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2003
Toker, Leona . 2003. “From the Editor”. Partial Answers 1(1): vii-viii. . Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 1
Abstract
see full text
Harrison, Bernard . 2003. “Houyhnhnm Virtue”. Partial Answers 1(1): 35-64. . Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 1 Literature and Philosophy The Past and the Present
Abstract

 

Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism.

 

Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers. His more strictly philosophical writings include work on epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language. His most recent book on such topics, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-authored with his Utah colleague Patricia Hanna, offers a systematic rethinking, with implications, among other things, for literary studies, of the philosophy of language, as it has developed since Russell and Frege, on the basis of a new reading of Wittgenstein. He is currently (2017) at work on a study of the nature of anti-Semitism, and the continuity between its traditional and contemporary forms, under the title Blaming the Jews: The Persistence of a Delusion. It develops and carries further some of the ideas proposed in his The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

Updated in March 2017.

 

 

 

Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism.

 

bernard_harrison.jpg
Gagnier, Regenia . 2003. “Individualism from the New Woman to the Genome: Autonomy and Independence”. Partial Answers 1(1): 103-128. . Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 1 Literature and Ideology
Abstract

 

The paper analyzes a number of cultural patterns of individualism since the late nineteenth century to our times, taking into account its national and gender variants and patterns of conflict and violence. It argues that the liberal New Women literature, especially written by women, opted not so much for independence, with its emphasis on self-affirmation, as for autonomy, which also valorized relationships and shared goals. The technological revolution, which promoted the rise of mass societies, and the current Information Age, in which political freedom risks transforming itself into market democracy and respect for individuality into a cult of “recombinance,” have produced types of self-affirmation that actually tend to come full circle to submerging individuality in social environment.

 

Professor Regenia Gagnier is a critical theorist and cultural historian of  19th-century  Britain. Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, she was a Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Director of the Programme in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University from 1982 to 1996, and Professor of English, Director of Research, Dean of the Graduate School, and Director of Exeter Interdisciplinary Institute  at the University of Exeter since 1996. Her  books include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986), Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991), Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde (Boston, 1991), The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000), Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Basingstoke, 2010),  and two guest-edited special issues of  New Literary History (Economics, Culture and Value [2000]) and Victorian Literature and Culture (Victorian Boundaries [2004]).  She is the Editor in Chief of Literature Compass and its Global Circulation Project and the President of the British Association for Victorian Studies.

Updated October 18, 2010

 

 

 

The paper analyzes a number of cultural patterns of individualism since the late nineteenth century to our times, taking into account its national and gender variants and patterns of conflict and violence. It argues that the liberal New Women literature, especially written by women, opted not so much for independence, with its emphasis on self-affirmation, as for autonomy, which also valorized relationships and shared goals. The technological revolution, which promoted the rise of mass societies, and the current Information Age, in which political freedom risks transforming itself into market democracy and respect for individuality into a cult of “recombinance,” have produced types of self-affirmation that actually tend to come full circle to submerging individuality in social environment.

 

regenia_gagnier.jpg
Hunter, Dianne . 2003. “Poetics of Melancholy and Psychic Possession in Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters and Other Haunted Texts”. Partial Answers 1(1): 129-150. . Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 1 Topoi
Abstract

 

Read intertextually with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1938 story “Ligeia” and other gothic accounts of melancholy and spousal mourning, Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters evinces ancestral haunting and literary vampirism. “Ligeia,” Hughes’s Birthday Letters in their biographical context, and the aftermath of the death of Eva Peron exemplify Abraham and Torok’s concept of how family histories communicate, via psychic crypts, a sense of possession by the dead. Insofar as intertextuality reveals how texts are lodged within one another and can be thought of as eating one other, literary history reveals itself as a vampiric tale.

 

January 2003: Dianne Hunter is Professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, Editor of Seduction and Theory (University of Illinois,1989); author of essays in American Imago and The Psychoanalytic Review.

 

 

 

Read intertextually with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1938 story “Ligeia” and other gothic accounts of melancholy and spousal mourning, Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters evinces ancestral haunting and literary vampirism. “Ligeia,” Hughes’s Birthday Letters in their biographical context, and the aftermath of the death of Eva Peron exemplify Abraham and Torok’s concept of how family histories communicate, via psychic crypts, a sense of possession by the dead. Insofar as intertextuality reveals how texts are lodged within one another and can be thought of as eating one other, literary history reveals itself as a vampiric tale.

 

dianne_hunter2.jpg
Regard, Frédéric . 2003. “Topologies of the Self: Space and Life-Writing”. Partial Answers 1(1): 89-102. . Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 1 Life Writing Literature and the Ideas of Space
Abstract

 

The paper suggests that in autobiographical writing issues of geography are no less important than those of history. It surveys several theoretical tools for the study of the geographical aspects of life-writing and tests them against John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. 

 

January 2003: Frédéric Regard is Director of English Studies at the École Normale Superieure des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, formerly “Fontenay/Saint-Cloud” recently relocated in Lyons. Born in Algeria. Educated at ENS Saint-Cloud; awarded the agregation in British Literature, wrote his thesis under the supervision of Helene Cixous. Author of  books on William Golding, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf and of an essay on the notion of feminine writing in English Literature. Published a History of British Literature with the Presses Universitaires de France. Current field of research: the production of national identity through life-writing (mainly auto/biography, and narratives of exploration).

 

 

 

The paper suggests that in autobiographical writing issues of geography are no less important than those of history. It surveys several theoretical tools for the study of the geographical aspects of life-writing and tests them against John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.