New Literary History最新文献

{"title":"Early Medieval Arabic Polymathy: A Preliminary Sketch","authors":"Ahmed H. al-Rahim","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a917054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a917054","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Early Medieval Arabic Polymathy<span>A Preliminary Sketch</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ahmed H. al-Rahim (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>By perfect polymath (<em>perfectam polymathian</em>) I mean knowledge of various subjects, collected from all kinds of studies, overflowing with fullness, and wandering freely through all the fields of the disciplines as far as the human mind is able to pursue with tireless energy.</p> —Johann von Wowern (d. 1612), <em>De polymathia tractatio</em> (Basle, 1603), 16f.<sup>*</sup> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>I took the word philology in the sense of the ancients (<em>le sens des anciens</em>), as a synonym for polymathy.</p> —Ernest Renan (d. 1892), <em>L'Avenir de la science</em> (Paris, 1890), 506n69. </blockquote> <h2>I. Introduction to Medieval Arabic Polymathy</h2> <p>N<small>early all the celebrated</small> scholars of the Islamic tradition have been described as polymaths. Yet the intellectual history of medieval Arabic polymathy <em>per se</em> has received only a modicum of attention in the field of Islamic studies.<sup>1</sup> This is true as much for the educational paradigm of polymathy as for its appeal as a scientific methodology and sociopolitical ideal of Islamic intellectual history and civilization. Polymathy refers to knowledge of the various sciences and arts mastered by one scholar, the polymath. It was the normative standard and scholarly model for the attainment of knowledge (<em>'ilm</em>) in the Arabo-Islamic intellectual tradition of the Middle Ages.<sup>2</sup> However, this knowledge may also be described as a form of encyclopaedism that is not necessarily (to take a modern definition of polymathy) focused on the solution of any one single theoretical or practical problem.<sup>3</sup> Three <strong>[End Page 1323]</strong> principal factors were fundamental to the rise of Arabic polymathy and polythematic knowledge, that is, knowledge dealing with more than one field or discipline. First, there was the early introduction of the Platonic methodology of analysis by division (Gk. <em>diairesis</em>, Ar. <em>qisma</em>), Aristotelian <em>genus-differentia</em> definition (<em>ḥadd</em>), and the Porphyrian branched tree (<em>musšağğgar</em>), by which the sciences, or knowledge, were (sub)classified into discrete disciplines (<em>tartīb</em>) and the varied genres in which they were to be expounded.<sup>4</sup> Second, there was scholasticism as a method of learning, or pedagogy, which, for the acquisition of true knowledge, emphasized dialectical reasoning, or disputation, argued according to strict logical rules, particularly as adopted by Muslim theologians (<em>mutakallimūn</em>) and jurisconsults (<em>fuqahā</em>').<sup>5</sup> And third, there was the professionalization of knowledge, that is, scholars or epistemic communities (<em>ahl al-'ilm</em>) w","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139475585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"A Living Growth\": Rabindranath Tagore and Polymathy","authors":"Fakrul Alam","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a917057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a917057","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This paper looks at Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian writer, as a polymath, a man crossing literary, artistic, intellectual, linguistic and civilizational borders of all kinds, and as someone whose imagination was always in flight. It sees him as someone who, time and again, kept trying his hand at all sorts of things, despite the difficulties he faced and the challenges ahead of him. He thus worked also as a reform-oriented educator and as someone committed to educational and agricultural ventures. The paper also notes the polymathic travails Tagore occasionally encountered and the indiscretions that sometimes resulted from his scanting of borders. It traces the main features of his polymathic voyaging from his youth to the final months of his life and stresses the growth and vitality of his imaginings.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139475632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a917061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a917061","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Contributors &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;F&lt;small&gt;akrul&lt;/small&gt; A&lt;small&gt;lam&lt;/small&gt; is Supernumerary Professor of the Department of English, University of Dhaka. His publications include &lt;em&gt;South Asian Writers in English&lt;/em&gt; (2006) and &lt;em&gt;The Essential Tagore&lt;/em&gt;, with Radha Chakravarty (2011). Other works include the translation of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's &lt;em&gt;Unfinished Memoirs&lt;/em&gt; (2012) and &lt;em&gt;Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore&lt;/em&gt; (2023).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;P&lt;small&gt;eter&lt;/small&gt; B&lt;small&gt;urke&lt;/small&gt; was Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge until his retirement in 2004 but remains a Fellow of Emmanuel College. His thirty-odd books include six volumes on the history of knowledge (counting one on ignorance), with one more to come on the history of connoisseurship.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;M&lt;small&gt;erve&lt;/small&gt; E&lt;small&gt;mre&lt;/small&gt; is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the author of several books. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;H&lt;small&gt;ans&lt;/small&gt; U&lt;small&gt;lrich&lt;/small&gt; G&lt;small&gt;umbrecht&lt;/small&gt; is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and Distinguished Professor of Romance Literatures at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. After &lt;em&gt;Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment&lt;/em&gt; (2021), he has recently finished the manuscript of a book under the title &lt;em&gt;Lives of the Voice&lt;/em&gt; (forthcoming). Future fields of thinking and writing will include the philosophy of imagination and the specific status of women within mysticism as a religious practice.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;K&lt;small&gt;evin&lt;/small&gt; H&lt;small&gt;art&lt;/small&gt; is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Thought at the University of Virginia. His most recent books include &lt;em&gt;Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative: Ethics of the Image&lt;/em&gt; (2023) and &lt;em&gt;Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation&lt;/em&gt; (2023). Next year there will appear &lt;em&gt;Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood&lt;/em&gt;. His poems are collected in &lt;em&gt;Wild Track: New and Selected Poems&lt;/em&gt; (2015) and &lt;em&gt;Barefoot&lt;/em&gt; (2018).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;S&lt;small&gt;tephen&lt;/small&gt; N&lt;small&gt;achmanovitch&lt;/small&gt; is the author of two books on the creative process, &lt;em&gt;The Art of Is&lt;/em&gt; (2019) and &lt;em&gt;Free Play&lt;/em&gt; (1990). He performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist, and at the intersections of performing and multimedia arts, philosophy, and ecology. He graduated in 1971 from Harvard and in 1975 from the University of California, where he earned a PhD in the History of Consciousness for an exploratio","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139475813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Being Whole","authors":"Stephen Nachmanovitch","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a917058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a917058","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>I begin by thinking of my friend and mentor Gregory Bateson, but the questions here are broad and relate to the experience of many people, and many kinds of people. Gregory was known as a great polymath. But that is not quite right. In truth, he was a holomath, if we can coin that word. A polymath is a person who turns to, and sometimes excels in, multiple fields of endeavor. A holomath is a person who sees multiple fields as being really the same enterprise, circling a central pattern from different angles and points of view.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139475543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Creative Writing and Critical Thought II Interpreters in Court","authors":"Emily Apter, Katie Kitamura","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907158","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The following exchange is the edited transcript of an event that took place online on February 24, 2022. The conversation is the second in a series jointly sponsored by New Literary History and the Center for Fiction that brings together novelists and poets with literary theorists and historians to create a series of in-depth conversations about the state of literary practice and study in the contemporary world.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907176","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Homelessness of the Novel: Friedrich Blanckenburg and Novel Poetics","authors":"Fredrik Renard","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907163","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Of all the major literary genres, the novel is the only one that has no poetics of its own and thus no given place in the canon of genres established in Antiquity. Formally speaking, the novel emerged as a homeless genre—a fact with which it has had to cope ever since the rise in popularity of romance during the Italian renaissance. How this homelessness is dealt with is however not an historical constant but undergoes substantial change throughout the history of the novel. One watershed moment in this history takes place in the eighteenth century during the so-called modernization of the novel. In this period, the formal homelessness of the novel goes from being a problem to be solved externally in poetological treatises—an attempt to give the novel a place within tradition après coup—to being a problem internal to the novel. The present essay considers how this fact forever changes what it means for the novel to have a form by turning to the eighteenth-century German writer and critic Friedrich Blanckenburg and his seminal work Essay on the Novel.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"201 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Appreciation After Critique","authors":"Wolfram Schmidgen","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907160","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Long belittled as a sentiment that makes no measurable contribution to knowledge, appreciation is being reclaimed today. Postcritical writers, in particular, have turned appreciation into a model affect for how literary scholars relate to their objects of study. They have been empowered to do so by the flat ontologies associated with such thinkers as Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, and especially Bruno Latour. This essay argues that leaning on flat ontologies to rethink our relationship to aesthetic objects has led a significant number of postcritical scholars to flirt with the possibility of escape: escape from the fact that all seekers of knowledge are embodied and situated individuals and therefore different from the objects they investigate. In suggesting an escape from such difference, postcritical writers shirk ethical and political responsibilities that are central to the legitimacy of our disciplinary practices. Postcritical appreciation can have a more promising future, the essay concludes, when we heed the lessons of Donna Haraway and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who have proposed models for relating to objects that avoid the alternatives of detachment and attachment and can renew the commitment to objectivity in the humanities.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Hermenautics\": Toward a Disinformation Theory","authors":"Avery Slater","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907171","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay tracks cybernetic approaches to the task of hermeneutics. From the first paradigm of cybernetics through its development within contemporary lines of research, the question of information processing evokes problems of interpretation shared by humans and machines. The article discusses Friedrich Kittler's notion of \"hermenautics\" in the context of disinformation and contemporary politics. This argument draws out connections between scientist Heinz Von Foerster's writings on the ethics of second-order cybernetics and Hannah Arendt's reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Regimes of disinformation, working to blunt the task of interpretation, are only intensified by the information age. The study of cybernetics can prepare us for the task of adapting hermeneutics to an age of digital dissemination, reading (with) machines.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Stop Asking for Life to Be a Poem\": On Cybernetic Instrumentality","authors":"Michael F. Miller","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907172","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The \"sentimental\" narrator of Hari Kunzru's Red Pill is starting to feel like a self-described \"waster.\"1 Away on fellowship in Berlin at the interdisciplinary Deuter Center for Social and Cultural Research, our writer-in-residence narrator ingests the eponymous capsule and \"wakes up\" to the obsolescence of literary humanism, a historical \"period that was drawing to a close\" ( RP 46).2 Instead of using the time afforded by the fellowship to work on his grant winning project––notunironically titled \"The Lyric I,\" and which aims to achieve poetic transcendence through a better understanding of \"the construction of the self in lyric poetry\" ( RP 15)––the narrator whiles away his days on violent police procedurals and social media doom-scrolling.3 \"I was like a miser, fretting about his emotional hoard,\" he confesses: \"I frequently found myself hunched over my laptop, my eyes welling with tears … If the world changed, would I be able to protect my family?\" ( RP 6-7). Alternating between sentimental musings and apocalyptic fantasies, he slides into a \"mad\" state of internet-fueled paranoia and begins to see signs and symbols of \"red pill\" and Alt-Right ideology everywhere he looks ( RP 280). The \"sleepy-eyed cartoon frog\" on a stranger's tee shirt slyly signals right-wing in-group belonging, while the OK sign made by the right hand of Carl Spitzweg's \"Poor Poet\" is reinterpreted as an allusion to contemporary fascist iconography, a cryptic communication from the not-so distant past ( RP 27; 9-10).","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}