Issue #3: No Quarrel (Part 1)

This issue of nonsite.org presents a conversation between literary scholars and philosophers, revisiting the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy in a modern disciplinary context. These essays are revised and extended versions of papers originally delivered at “No Quarrel: Literature and Philosophy Today,” a conference organized at Boston University in April, 2011 by Robert Chodat and Oren Izenberg, and sponsored by the BU Humanities Foundation. Half of the essays appear now; five more will appear in November, along with responses to the issues they raise.

The schism between literary study and philosophy has long been sharper in America than in Europe. For more than a half-century, mainstream Anglo-American academic philosophy has been dominated by work that looks to science, logic, and mathematics for its models of knowledge, marginalizing questions of narrative, interpretation, and beauty. Over the same period, American literary scholarship has invested in eclectic versions of “theory” that address questions about meaning, intention, and culture without sustained attention to contemporary work in epistemology, the philosophy of language, or the philosophy of mind. As a result, any conversation that takes the disciplinary foundations of interdisciplinarity seriously is bound to reveal differences in assumption (about the stability of a historically variable term like “literature”; about the rigor of a vague concept like “style”). It will also highlight differences of method (e.g., is a discussion of Wordsworth undertaken to improve our account of Romanticism or to improve our account of the self?).

Nevertheless, the writers assembled here seek common ground, connecting high-level conceptual problems with questions of historical change and the particularities of what Wittgenstein called “the stream of our lives,” and making explicit how they understand some of the perennial questions hovering over all discussions of literature and philosophy: Can literature offer some kind of “truth”? What does a fiction have to offer a life? Do poems mean in some special way? We hope that “No Quarrel” might provide a model for how two different humanistic disciplines—disciplines with quite different institutional and intellectual histories—can come to understand one another more fully.

Many thanks to those who helped make that event a success: Juliet Floyd, Charles Griswold, Susan Jackson, Maurice Lee, Carrie McGrory, Michael Prince, Amelie Rorty, Allen Speight, James Winn, and everyone who attended the sessions.

Inside the issue

Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art

There is, so to speak, an internal relation between our theories of psychological expression and our theories of aesthetic expression. If we therefore want to hold on to the thought that art is, in fact, expressive, a great deal will depend on how we understand the expressiveness of the human figure. Yet at the same time, if we are convinced that art is not expressive (for whatever theoretical reasons), then that may, in turn, influence the way we see the human body itself: perhaps draining not only works of art, but the human body too, of their expressive powers.

BY Bernie Rhie
October 14, 2011

The American Evasion of Pragmatism: Souls, Science, and The Case of Walker Percy

It is the scientist’s “being-in-the-world” that allows her to describe planets and bacteria, “things and subhuman organisms,” but the “being-in-the-world” of the layman occupies what Percy calls a “different sort of reality,” resting upon the linguistic and social ties that constitute a “non-material, non-measurable entity.” And what holds true of our triadic relationships also goes for us as individuals. A “material substance cannot name or assert a proposition,” which accordingly means, Percy concludes, that “the initiator of a speech act” is also something that the natural sciences are incapable of recognizing: “The agent is not material.”

BY Rob Chodat
October 14, 2011

Articles Issue #3

Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and Narrative Constructions of the Self

Narratives are indeed a crucial tool by which many of us make sense of our lives. The problem comes in identifying selves too directly with the lives they live. If we drop the insistence on life-long autobiographies in favor of many short overlapping stories, we can hew more closely to the role narratives typically play in everyday self-representations; but then we also stand in need of a new criterion for unifying those stories into a coherent self.

BY Elisabeth Camp
October 14, 2011

Articles Issue #3

Literature, Genre Fiction, and Standards of Criticism

To suggest that literature is simply another genre of fiction, like the Western or the Romance, is to ignore a fact that…genres are distinguished from one another principally by looking at the story-type, the plot. Insofar as works of literature fall into distinct types, they do so on the basis of features other than plot, such as theme or character. So different kinds of great literature may indeed be categorized as falling into certain “types,” but these types are not thereby genres, because genres are distinguished from one another according to their plot. This matters because plots are powerful emotion-producing machines.

BY James Harold
October 14, 2011

Articles Issue #3

Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, and the Reconstruction of the Everyday

The dominant question that has troubled readers of both Wordsworth and Wittgenstein on the topic of common language, its forms of expression, and its situatedness in the world consequently has been similar: Whose language shall count as the “real” or “everyday” one, and with what authority or under which criteria do I assert the commonality and commonness of this language? Put differently: Which words are to act as representative of real or everyday language, what is supposed to be, as Wordsworth has it, the very (the “empirical,” let’s say) or what J. L. Austin might have called the actual language of men?

BY Magdalena Ostas
October 14, 2011

Issue #3 Poetry

Midsummer Zero

There is not not anything true here; there is not no thought whose single attention might burn as the day burns, holding in flame and in fury to longing, or stuck to the nub of some one refusal, some stubborn remainder of thought.

BY Simon Jarvis
October 14, 2011