The essay discusses the literary-critical concepts of Matvei Kagan (1889-1937) - a Russian philosopher of Jewish origin, a student and follower of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and a close friend of Mikhail Bakhtin in his early, constitutive period of the Nevel Circle (1918-1920). The concepts of love and bewilderment, as defined in Kagan's works on Turgenev and Pushkin, are examined in the context of his philosophy of history, culture, and art. In the center of Kagan's historical theory of literature lies the idea of the Jewish community as a model for canonization of the cultural work. Kagan views literature as generating self-awareness and national-cultural identity, either through tragic bewilderment at the loss of freedom and love in history (in the case of Pushkin) or through a culture's self-defining dialogue with other cultures (as in the case of Turgenev). The central concept of this approach is that of svive-libe - "love of environment," interpreted as love for a community's cultural contribution in the context of its purposefulness in a universal human context.

In recent years, literary critics and theorists have turned increasingly toward cognitive science for models, including in discussions of literary style. More than is usually recognized, such an approach recalls the "affective stylistics" developed by Stanley Fish in the 1970s - a similarity evident in the heavy use both theories make of the term "information." The assumptions behind the use of this term, however, are deeply misleading. "Information" implies that styles are parcels or propositions rather than expressions of attitude, and invokes a causal vocabulary that fails to capture how texts convey moods and communicate ideas. More plausible models of understanding can be culled from Donald Davidson's account of Mrs. Malaprop and Ludwig Wittgenstein's descriptions of "seeing-as." Avoiding the twin temptations of skepticism and dogmatism, these discussions suggest that cognitivist and affective theories are logically dependent on the practices of actually existing readers, whose engagements with style are at times effortless and at times full of confusion. Styles are not discrete objects, as the language of "information" implies, and understanding them demands a complex training and historically variable set of skills, sometimes referred to as know-how and wit.

Waiting and expecting structurally presuppose a futurity conditioned by doubt and uncertainty about the object of the wait. But what can waiting signify when one no longer waits for something/someone to come in a determinable future or when the horizon of such a traditional form of waiting starts receding? This paper attempts to frame this problem within a "dialectical" reading of Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, starting from the existential-temporal dimension of humanity's Dasein as "destined-to-death," which traces the limits of waiting with/for an end as the time of the always missed/deferred encounter with Godot, symbolizing the ultimate appointment with death. As the play unfolds, the main characters may be seen to approach, albeit unwittingly, the threshold of another, more objectless waiting: that of Derrida's arrivant or waiting without (messianic) expectation in a future-to-come (avenir). Finally, after a detour via Blanchot's own modes of waiting and, as a possible remedy, the form of negation known as forgetting (Awaiting Oblivion), it returns to the ultimate inescapability of waiting beyond the "end" of Beckett's play and, following Abraham and Torok's speculative endeavor to write a "Sixth Act" in order to put to rest the dramatic uncertainties of Hamlet, it attempts to imagine a "third act," once the curtain has fallen on Beckett's characters.

The article explores Margaret Atwood's engagement with the ethics of hospitality as manifested in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000) and the short story "The Art of Cooking and Serving" (2006). It claims that these works point to an ethical vision which is best understood in light of the philosophical ideas of radical hospitality suggested by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida but with an important feminist revision. Focusing on allusions to an inspiring cookbook, prominent in the two works by Atwood, the article analyzes the works' appropriation and reformulation of the feminine myth of gracious housewifery for signifying both the subject's obligation to the other and the ideal of generous giving and attentive care. It addresses the conflict that Atwood stages between a feminist critique of the duty of hospitality imposed on women and the ethical view of the subject's un-chosen and absolute responsibility to another. 

The essay examines the epistemological possibilities of artistic imaginary languages and their ontological effects in the avant-garde movement "lettrism." The movement employed imaginary language, which illustrates an anti-rational theory of language. The problematics of such quasi-language are manifested most radically in relation to quietistlinguistic philosophy (Sprachkritik): the identification of the limits of thinking and language in philosophy confronts the utopian belief in the possibility of "private" communication in the avant-garde. Lettrism subverts the normative order of systematic language by means of invented signs, which are not arbitrary but unorthodox. These signs supposedly express that which philosophy designates as epistemic privacy - what can be known to one person only. The paradoxical claim that an imaginary language can express the epistemically private gives rise to what I term the mysticism of immanence. Neither distinctively religious nor atheistic, the mysticism of immanence is based on the idealistic assertion that one is able to express not only the existence but also the contents of epistemic privacy. Moreover, the renunciation of conventional language suggests that immanence is in this case alinguistic. In brief, for lettrists, thinking did not necessitate language. Lettrist imaginary language points out the necessity for convention as a stabilizing framework for meaning production. By advocating the idea of an "immediate message," which remains between mediation and immediacy, imaginary language exceeds the limits of immanence. Since an imaginary language cannot be shared or self-contained, it is an opening of immanence towards other than immanence. This other is not represented as any absolute transcendence, any version of the beyond, but rather as a collapse of the limits of immanence, limits that are subject to negotiation because the immediate message gives rise to a new and expanded sense of the immanent.

This essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf's much-debated claim that "on or about December 1910, human character changed," reassessing its import not as the provocation to her contemporaries that seems to have been intended, or as a statement of originality, but in a historical envelope that encompasses Woolf's own fictional oeuvre within a tradition of representing women in fiction. This tradition is essentially rhetorical and literary rather than essentialist; it engages with representations and associations rather than directly with psychological or philosophical questions about personality or identity. As such, "character" should be understood as involving a series of recognizable codes or tropes played through new contexts, with Shakespeare's representations of women as a constant touchstone or reference point. A pioneer of "stream of consciousness" prose and Modernist fiction, Woolf is normally read for her innovations in representing selfhood; this experimentalism, I suggest, is built on a bedrock of familiar imagery that reveals her involvement in a continuing literary tradition of character representation. Her interest in late nineteenth-century and contemporary developments in depth psychology notwithstanding, Woolf's revolutionary prose style shows evidence of her careful reading of previous literary evocations of character, particularly the characters of women. What is at issue, then, is not primarily existential questions about whether character "is" innate, self-fashioned, or merely linguistic, but rather critical or representational issues of how literary character has been evoked so as to create certain responses in readers. In the process, however, the larger existential questions are implicitly invoked, and shown to be not novel concerns of modernist psychology but continuing issues in literary understandings of the concept of "character" itself, at least as far back as the seventeenth century. In addition to a range of Woolf's own critical and creative writing, the essay considers works by Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Walter Pater, Henry James and Oscar Wilde.