Volume 47, Issue 1

How does philosophy interact with literature? The reception of Medea’scentral monologue (lines 1019–1080) in Euripides’ homonymously titled tragedyshows how literature can generate philosophical conceptions. Medea, amythological and literary character, murders her own children in order to getback at her husband and rebuild her status and her notion of justice. Hercharacter and her actions have become different models for the opposed schoolsof platonic and orthodox stoic philosophers. A new historical reconstruction oflost stoic interpretations of Euripides’ tragedy, based on philosophical discussionsof the play and stoic theories of mind and action, allows us a new understandingof the debate, of the distinctions between platonic and stoic theories ofmind, and of the role that literature can play in developing philosophicaltheories.

The epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto , Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), oneof the most influential texts of Renaissance writing, shows not only a precisecognition of early modern cartographic knowledge, as Alexandre Doroszlaï hasillustrated it in Ptolemée et l’hippogriffe (1998), but also performs a complextransmedial translation of cartographic depictions. The journeys around the globeof the Christian paladins Ruggiero and Astolfo narrated by Ariosto are, in fact,performative negotiations between literary and cartographic processes. Riding theHippograph, the hybrid vehicle par excellence, Ruggiero and Astolfo fly over theEarth as if they were flying over a map. Their journeys do not merely transmediallytranslate the course to the West pursued by Early Modern Europe. Rather, bytranslating the map Ariosto performs a new geopoetics that turns away from thesymbolic dominance of the East (or “Ent-Ostung”, as Peter Sloterdijk has usefullycalled it) and offers us one of the first poetic versions of modern globalization.

Following the skeptical attitude towards foreign nations and culturesduring the Renaissance, travel fictions during the English Restoration took amore liberal approach to ethnic difference. The anonymous novel Peppa (1689)artfully presents Western stereotypes about ethnic others as being based on falseassumptions and outright lies. A crucial scene in this cross-national love plot isbased on ethnic fakery, thereby presenting to its readers the constructedness ofnational and cultural identities. A second text example discusses John Dunton’sA Voyage round the World (1691), arguing that through its unusual form and theresulting openness it reveals the relativity of all cultural norms and nationalstereotypes. By presenting domestic scenes through the prism of colonialistderision, Dunton turns the tables on English nationalist discourse. Both textsthus invite their readers to confront national, ethnic, and cultural differencemore open-mindedly and be aware of the power of language and discourse toinfluence public opinion.

The German and Dutch historiography of eighteenth-century patriotismdefines two different forms of patriotism. It is either presented as an enlightenedand virtuous-eudemonic form of ʻlove for the fatherlandʼ based on reason, or asan ideology that foreshadows nineteenth-century emphatic forms of aggressivenationalism. A critical reading of the mid-eighteenth-century epics Cyrus byChristoph Martin Wieland and De Gevallen van Friso by Willem van Haren showsthat the discourses are strongly intertwined. Heroism in these epics is based on apersonal experience of war acts and no longer on distanced and ʻtheatricalʼexperiences of the military spectacle. It confronts us with aggressive war fantasiesrelated to early bellicism, as well as with pacifist statements. In Cyrus , forinstance, the sentimental warrior inspires his fellow-soldiers to offer their bloodin the struggle against the enemy, but he has doubts about the war and showscompassion with the enemy. Explorations of the effects of individual emotionson the battlefield, prepared both further idealisations of patriotic war acts and amore critical literary approach to war and fatherland.

Celan was a reader of Husserl’s phenomenology and this had animpact on his poetics. Husserl differentiates between three time conceptions:“Urimpression”, “Retention” and “Protention”. Together they are named “Zeithof”.In Celan’s poetological conception this temporal experience is also expressedin a single word, or poem. Hence remembrance emphasizes in Celan’sphenomenological conception the process of perception itself. When using aspecific word like “Mandel” (almond), Celan indicates what changes “Mandel”underwent in history, from ancient biblical times, via the Russian writer OsipMandel’stam to Auschwitz. In Celan’s poetics, words are therefore always ontheir way to another meaning, finally to another person.

Valéry’s dream of the creation of a poésie pure is determined by afundamental tension between two contradictory aspirations. On the one hand,he inherits French rationalism when he tries to develop a poetical praxis basedon a logical-mathematical calculus, in which anything vague and unclear shoulddisappear. On the other hand, this strictly formalized language revolves aroundthe notion of moi pur and therefore subscribes to a hypertrophied subjectivism.The paradoxical logic of personal pronouns described by Émile Benveniste is atthe origin of Valéry’s project: The moi pur is both, the personal pronoun thatidentifies the concrete speaker and the structural function of the universalinvariant. Ineluctably affected by this pronominal shifting, the reader is, aboveall, at stake in the poéésie pure . In an attempt to unfold the aporetical constructionsresulting from this paradox, this textual analysis focuses on some of themain rhetorical figures of Valpoéry’s work. A close reading of Narcisse parle revealsthe specific moments of permanent self-variation by which the popoésie pure constantly subverts itself. Poeisis resists any kind of rigid formalism, any subjugationof its rhetorical potential and any attempt to escape the ever-sliding senseof the metaphor. We can thus affirm that the aporias revealed by the popoésie pure evidence hence the conditions of poetical representation itself.

Both in literature and philosophy it is assumed that the beginning ofpost-modernity coincides with the end of the so-called grand narrative. Referringto Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s last book L’“Allégorie” , one could claim that sincethen, literary (re)presentation manifests itself as essentially ‘chronic’ and nonallegorical.Moreover, in the wake of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat thetwenty-first century is often referred to as an all-visible flat world. This flatness,however, both extends and challenges the postmodern end of the grand narrative.After all, a world without reverse might be particularly suitable for an allencompassingstory. This seems to be the conclusion drawn by the remarkableand comparable recent novels of three Flemish literary writers. Putting to the testexisting ideas of literary presentation of post-modernity, they return to the grandnarrative while at the same time subscribing to the main characteristics ofcontemporary literature.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar is a representative author of German-Turkishliterature, which has been growing in size and importance during the last decades.The present article assumes that authors who use norm-deviant language(diverging from established linguistic practices as well as from conventional andmodern literary forms of expression) are particularly capable of making innovativecontributions to contemporary German literature. In Özdamar’s narrativeworks uncertain linguistic attitudes and deficient or “odd” verbalizations canproduce aesthetically valuable estrangement effects –; a conception recallingBertolt Brecht’s literary theory, as well as Ernst Jandl’s experimentations withwhat he called “heruntergekommene Sprache” (degenerate language). Due,among other factors, to Özdamar’s decision to use predominantly autobiographicalmaterial for her narrations, her exophonic writing accompanies in someworks childlike-naive forms of perception, and diction that can produce similareffects in respect to linguistic norms and habits. We can observe numerousmetaphorical expressions that reveal a playful animistic attitude towards reality.A look at Özdamar’s three-volume autobiographical sequence suggests that theestranging/innovative quality of her literary work decreases with the her gradualintegration into the German linguistic and literary community. Viewed in thislight, the struggle for literaricity would consist of maintaining and renewing theessential “linguistic strangeness” (Marcel Proust) of her style. Such an attitude isdifferent from a globalized (or globalizing) type of literature, which intends toproduce universal linguistic and narrative schemata.

Mario Domenichelli’s novel Lugemalé is set in the late 1980s and early2000s, between Rome and Somalia. The book follows the narrator,Valerio, as hereads, in the early 2000s in Rome, the typescript of a novel written by a friend,Tomas, before his mysterious death in Mogadishu. Tomas’ novel describes theevents which took place in 1989 at the end of the Siad Barre regime, when Italywas still committed to fulfilling its responsibilities as an ex-colonial power,through major projects of cooperative development. Both Valerio and Tomas wereemployed by the Italian government’s Development Cooperation Agency as lecturersat the University of Mogadishu. In his narration, Tomas merges his ownexperiences with Valerio’s, through the main characters of Gigi and Marco. In acomplex play of mirrors (a novel within a novel, a reading of a tale within the taleof a reading) that reveals the ambiguities and contradictions of both characters, Lugemalé is merciless in its judgment of the generation of Europeans whobecame the ruling class of the 1980s. Such a post-colonial adventure offers apowerfully alienating perspective for the representation, post res perditas , of the vanishing of that class’s commitment to changing the status quo and breakingwith a capitalist society based on the most depraved and egoistic consumerism.

The diversity of contemporary French narration renders the canonicaldefinition of le fantastique useless. Writers challenge Todorov’s definition thatthe fantastic emerges as the reader hesitates between the supernatural and thenatural explanation for the unlikely event. Léa Silhol (1967), a storyteller ofmythic-poetic-fantastic style, figures among these writers. An inheritor of romanticfantastic storytelling, Silhol delves into the mental and psychic depth oflegendary figures, mostly goddesses and fairies, to make them question theirown identity and observe humans from their perspective. Her feminine anduniversal writing about the fantastic exemplifies the new-generation Frenchfantastic. Like the mythic tisseuse in her tales, Silhol weaves stories with a newtexture, with an imaginary étoffe. Just as the mythic and legendary weavers areassociated with water, she makes use of it to achieve her verbal alchemy, thenarrative rhetoric of which operates from three angles: mythic, structural, andstylistic. Silhol’s transtextual writing of myths from different cultures createsmythic résonance of the collective unconscious from linguistic différance. Thenarrative structure of the tales embodies the inversion of vision in Bachelardianalchemy of the imagination. Lastly, a scrupulous analysis of the author’s dictionthat corresponds with the thematic threading of tales and their narrative structurewill illustrate her dominant style of harmonism.