History of Literary Criticism

Amid the devastation of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), Philip Melanchthon and his colleagues at Wittenberg hastily compiled a Latin edition of Sophocles from fifteen years of teaching materials and sent it to Edward VI of England within weeks of his coronation. Wittenberg tragedy reconciled Aristotelian technology, Reformation politics, and Lutheran theology, offering consolation in the face of events that themselves seemed to be unfolding on a tragic stage. A crucial but neglected source of English and Continental literary thought, the Wittenberg Sophocles shaped the reception of Greek tragedy, tragic poetics, and Neo-Latin and vernacular composition throughout the sixteenth century.

Türkiye odaklı çeviri tarihi çalışmalarında Tercüme, Metis Çeviri ve Yazko Çeviri gibi çeviri odaklı yayınlar dışında kalan süreli yayınlardaki çeviri eleştirilerinin genellikle göz ardı edildiği bulgusundan yola çıkan bu çalışmanın iki temel amacı bulunmaktadır. Bunlardan ilki, 1935-1945 yılları arasında Yücel, Varlık, Oluş, Marmara, Harman ve Kalem gibi edebiyat dergilerinde yayımlanan eleştirel metinlerin geniş çeşitliliğine dikkat çekerek söz konusu metinlerin içerikleri ve biçimsel zenginlikleri sebebiyle çeviri eleştirisi, inceleme ya da tanıtım gibi kavramların akademik tanımlarıyla uyumsuz olduğunu göstermektir. Bu sebeple, mevcut çalışmada bu metinlerin daha kapsayıcı bir isimlendirmeyle "çeviri üzerine eleştirel metinler" olarak tanımlanması önerilmekte ve yeni bir sınıflandırmanın gerekliliği vurgulanmaktadır. Çalışmanın ikinci amacı ise, yukarıda sözü geçen dergilerin 1935 ve 1945 yılları arasında taranması ile oluşturulmuş metinler derlemi içerisinde, Türkiye odaklı çeviri tarihi araştırmaları açısından dikkat çekici özellikler taşıyan iki büyük 'tercüme münakaşasını' eleştirilerin erek kültürde meydana getirdiği etki ile birlikte özgünlük, yazarlık, tercüme, intihal ve adaptasyon kavramları üzerinden sorunsallaştırmaktır. Çalışma sonucunda, çeviri üzerine eleştirel metinlerin erek kültürde büyük çapta tartışma ve sorgulamalara sebep olabildiği ve dönemin birçok yazar ve aydınının gizli çeviri veya adaptasyon gibi sınırdaki çeviri faaliyetleri karşısında sorgulayıcı ve eleştirel bir bakış açısı benimsediği gözlemlenmiştir. Çalışmada, ayrıca, 1935-1945 yılları arasında edebiyat dergilerinde yayımlanmış olan çeviri üzerine eleştirel metinlerin incelenmesinin Türkiye odaklı çeviri, eleştiri ve edebiyat tarihine yeni veriler aracılığıyla katkıda bulunabileceği ve dönemin daha bütüncül temsiline olanak sağlayacağı görüşü savunulmaktadır.

Anahtar Sözcükler: çeviri eleştirisi tarihi, çeviri tartışmaları, süreli yayınlarda çeviri, Hamlet, Ercüment Ekrem Talu.

Book Jacket blurb, for what it's worth: "A sharply focused analysis of how and why romantic writers drew on gothic conventions whilst, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of gothic writing, including its institutional and commercial recognition as a form of literature, played a fundamental role in the development of romanticism as an ideology. In doing so he examines the early history of the romantic movement and its assumptions about literary value, and the politics of reading, writing, and reception at the end of the eighteenth century. As a whole the book makes an original contribution to our understanding of genre, tracing the impact of reception, marketing, and audience on its formation."

This paper argues that German literary studies was, from its inception, an entirely nationalist and nation-building endeavor, perhaps the quintessential nationalist project. Among the discipline's foundational premises are its belief in and commitment to a diversity of culturally individuated national communities (rather than one uniform humanity), a non-hierarchical plurality of vernaculars (rather than classical languages), and historically inflected and culturally expressive aesthetic forms (rather than transhistorically and transregionally valid templates of excellence). Three disciplinary activities of early Germanistik—Germanic historical linguistics, vernacular canon formation, and national literary history—are introduced as key instruments of nationalization. In conclusion, the paper claims that contemporary German Studies in the US, thankfully a reflective and critical enterprise, nonetheless remains institutionally completely dependent on the paradigm of the linguistically and culturally defined nation.

The playful discussion of 'horsemanship' that opens Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie has been variously interpreted as a straightforward anecdote about the chivalric arts, or an oblique rhetorical flourish, or something in between. This essay suggests a new context for Sidney's exordium by focusing primarily on its affiliation to the genre of the 'Art of Poetry'. In Horace's Ars poetica and other classical, scholastic and Renaissance treatises, horse-men and other unnatural hybrids embody the tension between decorum and poetic liberty. Three major traditions inform this trope: by the Renaissance the centaur could be an allegory of reason's struggle with the passions, an emblem of the poetic imagination, or a figure for compositional hybridity associated, especially, with Lucianic satire. Reading Sidney in the light of these traditions, finally, this essay explores aspects of the centaur's significance in the Defence and the Arcadia, and suggests that this kind of attention to metaphor might provide a bridge between critical and creative modes of Renaissance poetic thought.

Richard Hurd’s ‘Letters on Chivalry and Romance’ (1762) are generally treated as a key installment in the rise of gothic aesthetics, but more empirically considered, they are an idiosyncratic discussion of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ and its putative sources. It’s argued here that Hurd applies a specifically 18th-century mode of historically contextualizing reading to Spenser’s unsuspecting poem: as a consequence, we can learn from this eccentric work about the difficulties that beset both historical thought and the reading of literature in particular during the Enlightenment. To begin with, Hurd rejected the classic method of seeking out textual parallels to a poem’s words, whether drawn from classical, Biblical, or earlier English literature. His ambitions were greater, specifically, to identify the source of the ‘Faerie Queene’ with medieval life taken as a concrete whole and unmediated by texts. (Hurd’s own confessed distaste for reading medieval primary sources must have shaped this model: he preferred to lift his information from the 18th-century medievalist J.-B. de la Curne de Ste.-Palaye.) Considering the poetic material at hand, the result was more than perverse: the ‘Faerie Queene’ was no fantasy at all, but real and historical, and the elements in it that even Hurd was forced to take as allegorical were not medieval in their flavor but unfortunate concessions to the degenerate taste of Spenser’s Elizabethan contemporaries. Hurd’s jarring deflation or debunking of Spenser’s allegorical epic recalls similar intellectual maneuvers emanating from English churchmen in the earlier Enlightenment -- for example, William Warburton’s argument that the Egyptian hieroglyphs had no mystical origin but had been invented for practical and commercial purposes, or Richard Bentley’s exposure of the forgery of the letters of Phalaris. By implication, this study contributes to the growing consensus that members of the institutional church deeply shaped England’s literary and intellectual culture during the 18th century.

In the 1980s there was a brief but intense period of interest among literary critics and theorists in Classical Rabbinic interpretation, and, in particular, the genre of commentary known as Midrash. Interest concentrated around the apparent similarities between Midrash and the commentaries and criticism of Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Barthes and others. This essay examines this connection between Midrash and theory in light of the persistent charge from Foucault and others that all hermeneutics is essentially theological. It proceeds by drawing out the aims and frustrations of the literary critics and Jewish scholars involved, and considers in what ways the questions which arose in these years might be pertinent for contemporary literary criticism, theory and institutional practice.

Bentley was the most famous classical scholar in Europe at a time when this meant a great deal. But he provoked continual controversy by his bold methods and pugnacious personality. In the world of England, both Bentley and his rivals Swift and Pope apparently wished to be known for classical knowledge as much as personal taste. In the international Latin-speaking realm, Bentley faced the universal opinion that no one could equal the great scholars of the Renaissance. If later generations admire Bentley, his career in his own time was uncertain, uncomfortable, and fundamentally experimental.

Abstract:
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110944419/html#overview
Individual chapters:
https://dartmouth.academia.edu/MichaelLurie/Chapters

Reviews: 
(a) A. Kerkhecker, Museum Helveticum 62 (2005) 224f. (http://retro.seals.ch/digbib/view?rid=mhl-001:2005:62::241&id=hitlist);
(b) R. Lohse, Romanische Forschungen 119 (2007), 257–260 (http://dx.doi.org/10.3196/003581207781361279) 
(c) G. Boter, “Lees maar: er staat niet wat er staat. Over Oedipus’ schuld en Aristoteles’ hamartia”, Lampas 43 (2010), 3-19 (http://www.verloren.nl/file.php?id=6038 )

For  responses from the scholars whose positions were challenged and dismantled in the book, see Gnomon 78 (2006) 671–674 and E. Lefèvre, CR 57, (2007) 18–20, whose angry outburst is cowardly disguised as an impartial review by an independent observer.

This essay introduces the March 2016 special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, "Reading Historical Poetics," edited by V. Joshua Adams, Joel Calahan, and Michael Hansen. In the introduction, we situate the work of the six scholars who contributed essays on historical poetics to the volume by describing and evaluating the conflicting methodological approaches pursued by scholars of historical poetics in current Slavic and American comparative traditions.

This book presents a study of one of the most important literary polemics of the seventeenth century in which Lope de Vega was involved, the polemic about the new poetic language used by Luis de Gongora. This question is studied here through the analysis of the letters and censorships that Lope de Vega and Diego de Colmenares exchanged. Lope’s literary ideas, as well as those held by his rival, are presented within the frame of the different literary theory traditions existing at that time.

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An unstudied manuscript in Princeton contains lectures delivered by the youthful Jacques Sirmond at the Jesuit college of Pont-a-Mousson. In contrast to the received pictures of Jesuit pedagogues as devoted rhetoricians, Sirmond explained 'Aeneid' books 3 and 12 in a self-consciously historical way, concentrating especially on Roman law and religion and their interaction. His concerns are discussed in light of sixteenth-century scholarship on ancient Rome, contemporary Virgil commentary, humanist interest in the history of culture as a hermeneutic tool, and Sirmond's own later career as a philologist and ecclesiastical historian. Sirmond's comments on 'Aeneid' 12 in particular show how he used religious and legal information in an unusual ethical reading of Virgil's text. Like some other early modern readers, Sirmond read Virgil's poem, other ancient literary texts, and Roman historical texts and documents as equivalent and interchangeable sources of information.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Richard Rorty advocated that his confréres kick the ‘philosophy habit’—that is, adopt a post-positivist, post-metaphysical style of interpretation. Philosophers largely ignored Rorty’s clarion call. Unburdened by the kind of Selbstverständnis of scholarly mission held by most analytics, members of departments of literature instead became the most important advocates for reading literature philosophically during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Though the academic Left, especially practitioners of ‘theory’, largely celebrated and encouraged this development, Rorty, in the late 1990s, came to view it as harmfully elevating ‘cultural politics’ above ‘real politics’, which would ultimately lead to the abandonment of civic responsibilities. While heavy-handed and partial, Rorty’s critique of the uses of philosophy by literary critics was not only perceptive, but can be helpful for understanding how the contemporary academic Left might move forward as well.

Prezentowany tekst stanowi omówienie związków literaturoznawstwa z psychoanalizą freudowską na przykładzie psychograficznej twórczości Izydora Sadgera, jednego z pierwszych i najbliższych uczniów Zygmunta Freuda. Autorka, przywołując sylwetkę zapomnianego dziś analityka, dowodzi wpływu prac Sadgera na twórcę psychoanalizy oraz jego pisma dotyczące literatury. Dzięki analizie dyskusji prowadzonych na spotkaniach Środowego Towarzystwa Psychologicznego w tekście ukazano szeroki kontekst powstawania najważniejszych prac Freuda poświęconych artystom, pisarzom oraz dziełom ich autorstwa. Celem artykułu jest dowiedzenie, że pierwsi psychoanalitycy świadomie rezygnowali z języka dziewiętnastowiecznej psychiatrii na rzecz wypracowania nowatorskich modeli interpretacyjnych i pisarskich.

Aristotle’s Poetics has been thought to be inaccessible or misunderstood in sixteenth-century England, but this inherited assumption has drifted far from the primary evidence and lagged behind advances in contiguous fields. As a member of the corpus Aristotelicum, the shared foundation of Western education until the late seventeenth century, the Poetics enjoyed wide circulation, ownership, and interest in Latin and Italian as well as the original Greek. Placing the Poetics in its intellectual context suggests a very different narrative for its reception in English criticism, one that accounts for a multiplicity of readings and uses on both sides of the academic divide. Some of those readings—in Cheke, Ascham, Rainolds, Sidney, and others—are considered in this article, and directions are proposed for future research in what remains a rich and mostly unworked vein of literary history.

Sir Philip Sidney has exemplified the meager access English readers are thought to have had to Aristotle’s Poetics in the sixteenth century. This article shows, on the contrary, that a passage of his Defence of Poesie was directly translated from the Poetics. Philological analysis across extant translations and contemporary polyglot dictionaries demonstrates, moreover, that Sidney’s source was the Greek itself, and suggests a revised model for English encounters with this crucial text in the Renaissance.

An introduction to some central concepts in literary hermeneutics and interpretive theory (Interpretation, understanding, criticism, evaluation, meaning, etc.), and to the semiotic groundings of hermeneutics. This is followed by an overview of the main approaches in classical hermeneutics, from Greek philosophers and Homeric critics, through medieval poetics and criticism, to early modern developments. The overview concludes with an introduction to Schleiermacher's general hermeneutics in the Romantic period.

Literature on Trial traces the rise of modern literary criticism in Central and Eastern Europe during the eighteenth century. S.D. Chrostowska juxtaposes the discourse's written forms in three linguistic-cultural regions — Germany, Poland, and Russia — to show how fluid the relationship once was between the genres of criticism and those of literature.

An alternative history of literary criticism, Literature on Trial marks a shift from earlier studies' focus on aesthetic principles to an emphasis on the development of literary-critical forms. Chrostowska relates cultural and institutional changes in these areas to the formation of literary-critical knowledge. She accounts for the ways in which critical discourse organized itself formally and deemed some genres ‘proper’ while eliminating others. Analysing works by Lessing, Goethe, and Karamzin, among others, Literature on Trial brings a fresh theoretical perspective to the links between genre as a discursive strategy and sociopolitical life.

In this article, I intend to look into the issue of the relation of History to Literature through the works of the American literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). Therefore, I will both analyze Trilling’s argument in favor of the historicity of literature and will relate this argument to Trilling´s interest in the history of sensibilities. Finally, I intend to look into the historicity of Trilling’s own arguments. In doing so, I hope to show that Trilling becomes part of a particular branch of American literary history, alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, which is marked by the awareness that every self is inevitably historically shaped.

Christian denominations generally viewed the social and ideological changes that occurred throughout the nineteenth century as crises and therefore perceived modern literature as a manifestation of decadence. Due to their diverse rootedness within Hungary's social and political life, each denomination reacted distinctively to the phenomena of the modern. This paper describes the different reactions of the Catholic and Protestant Churches and examines their social background by analyzing the denominational and literary conditions of Hungary at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Obviously, both the Catholic and Protestant Churches needed to modernize their social and cultural institutions in order to regain their former social bases: until 1920, however, this effort yielded no valuable results, primarily because their attempts to create a denominational version of modern literature was subordinated to the requirements of religious morality and thus was not capable of achieving artistic autonomy.

Este artigo, através de uma intersecção das reflexões sobre a história da literatura produzida no Brasil e o contexto argentino, pretende explorar as possibilidades de se escrever uma história da literatura hoje. Para isso, abordamos o caso da Historia Crítica de la Literatura Argentina (iniciada em 1999) para ver os limites e as possibilidades desta prática atualmente.

Contrary to a long history of scholarship that considers Sitwell’s personality a major detriment to her historical and contemporary reception, this chapter understands Sitwell’s self-marketing strategy as genius critical self-doubling. To this end, Sitwell’s most important genre is criticism, in which she displays a penchant for often unattributed self-reference and self-explication. Sitwell doubles herself in her criticism, forging an arbitrary division between Sitwell the empirical critic and Sitwell the poet-philosopher; the empirical critic functions as a stand-in for the critico-literary institution, providing an “external” imprimatur for the poet-philosopher. Examining Noël Coward’s creation of Sitwell’s parodic poet-doppelgänger, Hernia Whittlebot, thus allows an understanding of Sitwell’s own self-doubling as integral to her self-marketing genius—Whittlebot’s relationship to Sitwell reenacts Sitwell’s approach to her own work. More broadly, these relations are a microcosm for the institution of modernist literary criticism that developed conterminously with the maturation and solidification of Sitwell’s strategies of authorship.

This article discusses Virginia Woolf's complex relationship with literary history, and especially with Walter Scott, the reputed father of the historical novel. It also takes up one of Woolf's own categories, spirituality, and explores what that means relative to literary romance and the "fulness of life" that literature promises, whether enduringly or fleetingly.

Scrutiny (1932-1953) was one of the most important critical reviews of the last century. Its editors and contributors included F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, Denys Thompson, L. C. Knights, D. W. Harding, W. H. Mellers, H. A. Mason, among others. In recasting Scrutiny’s critique of mass culture by way of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), I hope to show that the Scrutiny project not only dramatizes the conflicts internal to what MacIntyre calls emotivist culture, but provides a new way of looking at the group’s relation to the culture industry, its purported elitism, and its deep ties with a communitarian rather than socialist politics.

For modern historians of criticism, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics was decisive in popularising a definition of «poetry» that hinged on fictiveness rather than verse, a definition typically associated with «modern» as opposed to «medieval» poetics. Renaissance critics and translators, however, approached the crucial passage in the Poetics with more caution than this triumphal narrative would suggest. The Greek text was problematic, and appeared to contradict the obvious truth about ancient epic; lacking a word for «literature» in general, Aristotle was forced to communicate in terms that obfuscated as much as they clarified. When the Poetics arrived in England, moreover, it met a lexicon of «verse», «poetry», and «feigning» that had its own internal coherence, and prompted deep reflection on the relationship of classical poetics to modern literary composition. This paper explores the intersections of these new Aristotelian categories with long-standing English taxonomies of literary composition, and their consequences in modern critical historiography.

In Eclogue 3, Vergil flags the rough verses of his quarreling shepherds as alterna, evoking similar songs in aetiologies of early drama in the Georgics, in Livy, and in Horace. These later treatments often set early Italian practices against their foreign (especially Greek) counterparts to interrogate contemporary literary and social concerns. I argue that Eclogue 3—albeit with pastoral obliqueness—does the same, adumbrating a discomfort with indigenous Italian coarseness. My conclusion reassesses the significance of Palaemon’s judgment (e.g., his award of the vitula to both herdsmen) in the context of Roman literary history.

This short essay is designed as an introduction to the new journal EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN IMAGINATIVE CULTURE (ESIC). The journal is designed to make use of an opportunity that has only recently opened up for the social sciences and the humanities. These fields now have before them the prospect of a synthesis that would produce, for the first time, a comprehensive and scientifically robust understanding of the human condition. ESIC is founded on the assumption that imaginative culture is an essential part of the human condition. Evolutionary cultural study is still establishing itself as a distinct field. ESIC will provide a nexus for research in that field—to help scholars stay informed about the newest thinking in evolutionary cultural theory, to illuminate connections between findings in seemingly disparate disciplines, to help establish a body of common knowledge, and to set standards for informed and theoretically competent commentary. Already, evolutionary scholars and scientists who focus on humanistic subjects have produced a substantial body of work, much of it good, some of it excellent. That kind of work points a way toward the future. This journal is meant to be an avenue into that future.

Alexander Nowell, headmaster of Westminster, left a rough manuscript notebook that contains Latin prose prologues to three classical plays performed by his pupils at Westminster in the 1540s: Terence’s Adelphoe and Eunuchus, and Seneca’s Hippolytus. These prologues, a substantial new source in Reformation criticism, are transcribed and translated in full here for the first time, and placed in their historical, literary, and intellectual context. Prefacing Terence’s comedies, Nowell produces a learned and charismatic address in the Erasmian mode, drawing together a range of pragmatic and theoretical defences of comedy and a robust notion of fictionality remarkable at this early date. His treatment of Seneca’s Hippolytus is quite different: Nowell draws a detailed and unusual parallel between the classical myth and the scriptural story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife that relates him closely to contemporary developments in Reformation neo-classicism in Germany and the Low Countries. These multi-faceted orations paint a complex picture of pedagogy, bureaucratic necessity, and literary thought in the early morning of the English Reformation.

SUMMARY The essay identifies and explores the intellectual formation of a hitherto overlooked constellation of 'anthropologists' in Edwardian Cambridge. Three core members of this group were William Ridgeway, Hector Munro Chadwick, and William H. R. Rivers, who today are more normally associated with (respectively) Classics, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Anthropology. However, in the decade before World War I all three were active members of the new Board of Anthropology, and each, in his particular field of study, began to turn away from established evolutionary explanation to investigate social phenomena as arising out of the contact of different peoples. The essay first shows the connections between the work of Chadwick and Rivers, and then suggests that both were following a path recently beaten down by Ridgeway who, in his disputes with the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, advanced an account of ancient Greek tragedy as arising out of a fusion of native and intrusive performances, both relating to the commemoration of the dead.

Durant les années qui suivent la seconde guerre mondiale, l’histoire de la critique en France est marquée par l’apparition de collections monographiques de poche consacrées aux écrivains. Conçues comme des vecteurs de constitution et de diffusion de l’histoire littéraire, les deux premières de ces collections de monographies, « Poètes d’aujourd’hui » (Seghers) et « Écrivains de toujours » (Le Seuil), ont pour objectif commun de donner à lire, à un public aussi large que possible, un panorama de la littérature passée et présente. Visant en particulier le grand public ainsi que les étudiants, ces deux séries vont constituer une niche spécifique au sein du discours critique et du système éditorial français de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. De façon à répondre aux différents publics qu’elles visent, ces collections façonnent un modèle qui se caractérise par la conjonction entre un médium spécifique – le livre de petit format – et une généricité composite combinant la biographie, l’essai et l’anthologie à une iconographie plus ou moins étoffée. La diversité impliquée par cette formule de discours critique se traduit par l’implication de plusieurs intervenants : la réalisation de ces ouvrages, fruits d’un travail collectif, est soumise à des mobiles distincts.

A “giuntina” edition of «Perì hermenèias» (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Stamp. 15826), belonging to Benedetto Varchi (1503-1565) and by him richly annotated, testifies on his study on Logica. During his stay in Padua (1537-1541), while giving lectures on Philosophy at the «Studium» and taking part to the Accademia degli Infiammati, the Florentine scholar prepared the ground for building a vernacular philosophic prose by translating and commenting Aristotle's work. When he was called back to Florence in 1543 with the assignment of writing the «Storia fiorentina», Varchi persevered in his efforts to realize the project of putting the philosophic and scientific doctrine into vernacular, by giving lectures on Dante and Petrarch at the Accademia Fiorentina. Such project, moreover, matched with the aim of Duke Cosimo I to make Florentine language an efficient tool of his cultural policy. ***************************************************************************************
L’edizione giuntina del «Perì hermenèias» (Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Stamp. 15826), appartenuta a Benedetto Varchi e da lui fittamente postillata, è il testimone dei suoi studi sulla logica. Durante il soggiorno a Padova (1537-1541), fra le lezioni di filosofia nello Studio e l’attività all’Accademia degli Infiammati, il letterato fiorentino, traducendo e commentando l’opera di Aristotele, pose le basi alla costruzione di una prosa filosofica in volgare. Richiamato a Firenze nel 1543 per scrivere la Storia fiorentina, Varchi s’impegnò anche, con le letture dantesche e petrarchesche all’Accademia Fiorentina, a mettere in pratica il progetto di trasferire in volgare la dottrina filosofica e scientifica, un progetto che nei principi s’incontrava con l’aspirazione del duca Cosimo I a fare del fiorentino un mezzo efficace della sua politica culturale.

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

As literary history stages a comeback as a method in contemporary literary study, it makes sense to ask about its antecedents. In the Renaissance, as it turns out, literary history was widely pursued alongside interpretive commentary and textual criticism. Perhaps the thorniest question Renaissance scholars faced in this field, as well as the most resonant for 21st-century readers, centered on the birth of tragedy in ancient Greece. What had been the tragedy's original form, and in particular, had it included music in any way? To attempt to answer was to engage with Aristotle's 'Poetics' in a very unfamiliar way, and moreover to compare Greek with Roman sources imaginatively and boldly. Angelo Poliziano, Francesco Robortello, Pier Vettori, and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso are discussed.

Postface à La Haine de la littérature (Éditions de Minuit, 2015). Pourquoi vaut-il la peine de s’intéresser aux discours contre la littérature ? Que nous révèlent-ils de la littérature elle-même ? En quoi les discours antilittéraires externes (venus de philosophes, théologiens, savants, hommes politiques, etc.) se distinguent-ils des discours antilittéraires internes (sous la plume des écrivains) ? Autrement dit, qu’est-ce qui distingue La Haine de la littérature de mon livre précédent, L’Adieu à la littérature (Éditions de Minuit, 2005) ? La leçon à retenir est qu’il est profitable d’examiner la littérature non pas seulement en elle-même, mais par les reflets qu’elle jette dans les autres discours, par l’image que ces discours en proposent, c’est-à-dire par réflexion, en creux ou en négatif. L’approche de la littérature par le négatif, en creux ou par réflexion, permet en effet de mieux comprendre un certain type de discours (la littérature) qui longtemps n’eut pas de nom à lui, parce qu’il était mis au rebut de tous les autres.

Approaching Literature by Reflection
Afterword to The Hatred of Literature (Harvard University Press, 2018). Why is it worthwhile to look at discourses against literature? What do they tell us about literature itself? How do external anti-literary discourses (from philosophers, theologians, scholars, politicians, etc.) differ from internal anti-literary discourses (from writers)? In other words, what distinguishes The Hatred of Literature from my previous book, Farewell to Literature (Éditions de Minuit, 2005)? The lesson to be learned is that it is profitable to examine literature not only in itself, but through its reflections in other discourses, through the image that these discourses propose, that is, by reflection, in hollow or in negative. The approach of literature by the negative, in hollow or by reflection, allows indeed to better understand a certain type of discourse (literature) which for a long time did not have a name to him, because it was rejected by all the others.