MIDWEST QUARTERLY-A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT最新文献

{"title":"On the Ethics of Admiration-And Detraction","authors":"John G. Rodden","doi":"10.4324/9781315634500-13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315634500-13","url":null,"abstract":"YOU SEE THE placards waved at every rally of the Christian Right, as well as in many gatherings of the Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant sects: \"W.W.J.D.?\" And yet secular intellectuals are not without their own oracle, and (with the exception of the Marxist Left) the coveted (and presumed) patronage of their patron saint knows no bounds. \"The most heterogeneous following a writer can ever have accumulated,\" said his close friend, George Woodcock, about Orwell's \"faithful\" (53). \"W.W.G.O.D.?\" they ask recurrently. (Why not simply an Orwell website, a cyberspace hotline named www.GOD.net?) As a headline in the New York Times Book Review did indeed phrase it in September 2002, on one-year anniversary of al Qaeda's attacks: \"What Would Orwell Do?\" (Shulevitch). Yes, that question seemingly arises whenever a public issue provokes a major intellectual debate and splits the ranks of the Left and/or Right. Then \"St. George\" is called to arms, with the battle-certified catchwords from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four of the \"Big O\" packed in the polemical arsenals of his self-appointed mouthpieces, ready to be fired off at his name-drop. (Indeed, just days after \"9-11,\" the conservative British critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft suggested that British soldiers shipped out to Afghanistan should pack Orwell's essays in their knapsacks.) One could multiply the examples, but the point is clear: More than a half-century after his death, Orwell remains \"a writer well worth stealing,\" as he once said of Dickens. Since his death in January 1950, his soul has been up for grabs. Today, polemically minded intellectuals are still playing what Ben Wattenberg recently referred to in his PBS talk show devoted to Orwell as \"that wonderful parlor game\" called \"How Would Orwell Stand Today?\" (One is tempted to reply: Being 100, he wouldn't.) Nonetheless, the \"game\" often has its illicit darker sides: mantle-stealing, body-snatching, and political grave-robbing. It's an ideological shell game (usually with clever sleight-of-hand), whereby the participants move Orwell's coffin to the left or right. I One recalls the comment of the poet William Empson, Orwell's wartime colleague at the BBC and the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), on reading Animal Farm: \"You must expect to be 'misunderstood' on a large scale....\" Yes--and he has been. Empson himself reported that his young son, a supporter of the Conservative Party, was \"delighted\" with Animal Farm and considered it \"very strong Tory propaganda\" (Crick, 430). Similar misreadings have occurred with Nineteen Eighty-Four--for instance, during the early Cold War era, the last four digits of the John Birch Society's national number were \"1-9-8-4.\" And, as happened with Orwell and both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, sometimes the author himself inadvertently contributed to such misreadings. \"Orwellian\" misreadings have occurred partly because readers have identified so strongly with him that they have projec","PeriodicalId":41150,"journal":{"name":"MIDWEST QUARTERLY-A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT","volume":"130 1","pages":"284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2005-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poetry and Process","authors":"April Fallon","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1w0dbmn.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1w0dbmn.9","url":null,"abstract":"ONE OF THE MAJOR distinguishing traits of the Modernist Poets--which has also been one of their legacies bestowed upon subsequent generations--is their interest in philosophical ideas that explore the nature of an individual's relationship with the external world. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is still difficult to avoid the influence of the Modernist Poets. The Modernists were the first generation of poets to write in direct response to the modern milieu that essentially separates us in experience from all previous eras. Their revolutions in form, subject, style, theme, and philosophy have transformed poetry from the strictly metered forms and styles of the previous centuries into the highly solipsistic, and as Randy Malamud termed it in The Language of Modernism, the \"difficult, confusing, obfuscatory\" (2) forms poetry often takes. Whether most current poets believe it or not, they still show the presence of the Modernists (for better and for worse) in their writing, despite the pervasive application of the term postmodernism. The preoccupation of some postmodernist poetry with what Paul Hoover defined in the Introduction to Postmodern American Poetry as \"'the death of God and the author,\" and with \"oppositional strategies\" such as \"the empty sign\" (xxvii), is largely an intensification of modernism, in that the writing still responds to modern urban culture, and that postmodernist writing still utilizes many of the same techniques--juxtaposition, irony, and paradox--as the modernists used. The prevailing assumption of much postmodern poetry, that the poet's primary expression is one of solipsistic self-reflexivity with a tendency toward nihilism, has been a guiding literary concept for several decades. While on the surface the solitary nature of being a poet seems to validate many of the philosophical suppositions of literary deconstructionism, I have always harbored doubts about the creative possibilities of what seems to be a very narrow view of experience. It was from this impetus that I began to search for philosophical ideas that would better represent my own thinking and intuition about the creative impulse and would offer a more fertile set of assumptions and ideals for creative activity. It is in the work of Process Philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to the concept of the individual's experience of and interaction with temporality that my own hunches about the nature of creativity are best represented. My proposal is a simple as this: that Bergson's and Whitehead's views of temporality are fundamental principles, and the concept of the essential interrelatedness of things provides the basis for a much more fruitful artistic aesthetic that I am terming the poetics of process, than does current deconstructive postmodern poetics. Nietzsche and the Responses to the External World by Modernism and Postmodernism The influence of philosophy on the Modernist Poets, and particularly the phi","PeriodicalId":41150,"journal":{"name":"MIDWEST QUARTERLY-A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT","volume":"36 1","pages":"256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2004-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68729196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pacific Poetics: Melville's South Seas Laugh","authors":"K. Evans","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim060110007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim060110007","url":null,"abstract":"WHAT DID MELVILLE FOLLOW into the Pacific? Besides other Melvilles and Gansvoorts, besides whales? I think he had a hunch that there was some very good theater being played out in that sea, and that after acting like a banker and a school teacher he thought acting like a sailor would be a bit of a lark. The spectacle of the Pacific, though, as opposed to his short stint across the Atlantic, swallowed up and spat out a new Herman. What I mean by swallowed is that great blue basin and its inhabitants gave young Melville a serious attack of performance anxiety; learning the ropes as a sailor or whaler in the Pacific did not only mean knowing how to handle yourself--it was also an awareness of yourself and your place at all times. Even a little slip in relation to those ropes and you'd be sure to knot them around your neck (witness Ahab). As Melville digested the Pacific it digested him--he did not merely pass through but was absorbed, was made a part of that thing he came to see. In the process he got, what I would call, wet, a condition from which he never recovered. (I do not mean to imply that his new state was like an illness, but like taking on a life-long exposure to the elements.) This fishy distinction marks him off from many European and American visitors to the Pacific who managed to float on the surface of their performance consciousness, maintaining a visitor's edge, a spectator's worldliness, a sense of humor bound up with a feeling of authority that resulted in a certain buoyant faith in their own vantage points. Another way to label this difference is to say that Melville dipped into skepticism (relaxed into it, like one relaxes into a bath) when many of his peers held firmly to other models--most notably that cushion against worldly oddities, irony. In the Pacific, irony often served as a visitor's head-abovewater floatational device. In that new place of dubious sign and season, it was easy to sink into a certain distrust, a creeping suspicion that the rules guiding one's behavior and understanding suddenly did not apply. In order to protect themselves from such a devastating self-examination, tourists stayed sure through devices like irony. Irony both depends upon and fosters a community that must know the same things. And that community must share the joke on a third group that is excluded from knowing those things, that is somehow in the wrong. As Wayne Booth has said, there are three points of connection necessary for irony to take place: one who makes, one who catches, and one who misses. This kind of humor throws a line back home--depends on someone getting it, assumes that there is an `it' to get. As Pacific scholar Greg Dening concludes in Mr. Bligh's Bad Language, his novel exploration of theater and mutiny: \"Irony was the enlightened's trope.... Irony requires a perspective, a line of vision that the onlooker has but not the participant\" (373). The South Seas, however, swamped Melville's flotational device--though it did n","PeriodicalId":41150,"journal":{"name":"MIDWEST QUARTERLY-A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT","volume":"44 1","pages":"195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2003-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64407749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Road Back","authors":"D. Finkel","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1tg5h8s.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1tg5h8s.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41150,"journal":{"name":"MIDWEST QUARTERLY-A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT","volume":"40 1","pages":"407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"1999-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68725958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ring Lardner and the Other","authors":"C. Cagle","doi":"10.5860/choice.30-5449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.30-5449","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41150,"journal":{"name":"MIDWEST QUARTERLY-A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT","volume":"35 1","pages":"109-111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"1993-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71042922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}