The speaker moves between two positions: belief and disbelief. He addresses the “Far star” that “tickles” his “sensitive plate” and whose heat is so intense that it can fry black atoms white. He refers to his body as his armor… Read More ›
Philosophy
Analysis of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923) Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little… Read More ›
The Sublime
The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas… Read More ›
Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism
“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of… Read More ›
Poststructuralist Feminisms
“The question of gender is a question of language.” This statement is Barbara Johnson’s (World 37), and her succinct formulation of the relationship between gender and language does much to characterize the approach of a group of feminists who draw… Read More ›
Discourse Analysis
For many years, discourse analysis was less an explicit “theory” than a practical and empirical approach for supporting field work on relatively little-recorded languages and cultures (see, e.g., Grimes, Longacre, Malinowski, Pike). One domain of early work that attracted notice… Read More ›
Historical Criticism
Historical theory and criticism embraces not only the theory and practice of literary historiographical representation but also other types of criticism that, often without acknowledgment, presuppose a historical ground or adopt historical methods in an ad hoc fashion. Very frequently,… Read More ›
New Historicism
In 1982 Stephen Greenblatt edited a special issue of Genre on Renaissance writing, and in his introduction to this volume he claimed that the articles he had solicited were engaged in a joint enterprise, namely, an effort to rethink the… Read More ›
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. For phenomenology the ultimate source of all meaning and value is the lived experience of human beings. All philosophical systems, scientific theories, or aesthetic judgments have the status of abstractions from the ebb and… Read More ›
Textual Criticism
Textual criticism provides the principles for the scholarly editing of the texts of the cultural heritage. In the Western world, the tradition and practice of collecting, tending, and preserving records was first instituted in the Hellenistic period. The great library… Read More ›
Value Theory
The study of value, called axiology, has three main branches: ethics, concerning the morally good; political theory, concerning the social good; and aesthetics, concerning the beautiful, or taste. One might perhaps add another branch, pragmatics, which concerns the utilitarian good… Read More ›
Renaissance Literary Theory and Criticism
For its contribution to Renaissance literary culture at large, Renaissance literary criticism is a tentative and often unsatisfying body of work, shedding less light on that culture than might be hoped. The most durably interesting texts have proven to be… Read More ›
Reception Theory
Reception theory, the approach to literature that concerns itself first and foremost with one or more readers’ actualization of the text, is based on a collective enterprise that has had far-reaching institutional consequences. Hans Robert Jauss, with his University of… Read More ›
Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit
It is a sort of living death to be surrounded by the ceaseless concern for judgments and action that one does not even desire to change. In fact, since we are alive, I wanted to demonstrate, through the absurd, the… Read More ›
Analysis of Karel Capek’s Plays
Karel Capek (9 January 1890 – 25 December 1938) was concerned with the natural order of things, a theme that pervaded much of his work. His allegorical approach to expressionism linked his deep philosophical concerns to striking and often disturbing human… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 bce) was born in Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was a doctor at the court of Macedonia. The profession of medicine may well have influenced Aristotle’s interests, and his association with Macedon was lifelong: in 343 he became tutor… Read More ›
The Philosophy of George Berkeley
George Berkeley’s (1685–1753 ce) most lasting philosophical legacies are his immaterialism – the denial of the existence of matter – and his idealism, the positive doctrine that reality is constituted by spirits and their ideas. This is as Berkeley would… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Buddha
The person known as “the Buddha” (c.480–400 bce) was Siddhattha Gotama (in Pali; in Sanskrit Siddhartha Gautama). “Buddha” means “Awakened One” or “Enlightened One,” and is a descriptive title rather than a name. Gotama lived in north-east India at a… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi [Chuang Tzu or Chuang Chou] (c.360 bce) may have written up to seven chapters (The “Inner Chapters”) of The Zhuangzi collection. His technical mastery of ancient Chinese linguistic theory in some of these suggests that Zhuangzi studied and thought… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Xunzi
Xunzi [Hsün Tzu] or Xun Kuang [Hsün K’uang], who lived between from about 310 to after 230 bce, made unique contributions to Chinese philosophy in several important areas: the role of music and ritual in government and society; the concept… Read More ›