Abstract
Distinguishing between ethical and immoral cases of passionate love is one our most serious responsibilities. Unfortunately, making such distinctions will not be easy if we refuse to apply general principles and if we shun definitions of concepts like “love” that employ necessary and sufficient conditions. I have argued that we must pay careful attention to whole situations before we make moral judgments. Individual details cannot be assessed abstractly, as instances of general types, but must be viewed together in context. Narratives help us to make holistic judgments of particulars. I have used an example—a literary description of a case of adultery—to show how we might think about that kind of problem.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 145.
Rachel Jacoff, “Sacrifice and Empire: Thematic Analogies in San Vitale and the Paradiso,” in Andrew Morrogh et al., ed., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth (Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1985), pp. 317–331.
Henry Fuseli, “Aphorisms, Chiefly Relative to the Fine Arts,” in John Knowles, ed., The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831)
Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1972), p. 121.
François Pupil, Le Style troubadour ou la nostalgie du bon vieux temps (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1985), pp. 65–67.
See Francis Haskell, “The Manufacture of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Painting,” in Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 79
Leigh Hunt, “The Story of Rimini, Canto III” (“The Fatal Passion”), in Reginald Brimley Johnson ed., Poems of Leigh Hunt (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1891), pp. 25
William Weaver, Duse: A Biography (London: Harvest Books, 1984), pp. 234–235
John Woodhouse, Gabriele DAnnunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 211
Ruskin to Rossetti, June 15, 1854, in William Michael Rossetti, ed., Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism (London, 1899), p. 13. The letter does not make clear what picture is involved. But Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 32
Kossetti to Jack Tupper, ca. 1850, in Alicia Craig Faxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New York: Abbeville/Cross River Press, 1989), p. 24.
Walter Gropius, The New Architecture anâ the Bauhaus, trans. P. Morton Strand (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1965), p. 44.
Dewey, Philosophy anâ Civilization (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1931), p. 3.
Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” (2000), in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 189
Michael Walzer, Thick anâ Thin: Moral Argument at Home anâ Abroaâ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 4.
Schelling, “Über Dante in philosphischer Beziehung,” 1802–1805, trans. Longfellow in 1850 and anthologized in Michael Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage, 1314(?)-1870 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 411–420
William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” (1798), in Wordsworth, Poems, edited by Matthew Arnold (London, Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 251
Hazlitt, “On Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem, ‘The Excursion,’” in Lectures on the English Poets (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), p. 216.
Simon B. Gaunt, “Marginal Men: Marcabru and Orthodoxy: The Early Troubadours and Adultery,” MediumÆvum, vol. 59, no. 1 (1990), p. 16.
De Kougenient Love in the Western World, revised and augmented version translated by Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 16–17.
Ralph Pite, The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 26
Leigh Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets: Dante Alighieri (New York: Putnam, 1888), p. 104.
Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1983), pp. 50–51.
Keats to J.H. Reynolds, November 22, 1817, in Letters, vol. I, p. 189; Keats to the George Keatses, February 14-May 3, 1819, in ibid., vol. II, p. 74 (quoting Hazlitt at length); Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univetsity Press, 1963), pp. 253–263.
Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton,” in Lectures on the English Poets and The Spirit of the Age, p. 47 For the influence of Hazlitt’s lecture on Keats’ development of “negative capability,” see Walter Jackson Bate, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 30
Michael J. Sider, The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1998), p. 51.
Jessica Smith, “Tyrannical Monuments and Discursive Ruins: the Dialogic Landscape of Shelley’s Queen Mab,” The Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 47 (1998), pp. 108–41.
Bernice Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), p. 4.
William Archer, Poets of the Younger Generation, 1902 (New York: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1970), p. 340.
Kiccardo Zandonai, Vrancesca da Pimini (Milan: Kicordi, 1945), pp. 173
Frances Fleetwood, Concordia: The Story of Vrancesca da Pimini, Told by her Daughter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972).
It is the voice of an ironic historicist that states (in mock Georgian English): “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government...” Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York, Macmillan, 2004), p. 350.
I draw my interpretation of this painting from Charles Fried, Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 28–43
The copyrighted Italian text can be found in Jonathan Galassi, ed., Collected Poems of Eugenia Montale, 1920–1954 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), p. 268.
Roberto Unger, Passion: An Essay on Human Personality (New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1984), p. 38.
Montale, Stile e tmdizione, my translation from the appendix of Arshi Pipa, Montale and Dante (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), p. 152.
Copyright information
© 2009 Peter Levine
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Levine, P. (2009). Modern Versions. In: Reforming the Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104693_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104693_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38336-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10469-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)