Etudes Episteme最新文献

{"title":"“Either his notion weakens, or his discernings / Are lethargied”: Sleeplessness and Waking Dreams as Tragedy in Julius Caesar and King Lear","authors":"C. Fretz","doi":"10.4000/EPISTEME.1383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/EPISTEME.1383","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on the early modern physiological understanding of sleeplessness and hallucinations, this article examines how Shakespeare’s dramatic representations of insomnia and waking dreams support his tragedies’ iconic emphasis on bodily and mental suffering. To that end, I consider Brutus’s insomnia and the nightly appearance of Caesar’s ghost in Julius Caesar, as well as King Lear’s sleeplessness and his ontological uncertainty about whether his misfortune may be a dream. Whereas Brutus’s vision of Caesar’s ghost is often interpreted as a supernatural visitation, I argue that it can equally be read as a physiological hallucination caused by Brutus’s sleeplessness. Meanwhile I propose that King Lear’s sleeplessness and the metaphorical description of his waking reality as a dream form part of Shakespeare’s design of Lear’s tragedy as one that is primarily concerned with the character’s experience of suffering. In King Lear, I also show how ideas of sleeping and dreaming introduce tragicomic elements which, however, ultimately give further magnitude to the sense of pain and injustice.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imputed Dreams: Dreaming and Knowing in Tudor England","authors":"M. Campbell","doi":"10.4000/episteme.1337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.1337","url":null,"abstract":"This essay will examine reports of prophetic dreaming by a mid-sixteenth-century Catholic servant, eventually hanged for predicting the death of Henry VIII and in the process implicating such powerful men as Bishop John Fisher. It will then consider at greater length, in relation to the fatality of dreaming, two contemporaneous literary dream-texts by the prose writer Thomas Nashe and the poet William Shakespeare, who display by different generic means the aura of fear and consequence still enveloping dreams in 1595. l will take hold of one thread that runs through the period’s theatrical representation: the fearful idea that souls are not securely fixed in individual, nameable and placeable bodies, and that neither the border of the body nor the border of bodily life are stable from the point of view of early modern dream and vision. A matching and related fear is traceable in Nashe’s Terrors, the fear of oneiric error, wandering across borders usually experienced as rigid and definitive. Here on the border of modernity, the two writers help us see the psychological and political stakes of crediting or rejecting dream – costly either way.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Man of feeling as dupe of desire: John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751)","authors":"R. Barr","doi":"10.4000/EPISTEME.1454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/EPISTEME.1454","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyses John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), his idiosyncratic sequel to the more famous Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749). As Kathleen Lubey has recently shown, sensuality was part of literature’s repertoire of moral refinement. Indeed, Lubey has argued that erotica acts as ‘a continuous unfolding of epistemology from the details of amorous scenes’, providing a key means of understanding the self and its relation to the world. Yet despite its amorous plot, Memoirs of a Coxcomb emphasises the limits of sensory knowledge. The novel’s comically inadequate narrator is a ‘Dupe of his desires’: a man misled by feeling. Reading Coxcomb as a transmutation of mid-eighteenth-century ‘it-narratives’, this essay argues that rather than constituting and exercising virile autonomy, sexual passion potentially renders the male subject a mere puppet subjected to the mechanistic demands of feeling. Demonstrating a skeptical approach to the role of the body and sensation in the production of knowledge, the novel also provides an intriguing example of its author’s theory of fiction and an exploration of the fate of the author in commodity culture. Challenging the positivist claims of empiricism, the novel’s derisive depiction of the pell-mell of lust illuminates the compulsive self-abnegation of desire, and demonstrates the difficulty of parsing an idea of the self and the world from a deluge of sensory data. Cleland’s novel thus presents sensuality not as a laboratory of masculine self-fashioning, but as an intractable problem for self-knowledge and understanding.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ève et la nuit des sens : une explication poétique et rationnelle de la Chute dans Paradise Lost de John Milton","authors":"Laïla Ghermani","doi":"10.4000/episteme.1471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.1471","url":null,"abstract":"Cet article s’interesse a la confusion des sens provoque par le reve nocturne insuffle par Satan dans le Paradis Perdu de John Milton, aux livres IV et V. Partant de l’interpretation de Dennis Danielson qui analyse cette epopee comme une veritable theodicee visant a montrer la cause premiere du peche, je montre que cette nuit des sens constitue en fait une illustration de la necessaire faillibilite des facultes d’Eve. L’interet de cet episode, qui est une pure creation miltonienne puisqu’il n’existe pas dans la Bible, est d’etre a la fois une fiction derivee de la litterature epique (dont, entre autres, The Faerie Queen de Spenser) et de fournir une explication logique a la Chute. La description du processus onirique mele un vocabulaire physiologique a un lexique tres proche de celui que Calvin employait pour decrire l’imagination dechue. Cet entremelement de niveaux d’interpretation permet a Milton de montrer que l’impossibilite d’exercer sa raison conduit necessairement Eve a confondre les impressions sensorielles produites par les images oniriques avec de la pensee. Dans cette confusion entre l’image et son objet reel, il lit une tendance idolâtre. Dans cet episode onirique, privant Eve de ses facultes de jugement, la future mere de l’humanite est montree comme une victime de la capacite evocatrice de l’enargeia employee par Satan.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dream and Sensory Illusions in Seventeenth-century France","authors":"Cerilac","doi":"10.4000/EPISTEME.1484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/EPISTEME.1484","url":null,"abstract":"What does the apparently simple phrase “sensorial illusion” mean in the case of dreams? What forms did the century of Calderon, Shakespeare and Descartes give to this illusion ? This essay offers a typology of the kinds of relations between dreams and sensory information that can be derived from the most widely-held conceptions in seventeenth century theoretical texts and literature. I will limit myself to four distinct cases : 1) the mirror relationship of reversibility between waking and dreaming, a sceptical motif which is powerfully illustrated in the history of philosophy by what has come to be known as « the argument of the dream »; this argument allows for a paradigmatic shift of all the sensations felt waking into a potential dream, and thus a shift from a feeling that « all is true » to « all is illusion ». 2) The second case deals, on the contrary, with a belief that there is a partial continuity between waking and dreaming, through the transference of the sensorial information garnered by the passions into the dream. This can be illustrated with the poet Gombauld, a member of the Academie francaise, who offers with L’Endimion (1624) an original interpretation of the myth of Endymion, the « perpetual sleeper » who derives from this continuity a lesson in the intrinsically imaginary nature of love. 3) The third case is again about a movement of transference, this time between daytime sensations marked by distortions induced by sensorial stimuli and night-time sensations through which the latter stimuli are amplified and « translated » into oneiric images. This hypothesis, first put forth by Aristotle, was repeatedly taken up when dealing with the issue of the integration of external sensations and the transformations of internal impressions. 4) The fourth one is the particular case of what the seventeenth century considers as « the active dreamer », or, under a coinage new in French in the seventeenth century, in English in the eighteenth century, the « somnabulist », who allows the observer to attend, as it were, an illusion of the dream projected outward and made visible through the somnambulist’s actions. This case will be illustrated by an anecdote retold by Bonaventure d’Argonne at the end of the century.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment percevoir l’intention morale ? Le sentiment chez Francis Hutcheson","authors":"Laetitia Simonetta","doi":"10.4000/EPISTEME.1322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/EPISTEME.1322","url":null,"abstract":"Le philosophe ecossais Francis Hutcheson est connu pour avoir introduit, dans sa Recherche sur l’origine de nos idees de la beaute et de la vertu (Londres, 1725), un sens interne appele sens moral. Ce qui nous interesse est le statut qu’il tente de donner, a travers ses differents travaux, a cette nouvelle sorte de perceptions, les perceptions morales, absentes des textes de Locke. Si elles sont analogues aux sensations externes, elles ne peuvent s’y reduire, en ce qu’elles sont supposees nous donner des notions du bien et du mal, et pas seulement des objets corporels. Le probleme est le suivant : comment peut-on percevoir des qualites morales, c’est-a-dire des objets qui ne sont pas sensibles a proprement parler ? Hutcheson refuse toute intervention du raisonnement dans la constitution des perceptions morales. Toutefois, nous pensons que les perceptions morales dependent d’une apprehension specifique, distincte de celle des sensations, et qui releve d’une forme de reflexion. Des lors, toute l’ambiguite du terme anglais « sense » est convoquee dans une telle theorie : les perceptions du sens moral, que Hutcheson tend a designer par le terme « sentiments », doivent meler une forme d’immediatete et de reflexion, joindre une affection interieure et la comprehension des enjeux moraux d’une situation.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“The Philosophy of Tears”: Sense(s) and sensibility in some graveyard poems","authors":"J. Baker","doi":"10.4000/EPISTEME.1323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/EPISTEME.1323","url":null,"abstract":"This essay revisits the involved relationship between the senses, sense and sensibility in four eighteenth-century poems customarily assembled under the term “graveyard poetry” while foregrounding the emotional and material marker, the tear, and its presence (or absence) in the poems. The poems in question are Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” (1721), Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743), Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). How does the poet put into words an experience of loss and bereavement and come to terms with the anticipation of his own inevitable demise? Gray’s Elegy brings the genre to its apogee, if not to its conclusion, in the sense that it is itself a remarkable patchwork made up of allusions to, echoes and references from, earlier poems. It is in its way a cento that can seem, at least in part, to be fashioned from amended quotes. Gray appears to be so steeped in the poetry, be it of the recent or more distant past, that his genius expresses itself here in his capacity to refine this poetry, to transform it, producing in the process something at once perfectly traditional, conventional and recognisable, and enigmatically new and curiously incomplete.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“‘Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not.” Dream as performance in Cymbeline","authors":"Mike Nolan","doi":"10.4000/EPISTEME.1404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/EPISTEME.1404","url":null,"abstract":"Posthumus’ dream in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is significant in that it is a striking example of dream as performance. As he lies sleeping, Posthumus’ dream is fully enacted onstage so that the audience participates in the dreaming spectacle and is affected by, simultaneously with him, the instructive wonder of the experience. For Posthumus, the dream has a physical reality, for when he wakes, a tablet, given to him by Jupiter in his vision, has materialised. A cryptic inscription on the tablet marks the waking as a continuation of the dream process into the world of verifiable sensation. This article will consider the interaction of dream and performance, focusing especially on the role the senses play in describing and determining the experiential nature of the episode. It will also reference the Dreaming of Australian Aborigines as a means of interpreting the dream of Posthumus and examine the dramatic significance of the dream action in the course of the denouement of the play.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"De l’onirisme à l’ironie : les prestiges de la nuit dans l’Euphormion de Jean Barclay (1605)","authors":"Nicolas Corréard","doi":"10.4000/EPISTEME.1429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/EPISTEME.1429","url":null,"abstract":"Publiee en 1605 par l’auteur franco-ecossais Jean Barclay, la premiere partie de l’Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon, roman satirique neo-latin, abonde en scenes nocturnes, durant lesquelles le personnage eponyme est confronte a une serie de phenomenes au statut ambigu (feux follets, apparitions, songes). Evenements surnaturels, ou naturels ? Le texte laisse place a l’interpretation, comme le montre la reception d’epoque, notamment les traductions francaises, qui tendent a reduire son ambiguite et son obscurite volontaires en privilegiant l’une ou l’autre explication. Barclay elabore en realite une fine parodie satirique des anecdotes demonologiques ou des recits de songes premonitoires, comme le montre son travail d’imitation des modeles classiques (Lucien, Apulee, Petrone), l’usage des sources contemporaines (notamment Pierre Le Loyer), ou la composition soigneuse des scenes. L’auteur joue le jeu du faire-croire, mais pour mieux faire douter, car la pedagogie de l’incredulite passe par l’experience de l’illusion narrative proposee par la fiction.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70105780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Not Handel's sweet music more pleases the ear, than…”: The Music of Sound in Fielding's and Joseph Reed's Tom Jones","authors":"P. Degott","doi":"10.4000/episteme.1106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.1106","url":null,"abstract":"The self-conscious narrator of Fielding’s Tom Jones successively compares himself to a restaurateur, a law-maker, a historian, a literary connoisseur (if not a critic…), an inventor, a soothsayer, a scholar, a traveller, etc. At no stage in the book does he explicitly compare himself to a musician or to an orchestrator. And yet, the novel abounds in the depiction of various noises and sounds, whether they be the result of the notorious rows and tantrums of some of the most colourful characters, or the expression of divine and earthly harmony. One of the purposes of this paper is precisely to explore the functions of the many references to sound, noise and music that pervade Fielding’s novel, from Squire Western’s addiction to the hunting sounds and popular songs of country life to Mrs Western’s fascination for opera and oratorio, via sweet’s Sophia’s demure and soothing harpsichord-playing. Another area of investigation is the way Joseph Reed’s dramatic and musical adaptation transposes some of the musical issues raised in Fielding’s novel. In introducing into his operatic work a reflexive discourse on the very genre his staged adaptation belongs to, Reed surprisingly recycles Fielding’s own treatment of noises and sounds.","PeriodicalId":40360,"journal":{"name":"Etudes Episteme","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70104963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}