Among the institutionalized ways ofnotfacing Wordsworth perhaps none continues to stand upright quite as solidly and fixedly – “as if sustained by its own spirit” (II, 280–1)¹ – as the interpretation of the relationship between man and Nature, Imagination and Nature, in terms of a dialectic of immediacy and mediation, consciousness and self-consciousness. A most suggestive global statement of this interpretation is offered by Geoffrey Hartman in “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” when he reminds us “that Romantic art has a function analogous to that of religion. The traditional scheme of Eden, fall, and redemption merges with the new...

Hegel’s double, ambiguous and ambivalent if not downright duplicitous, attitude toward art is legible in hisAestheticsfrom one end to the other, from the beginning and to the ends. All we need to know about both the philosophy and the history of art (according to Hegel) is there to be read already in the Introduction. As Hegel goes through the three main types or forms of art according to the different relations between sensuous form and spiritual content proper to each –fromthe (“symbolic”) pre-art of the East and the Egyptians in which there is an inadequation between...

This chapter’s subtitle – “The Body of Descartes?” – quite rightly dresses the body of Descartes with a question mark.¹ The question mark is most fitting, for, indeed, what we might want to identify under its garments as the body of Descartes could turn out to be a ghost or an automaton – like those hats and cloaks at the end of the Second Meditation that we judge (by the “pure inspection of the mind”) to clothemenbut which may turn out to cover only “spectres or feigned men” (des spectres ou des hommes feints).² But these shapes become...

The opening paragraph of section 9 ofThe Birth of Tragedyin a modified version of Walter Kaufmann’s translation reads: “Everything that comes to the surface in the Apollinian part of Greek tragedy, in the dialogue, looks simple, transparent, and beautiful. In this sense, the dialogue is an image of the Hellene whose nature is revealed in the dance because in the dance the greatest strength is only potential but betrays itself in the suppleness and wealth of movement. Thus the language of Sophocles’ heroes surprises us by its Apollinian precision and lucidity, so that we immediately have the feeling...

For all the attention it has received and all the times its most famous (or infamous) lines have been quoted, Nietzsche’s brief “On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense” remains something of an enigma – a “riddling X,” as the text itself refers to the inaccessible and undefinable thing-in-itself (das rätselhafte X des Dings an sich). In large measure, the enigmatic status of the text is due to the uncanny way it manages to predict and inscribe within its own borders, in its own terms, any attempt that would gain access to it by solving its riddle and identifying...

A reading of a Henry James story in an issue on French symbolism may seem an odd juxtaposition.¹ Certain thematic links are, of course, possible: although James wrote very little on authors whom one could count among the French symbolists, he did write a great deal on what has been called “symbolism” in the American literary tradition (a tradition in which his own work takes a place).² But the possibility of such loose linking already points up a certain symptomatic instability in the very term symbolism itself. That is, the term symbolism would want to serve as a convenient label...

Paul de Man’s work – his writing, his teaching – had and continues to have a way of getting under people’s skin.² (Indeed, as de Man himself said at one lecture occasion, this is the moment when things become interesting: “when one gets under people’s skin, when some resistance develops …”) Among the many statements and pronouncements that have succeeded in provoking this kind of response, perhaps one of the most notorious, one that seems to have rankled more intensely and for longer, is the well-known sentence toward the end of “Semiology and Rhetoric”: “This will in fact be the...

In order to fulfill the didactic assignment and talk about the future of literary theory,¹ one might as well begin with the question of thepresentof literary theory: what is, what would or could be, “literary theory” today? If one can judge by the signs of the times, then the most direct answer to the question would be: “Not much.” Not much these days could qualify as “literary theory,” not much todayisliterary theory – at least in comparison to the fabled heyday of literary theory during the (late) 1960s and 1970s. In comparison to the various projects...