'inscrit dans un mouvement plus vaste que l'on peut qualifier de retour de l'auteur . Ce mouvement se caractérise, entre autres, par la prolifération dans le champ littéraire des formes autobiographiques ou autofictionnelles, mais aussi, sur un plan plus général, par le souci très « postmoderne » de garantir l'authenticité de l'oeuvre en l'inscrivant dans une expérience vécue. Depuis une vingtaine d'années, ce retour de l'auteur s'observe également dans le champ académique, la théorie littéraire accomplissant une sorte de retour du refoulé structuraliste. Les travaux de Jérôme Meizoz sur la posture de Houellebecq, ou ceux de Liesbeth Korthals Altes sur son ethos, peuvent être considérés comme des cas exemplaires de cet intérêt renouvelé concernant les liens qui peuvent être tissés entre le texte et son créateur. Mais ce retour de l'auteur, somme toute banal à constater, prend une tournure assez singulière chez Houellebecq, car sa figure apparaît à la fois omniprésente et étrangement insaisissable. On constate en effet, lorsqu'on analyse leurs discours [2], que les lecteurs ne s'entendent pas sur la manière de relier l'écrivain à ses textes. Là où certains entendront de l'ironie, d'autres y liront une provocation commerciale ; là où certains dénonceront une vision réductrice ou cynique, d'autres célébreront un regard lucide posé sur l'humanité, voire la sensibilité d'une âme blessée par la dureté du monde. Si les interprétations divergent, elles se rejoignent cependant dans la manière d'impliquer l'auteur dans son texte : c'est avant tout Houellebecq qui est ironique, provocateur, cynique, lucide ou sensible, et peut-être tout cela à la fois. 2Pour y voir plus clair, je commencerai par passer en revue diverses manières d'impliquerl'auteur dans son oeuvre, d'en débusquer les traces au sein de la matérialité textuelle. Je m'interrogerai ensuite sur la nature du référent auquel renvoient les diverses facettes de l'écrivain et sur l'utilité de maintenir certaines distinctions conceptuelles. Mais

This thesis is a study of the Jinamahānidāna, a biography of the Buddha, composed in Pāli, probably in Ayutthaya in Thailand between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jinamahānidāna covers the Buddha's entire life, from his first
aspiration to buddhahood to the Buddha's death. In thus confronting the reader with his death, it would seem to reaffirm his unavailability in the present. Yet it leaves the reader
with a stronger sense of the Buddha's connection to the present and of himself as personally involved in a relationship with the Buddha. Moreover, the reader is revealed as having the ability and the responsibility to ensure the Buddha's connection to the present continues into the future. On the other hand, the Jinamahānidāna tells the
Buddha's whole story, and in unusual detail, and so promises the reader a fuller, more
multi-faceted perception of the Buddha. Yet, ultimately, it undercuts this promise to
reveal the fullness of his person as extending immeasurably beyond the reach of our
perception or comprehension.

The Jinamahānidāna achieves this complex portrayal of the Buddha through a
sophisticated engagement with its own textual form, and a deft interplay between its form and content. Its form reflects aspects of its subject matter. In addition, its form and content often constitute existential and emotional stances toward the Buddha. Using its own textual form, the Jinamahānidāna both creates and models for the reader a particular orientation toward the Buddha. In my analysis of this process, the thesis explores four qualities of the text that are also qualities of the Buddha: comprehensiveness, wholeness, connectedness, and denseness.

The Jinamahānidāna is a composite text, created through the interweaving and
reworking of material from earlier texts, and Chapters 1 and 2 depend on comparison of the form of the Jinamahānidāna with that of its sources. Chapters 3 and 4 involve close reading of the Jinamahānidāna in its own right. These complementary approaches reveal the Jinamahānidāna's artful interactions with its sources, which permit it to present its particular vision of the Buddha.

SOMMARIO
Il saggio analizza l’influenza dei Viaggi di Gulliver sull’opera di Primo Levi. A partire dalla Ricerca delle radici, in cui Levi inserisce il capolavoro di Swift tra i libri cruciali della sua giovinezza, si esplora l’importanza dei libri III e IV dei Viaggi, che possono essere considerati un serbatoio di esperimenti immaginativi da cui Levi attinge nel modulare la sua riflessione sul rapporto tra linguaggio e ideologia (specie nei Som- mersi e i salvati) e quella sul rapporto tra ragione e repressione del corpo nei suoi racconti di fantascienza (in particolare in Storie naturali). Prendendo le mosse dai saggi freudiani di Giuseppe Sertoli, si prova a capire come Levi ridefinisce questi due aspetti nella sua opera: quanto segue Swift, e quanto se ne distacca per provare a elaborare soluzioni alternative.
SUMMARY
The main focus of the essay is the influence of Gulliver’s Travels on Primo Levi’s writ- ing. Starting from La ricerca delle radici, where Levi includes Swift’s book as one of the crucial readings of his youth, the essay examines the importance of book III and IV of the Travels: they can be considered as an ensemble of imaginative experiments that Levi had in mind while exploring the relationship between language and ideol- ogy in I sommersi e i salvati and the relationship between reason and the repression of the body in his sci-fi stories (in particular Storie naturali). Following Giuseppe Sertoli’s psychoanalytical reading of Gulliver, the essay tries to understand how Levi deals with these two relationships – deeply connected to each other – and how he represents them in his literary work.

The Shadow-Line represents a fundamental achievement in Conrad's literary career and constitutes the peak of the author's ethical reflection on the relationship between literature and life. By combining the autobiographical narration with the motives, atmospheres, and vocabulary of romance, Conrad presents the account of his personal experience of initiation to adulthood as a quest-like fiction of maturation through hardship. The key-figure of this merger is the "outsider," who is an individual who learns how to endure hardship and failure by opening his or her soul to solidarity and respect for humanity, thus achieving wisdom and ethical worth.

The Bell is Iris Murdoch's fourth novel, first published in 1958. The setting is the isolated complex of Imber, which is in a rural woodland area in England. Within the complex of Imber, the market garden, the three rivers, the immense lake, the large house of Imber Court, and the Abbey are important features. This setting is inhabited by two independent communities: on the one hand, a religious lay community lives at Imber Court, while the Abbey is inhabited by a closed order of nuns presided over by the Abbess. The plot of The Bell focuses on the religious lay community that lives at Imber Court. In this paper The Bell will be read as a moral study which gathers together the different moral proposals that various characters uphold and live in accordance with. It is not asserted that this is the only possible reading of the novel, but that it is one among those which are possible. However, The Bell is a lengthy novel with a wide range of characters and a highly complex plot. For these reasons, an analysis of its morality requires careful planning -an unplanned analysis of the morality of The Bell is doomed to be biased. The planning should start with certain passages or characters whose analysis would guide the overall moral analysis of the whole novel. Having said that, which passages or characters should be the starting point of our moral analysis?

Lecteur modèle, lecteurs empiriques et tensions interprétatives dans l'oeuvre de Michel Houellebecq / Raphaël Baroni, in journée d'études "Le lecteurs et ses autres (2)" organisée, sous la responsabilité scientifique de Marie-Josée Fourtanier, par le laboratoire "Lettres, Langages et Arts : Création, Recherche, Émergence, en Arts, Textes, Images, Spectacles" (LLA CREATIS) en collaboration avec l'Équipe de Recherche sur les Rationalités Philosophiques et les Savoirs (ERRAPHIS), Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès-campus Mirail, 20 juin 2014.

Dans le prolongement des travaux sur la lecture subjective menés autour du "Texte du lecteur" et du séminaire "Réception des oeuvres et créativité des lecteurs-auditeurs-spectateurs", les différents intervenants de la seconde saison ont interrogé, sans souci d'inventaire, les autres du lecteur. Par ce vocable, dont l'emploi peut sembler énigmatique, nous entendons, entre autres, les souvenirs enfouis issus de l'histoire personnelle du lecteur, les scénarios fantasmatiques tissés par son inconscient et activés par les oeuvres de fiction, le bruissement des diverses communautés interprétatives auxquelles il participe, le frayage des langages et des langages qui médiatisent son apport aux autres et au monde.

This article tests Martha Nussbaum's assertion that a novel can be "a paradigm of moral activity" (1990: 148) and expands that claim beyond the boundaries Nussbaum is likely to have originally conceived, through a study of Lionel Shriver's controversial novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003). The article combines analysis of Shriver's narrative techniques and unorthodox moral argument with current clinical research, discussions of accountability in post-postmodern society, and Nussbaum's hopes for the place of fiction in such debates, particularly with regard to her distinction between the general and the particular in moral judgment.
The article reveals how critical focus on violence in Shriver's novel has so far obscured Shriver's fierce and surprisingly optimistic ethical message. In addition to its astute anatomization of trauma, the novel offers readers a framework for envisioning rehabilitation from trauma that is both recuperative and generative. The process of mutual-reconstitution achieved by Shriver's characters challenges readers to reconfigure their expectations, assumptions, and biases; to engage with characters that court antipathy; and yet, to emerge from the experience profoundly humbled. Shriver thereby sets forth an existential model of significant importance to contemporary reformulations of notions of authentic self-becoming and of love's knowledge.

This article considers challenges posed to reading practices and hermeneutics by Ishtiyaq Shukri’s I See You. The content of the novel is at times didactic, and surface reading might seem an appropriate means of analysis, yet the form is experimental: it includes radio reports, characters’ reflections and journalistic work. The connection between these “documents” is not readily apparent, thus one is obliged to study the gaps between them to make sense of the text. Symptomatic reading might seem apposite, but the protagonist’s photographic work reveals the limits of this form of reading, too. I argue that Shukri’s text demands a process that interweaves symptomatic and surface reading in complex ways that require the reader to assess the ideological position from which s/he reads. The novel therefore draws attention to the ways in which reading, like seeing, is a political act.

In this article, I attempt to untangle the conflated representations of the two dead women who haunt Axel Vander, the narrator of large portions of John Banville’s 2002 novel, Shroud. The narrating protagonist has an inflated sense of his own centrality and a callous disregard for others. Cass Cleave and Magda are reduced to roles which bear striking resemblances to those of Nemesis and Echo in Ovid’s rendition of the myth of Narcissus. The article first explores Vander’s relationship with Cass, who is twice referred to as “Nemesis” in the text. It traces how Vander’s attempt to forge a coherent version of himself comes at Cass’s expense. While she is initially poised to bring justice, as Nemesis does, to the Narcissus-like figure by revealing who he actually is, their interaction costs her her life. The article then moves on to look at Magda, Vander’s dead (and likely murdered) wife, who throughout her life played the only role permitted by her grandiose husband: that of a hapless Echo. The article concludes by an examination of Vander’s belated regret, and doomed gesture of recompense.

This chapter examines literary relations in human rights contexts, where the production and consumption of such narratives relies on a public circulation of affect that divides the world into “comfort zones” and zones of risk, vulnerability and disposability. By focusing on the specific narrative strategies deployed in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Dave Eggers’ collaborative “fictional autobiography” of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng, What is the What, and Evelyn Amony’s I am Evelyn Amony (edited by Erin Baines), I explore the extent to which collaborative storytelling strategies enable authors to move past sympathetic self-projection or “post-humanitarian” responses. Each text signals the problem of circulation and reception of stories by intentionally drawing attention to the pressure to produce narratives along certain discursive lines in order to make the story available to a particular culture of reader, who in turn comes to the story with pre-formed assumptions about “Africa” and “Africanness.” The question of vulnerability— and literary engagements with it—is both political and contextual. The texts under consideration in this chapter engage self-consciously with complex acts of storytelling, where writing and reading constitute sites of conflict and tension as well as of hope and reparation. In the context of the ethics of humanitarian writing in relation to questions of political agency, I inquire to what extent the effect of the adopted storytelling strategies amount to an empowering of the vulnerable subject, such that they are more or less able to exercise political agency under particular conditions. The complex explorations of truth, voice and representation that emerge from these texts raise important questions about the possibility of ethical and political solidarity across boundaries of various kinds in the 21st century. Self-reflexive and political engagements with these questions can inform how we consume narratives of suffering and tragedy, while keeping the geopolitics of both imagination and vulnerability in mind.

That one ought to live like an artwork is the ideal of Gilbert Osborn in Henry James’ 'Portrait of a Lady,' the false aesthete who would escape moral judgement in the pose of beauty’s faithful admirer. John Barth’s 'End of the Road' picks up the theme, but in a first-person narrative that struck admirers and detractors alike as a manifesto on the sovereignty of art. The distance between author and hero is preserved, however, by virtue of the dialogical character of the novel, which challenges the narrator’s radical scepticism about the possibility of morality in a world of diverse impulses that never add up to an answerable self. The sceptical idea that the self is merely a performative construct, for example, summons on stage the idea of the self as a bearer of normative commitments. The relation of the moral to the aesthetic in the novel is clarified with reference to Kierkegaard’s 'Either/Or' and Bakhtin’s theory of selfhood.

The untranslatable and intriguing notion of ethos (mores, goodness, character, etc.) contrasts in Ancient rhetoric with pathos and logos, the other two pisteis or means of persuasion. Rhetorical ethos is characterized by ambivalence; is it essentially extra- or intra-discursive? an effect of the soul or an effective simulacrum? stable or circumstantial? As a discursive image, an artefact of speech, ethos remains problematic in its legitimacy. As shown in this volume, Montaigne’s readings of Ancient theories of ethos resonate in the Essais. The rhetorical effectiveness of Plutarch and Socrates versus Brutus and Seneca, for instance, is assessed in terms of ethos and a revealing style. Montaigne weighs rhetorical and ethical theories as he judges the writings of others, stages diverse types or characters, and develops in his book his own notion of ethos, paradoxical and dynamic, changing as is our soul. A variety of ethe narrated or enacted are also examined: Stoic figures and philosophers, generals, courtiers and honnêtes hommes, Indians, tragic heroes and heroines, among others. This collection of essays, beyond Montaigne studies, contributes to intellectual history, and to rhetorical, ethical, and political inquiry, for the early modern period and beyond. Montaigne’s quest for more human and humane modes of expression and action can be better understood in light of the notion of ethos, which raises issues of representation, subjectivity, social interaction, moral philosophy, politics, pragmatics, anthropology and identity. The contributors to this volume offer fresh new voices in “the art of conversation” about the Essais as they explore the many ramifications of Montaigne’s ethos and the manifold ethe he brings forth.

This essay observes that Cordelia figures into Shakespeare's King Lear much as autrui figures into Levinas's philosophy. She is the one who overawes, obsesses, and afflicts Lear. She is the one who summons and solicits him from "beyond being." She is the one who "disincarnates" the divine in a non-systematic and non-thematizable way. This is not to say, however, that Lear is simply a Levinasian fable. Rather, it is to suggest that Shakespeare was every bit as invested in the interpersonal relationship as was Levinas and appears to have entertained a number of similar ideas, including the idea that transcendence is not an effect of ecstasy or apotheosis but of interrelation.

The presentation investigates the ethical discourse in contemporary Polish literature in the context of Stefan Chwin’s novel "The Golden Pelican". The period in Polish literature after the communism fall in 1989 was a time of very important shifts in cultural axiology. The strong concentration on values, so characteristic of the New Wave poetic movement, was questioned in the times of liberalization and democratization. Writers such as Marcin Świetlicki, Manuela Gretkowska, or Andrzej Stasiuk, tried to overcome the high-values ethos and obligations imposed on artists and their works. At the same time, more classical discourse – focused on expressing values and moral dilemmas – experienced a deep crisis in the post-modern era, deprived of the stable metaphysical base.
The Chwin’s book reflects that crisis. It depicts a story of Jakub, an academic teacher, living in the times of a fulfilled liberalism, deeply valuing the law, responsibility, and moral imperatives. His beliefs are challenged when, after failing a student, he discovers that she possibly committed suicide. After that Jakub starts to discover the contingency of regulations ruling the systems shaping everyday life. His existence falls into pieces and eventually Jakub finds himself suffering on the margins of society.
The presentation analyses the ethical discourse in the Chwin’s novel. It aims to show how the text tries to deconstruct ethics of obligations and invent a new personality model, more appropriate to the liberal reality. In the story, only the first part of this project is conducted successfully, focusing on the crisis of the main character as a subject. The positive part, ethical answers given by the text, appears to be a more challenging – and not satysfying. Considering the interpretation of the Chwin’s novel I would like to show the alternative ways of overcoming the ethical crisis, proposed by the Polish literature.

This article analyzes the representation of ethics in Pat Barker’s novel Double Vision (2003), exploring the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the communities and individuals aggregated in the novel. In particular, it examines the ways in which an internationalization of empathy (shored up by media representation of global war, especially through the journalism of attachment) dovetails with the failure of the individual to internalize sympathy in its emotional underpinnings. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, which Barker places in the broader historical and geographical context of war atrocities and crimes, thus mark the point where the internationalization of empathy precipitates its domestic failure. By applying to the novel the critical apparatus on the cataleptic condition as proposed by ethicist Martha Nussbaum, this essay reveals the personal risks and benefits associated with the rotation of representational ethics around an international axis.

By examining the representation of popular and inquisitorial forms of punishment in the works of Cervantes, this essay seeks to recover shame as an emotional register of lived experience in the early modern Mediterranean, an affect which has hitherto remained overshadowed by the abundance of critical literature on honor as well as by large-scale Mediterraneanizing studies.  The identification of an inquisitorial discourse of shaming in the episodes of Don Quijote’s encagement suggests the need, on the one hand, to reevaluate what twentieth-century anthropology denominated the “values” of Mediterranean society and, on the other, to rehabilitate local (hi)stories that are all marked by blood: the blood of shame’s blush; that which was shed through violent conflicts; and that which governed the politics of blood purity.

Referat ma na celu analizę zależności między osobistymi a zbiorowymi narracjami w Sońce Ignacego Karpowicza. Pozwoli to na odczytanie utworu jako głosu sceptycznie oceniającego możliwości wpływu jednostkowej opowieści na zbiorowy dyskurs pamięci (m.in. częściowo poprzez zdekonstruowanie opozycji między nimi), a także poddającego w wątpliwość rolę sztuki jako mediatora w tym procesie.

Dla pokazania tych zależności pomocne okazują się m.in. kategorie zaproponowane przez Alaina Badiou, autora Etyki, pozwalające opisywać spotkanie Igora i Sońki jako „wydarzenie”. Francuski filozof, odwołując się tutaj do tradycji ukształtowanej zwłaszcza przez Heideggera i Deleuze’a, rozumie je jako przerwanie zwyczajnego toku egzystencji, pozwalające na wytworzenie szczególnego rodzaju podmiotowości, ściśle związanej z poczuciem zobowiązania do zmiany porządku „opinii” – i tym samym włączenia się (niekiedy w sposób rewolucyjny i wywrotowy) w „proces prawdy”. Jak można zauważyć, w Sońce akt opowiadania przez bohaterkę łączy się z próbą włączenia jej głosu (nie mieszczącego się w tradycyjnych, usankcjonowanych politycznie narracjach) w zbiorową pamięć i historię. Jednak projekt ten skazany jest na niepowodzenie wobec niemożliwości przekazania jednostkowego doświadczenia Sońki, które (niczym „hermeneutyczna kartka pocztowa” u Jacquesa Derridy) w interpretacyjnej drodze do odbiorców sztuki teatralnej Igora i do czytelnika gubi swój sens i aurę jednostkowości, zamazywane w narracyjnych konwencjach (co, jak autorefleksyjnie zdaje sprawę Igor, dzieje się już podczas słuchania Sońki), instytucjonalnych przetworzeniach oraz interpretacjach krytyków i publiczności.

Wreszcie, analiza tych zależności odwołująca się do myśli Badiou pozwala również na wydobycie etycznego (czy raczej etykopolitycznego) rysu powieści Karpowicza. Mimo pragmatycznej nieskuteczności bohaterowie zdają się kierować swoistym nakazem opowiadania, słuchania i zobowiązaniem wobec doświadczenia – co Badiou określa jako „wierność wobec tego, co się pamięta” i co jest podstawowym imperatywem w jego koncepcji.

... prey for the shadow" (1), and criticism correlatively depends on "a public's mode of ... In Levinas's Otherwise Than Being, Or Beyond Essence (1981), such deliberative sojourningis captured ... to being arrogated—covered rather than harmonized: "The performative hypostasis is the ...

Cet article déploie une réflexion épistémologique sur la littérature, l’éthique et la philosophie ainsi que sur la littérature en tant qu’incommunicabilité. Alors que la critique éthique a gagné de plus en plus d’intérêt depuis les années 1990, les liens historiques et théoriques entre la philosophie et l’éthique en tant que discours de la raison humaine et du progrès n’ont pas été examinés en profondeur. Pourtant, ils tendent à montrer que les deux discours subordonnent la littérature à leurs propres présupposés, faisant ainsi de la littérature un simple réceptacle pour leurs revendications et messages.

Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.

La racionalidad del poder, la imposición de un régimen semi-colonial, las políticas de privatización y transnacionalización de los bienes comunales han sido acciones que han realizado los últimos Gobiernos, los grupillos políticos y las familias burguesas de la región. Es Buenaventura un espacio de acumulación del capital y de enajenación de la dignidad humana.

Pero qué sucede con Buenaventura, la tierra del porteño, el arrechón, el viche y la salsa. Buenaventura es un espacio para la alegría, el sabor y la belleza de la gente del Pacífico, es una cultura digna de sus tradiciones afro y sobre todo un lugar de enunciación sobre la historia de comunidades negras víctimas del desarrollismo industrial y la ampliación de la sociedad portuaria. Todo esto con un telón de fondo de desplazamiento resultado de la lógica mercantilista de estos gobiernos de turno.

Studies or Locating Ethics Anna Fahraeus AnnKatrin Jonsson (Eds) 'fJiPi ... Textual Ethos Studies Thls On© F70P-E0H-PX9U ... Critical Studies Vol. 26 General Editor Myriam Diocaretz European Centre for Digital Communication/Infonomics Editorial Board Anne E. Berger, Cornell ...

Referat jest poświęcony możliwości ujęcia etyki czytania literatury w kategoriach zaproponowanych przez Alaina Badiou, łączącego (za nurtem neomarksistowskim) ściśle w swoich rozważania zagadnienie moralnego aspektu egzystencji z politycznym. Po pierwsze, analiza poglądów filozofa ma na celu ich odniesienie do literatury jako instytucji, wobec której formułuje się etyczne postulaty, zawsze związane z szerszym projektem społecznym. Pozwoli to na rozstrzygnięcie, czy istnieje specyficzna rola, którą literatura (a przede wszystkim – jaka literatura) mogłaby pełnić w egzystencjalnym „procesie prawdy”. Po drugie zaś, możliwe stanie się wskazanie perspektyw wykorzystania teorii Badiou w badaniach literackich w postaci względnie samodzielnej metody badawczej, nie dystansującej się z założenia wobec sfery politycznej.

The untranslatable and intriguing notion of ethos (mores, goodness, character, etc.) contrasts in Ancient rhetoric with pathos and logos, the other two pisteis or means of persuasion. Rhetorical ethos is characterized by ambivalence; is it essentially extra- or intra-discursive? an effect of the soul or an effective simulacrum? stable or circumstantial? As a discursive image, an artefact of speech, ethos remains problematic in its legitimacy.

As shown in this volume, Montaigne’s readings of Ancient theories of ethos resonate in the Essais. The rhetorical effectiveness of Plutarch and Socrates versus Brutus and Seneca, for instance, is assessed in terms of ethos and a revealing style. Montaigne weighs rhetorical and ethical theories as he judges the writings of others, stages diverse types or characters, and develops in his book his own notion of ethos, paradoxical and dynamic, changing as is our soul. A variety of ethe narrated or enacted are also examined: Stoic figures and philosophers, generals, courtiers and honnêtes hommes, Indians, tragic heroes and heroines, among others. This collection of essays, beyond Montaigne studies, contributes to intellectual history, and to rhetorical, ethical, and political inquiry, for the early modern period and beyond.

Montaigne’s quest for more human and humane modes of expression and action can be better understood in light of the notion of ethos, which raises issues of representation, subjectivity, social interaction, moral philosophy, politics, pragmatics, anthropology and identity. The contributors to this volume offer fresh new voices in “the art of conversation” about the Essais as they explore the many ramifications of Montaigne’s ethos and the manifold ethe he brings forth.

How are we to understand an invention that neither copies its source texts in a servile manner, nor competes to displace them? Piers Plowman defies the categories of primary and secondary translation. Instead, Langland adopts non-competitive habits of invention from the theory and practice of tropological exegesis in order to embody ethical and literary sources in the invention of ‘heretofore unseen phenomena’. In the Pentecost episode, Will joins ‘many hundret’ in inventing the ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, a hymn given to them by the Holy Spirit. The nascent church invents something completely new even as it conforms as closely as possible to its source, the Holy Spirit.