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Passing and Flowing: Rhythmical Entanglements of Writing, Painting and Knitting in Virginia Woolf and Berthe Morisot
“[F]or though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other: they have much in common”, Virginia Woolf claims. This chapter tracks the relation among writing, painting, and a mor...
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Incarnation and “Déchirure”; Annunciation and Crucifixion
This chapter proposes a typology of paintings in Western art based on the themes of the annunciation and the crucifixion and inspired by the way that Georges Didi-Huberman reflects upon these themes in Devant l’i...
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The Debate: Cuvier and Geoffroy
This chapter outlines pre-Darwinian ideas in early nineteenth-century French biology. In an epistemic shift, a natural history based on continuity and homology under a unitary body plan, changed to one endorsi...
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Rite of Spring—Rite of Disimagination: An Inquiry into the Pulsatile Imaginary of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre
Despite the abundant research on Igor Stravinsky’s musical score for the 1913 ballet Le Sacre, there is no specific examination of its exorbitant imaginary, which sprung straight from the tragic pathei mathos of ...
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Adaptationism and the Author
Adaptationism endorses the gene as the primary locus of change (leading to new structures in evolution). This functionalist position is consistent with current applications of biology, especially genetic manip...
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Introduction: Layers of Understanding and Long-Arc Narrative
First describing the difference between simply understanding a word and the more complex way we understand that word at the end of a story, this Introduction briefly sketches the ground covered in the fifteen ...
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Prague Structuralism and the Poetic Function
Structuralism has impacted the humanities and sciences, including biology. A limitation of structuralist models is their static nature. Saussure’s linguistic theory firmly separated synchrony and diachrony, as...
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Murdoch and Gilead: John Ames as a Model of Murdochian Virtue
What’s so good about John Ames? The narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead has been much admired, but it’s far from obvious why. His life is quiet and unassuming, and has for the most part been uneventful in ...
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Phenotype then Gene
The theory of evolution of novelty by genetic mutation and reproductive isolation is challenged by concepts such as environmentally triggered traits, genetic accommodation, and phenotypic adjustment. The evolu...
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Storm Jameson’s Phenomenology of Place and Ethics of Responsibility in The Hidden River
Storm Jameson’s The Hidden River (1955) projects a phenomenological nexus between place and identity, but what happens when that Heideggerian concept of “dwelling” is compromised by one family member’s wartime be...
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Consciousness, Beckett and the (Un)Aware Being: Krapp’s and Winnie’s Wobbly Mindfulness Under the Lens of Phenomenology
Interrogating the influence of twentieth-century phenomenology on the literature of Samuel Beckett, this chapter aims to analyse from a phenomenological perspective Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Da...
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An Ecological Context
Literary formalism, incorporating structuralist ideas developed by the Prague Linguistics Circle, proposes that literature is not the effect of an external cause or set of historical circumstances. Literature ...
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Imperfect Fiction and Criticism im Stillstand: A Reading of The Mill on the Floss
This chapter of The Mill on the Floss combines Ramon Fernandez’s theory of personality with Walter Benjamin’s anti-subjectivist philosophy to propose a different interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, one that e...
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Foreword: The Essence and Structure of Traditional Chinese Aesthetics
What is the spirit of traditional Chinese (By “spirit” I mean the typical quality of a concept)? To approach this question, I suggest that the initial step is to examine traditional Chinese from a macrosco...
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Shame and Self-Abasement: Bernard Williams, Kant and J.M. Coetzee
This chapter, structured in three parts, traces a conceptual genealogy of the reaction of shame as a primary psychological phenomenon and further analyses two sublimated renderings of the basic emotion: in Kan...
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We All Have Plague: Human Nature and Decency in Camus’ The Plague
The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a resurgence of interest in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague. Recent commentaries on the work have emphasized its themes of human nature, decency, and solidarity. However, has...
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The Confucian Spirit of Traditional Chinese Aesthetics
Confucian is an important component of traditional Chinese culture. Indeed, it made significant contributions to the creation of the spirit of traditional Chinese . The main forms of the Confucian in trad...
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Kant, the Karamazovs, and Hitler’s Pawn: A Kantian Approach to Vicarious Responsibility
On the standard reading of Kant’s ethics, agents are responsible only for their acts of willing, not the consequences of their willing, much less the acts or consequences of other agents’ willing (vicarious respo...
