Philosophy in the Narrative Mode

Histories of Arabic and Islamic philosophy tend to focus on texts which are systematic in nature and conventionally classified as philosophy or related scholarly disciplines. Philosophical principles, however, are also defining features of texts associated with other genres. Within the larger field of philosophy, this might be especially true of ethics and within the larger body of literature this might be especially the case for stories. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the very purpose of storytelling is to reinforce and disseminate moral conventions. Likewise, the moral philosopher can be conceptualized as a homo narrans.The aim of this contribution is to apply the approach to narratives as a mode of debating ethical or moral principles to biographies of Alexander the Great. More than any other figure of the classical world, Alexander was religiously validated in the Islamic tradition due to his quasi-prophetic status as the ‘man with the two horns’ in the Qur’an. He appears prominently in the larger orbit of Arabic and Islamic philosophy as interlocutor and disciple of Aristotle and is adduced anecdotally in philosophical literature as an example to teach larger lessons of life. As a world conqueror, he provided an attractive model for those who sought to reconcile philosophical insight with worldly ambition.Focusing on biographies of Alexander, this article explores ethical principles which are inscribed in this body of literature and thus reads the texts as a narrativized form of philosophy. The analysis is comparative in two ways. Biographies of different periods and regions of the Islamicate world will be discussed, but comparisons with pre-Islamic biographies of Alexander (notably Roman biographies and the Alexander Romance) are included as well.

New Perspectives on Ethics in Islam [whole issue]

Complete volume, containing all articles CONTENTS Introduction: Feriel Bouhafa, Towards New Perspectives on Ethics in Islam: Casuistry, Contingency, and Ambiguity I. Islamic Philosophy and Theology Feriel Bouhafa, The Dialectics of Ethics: Moral Ontology and Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy Frank Griffel, The Place of Virtue Ethics within the Post-Classical Discourse on ḥikma: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā Ayman Shihadeh, Psychology and Ethical Epistemology: An Ashʿarī Debate with Muʿtazilī Ethical Realism, 11th-12th C. Hannah C. Erlwein, The Moral Obligation to Worship God Alone: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Analysis in the Tafsīr Anna Ayse Akasoy, Philosophy in the Narrative Mode: Alexander the Great as an Ethical Character from Roman to Medieval Islamicate Literature II. Islamic Jurisprudence Ziad Bou Akl, From Norm Evaluation to Norm Construction: The Metaethical Origin of al-Ghazālī’s Radical Infallibilism Felicitas Opwis, The Ethical Turn in Legal Analogy: Imbuing the Ratio Legis with Maṣlaḥa Robert Gleave, Moral Assessments and Legal Categories: The Relationship between Rational Ethics and Revealed Law in Post-Classical Imāmī Shīʿī Legal Theory Omar Farahat, Moral Value and Commercial Gain: Three Classical Islamic Approaches III Hadith, Quran, and Adab Mutaz al-Khatib, Consult Your Heart: The Self as a Source of Moral Judgment Tareq Moqbel, “As Time Grows Older, the Qurʾān Grows Younger”: The Ethical Function of Ambiguity in Qurʾānic Narratives Enass Khansa, Can Reading Animate Justice? A Conversation from Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) Nuha AlShaar, The Interplay of Religion and Philosophy in al-Tawḥīdī’s Political Thought and Practical Ethics William Ryle Hodges, Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Notion of Political Adab: Ethics as a Virtue of Modern Citizenship in Late 19th Century Khedival Egypt

Still Point of the Turning World

Schubert’s late instrumental music evokes a distinctive time-sense which not only expands the expressive potential of stylistic norms, but also invites deeper reflections on the relationship between the self and the world through his multilayered construction of temporal consciousness. The sense of now, towards which past and future gravitate, is particularly salient. In this article, I examine the formal, harmonic, topical processes through which Schubert constructs a vivid sense of the now in two movements from his late period, D. 956/ii and D. 959/ii, through the lens of phenomenology, drawing on conceptions of time as formulated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I aim to bridge two fields together: first, the general theory of musical time, as has been delineated by Kramer, Barry and Clifton, which examines concepts such as linearity/nonlinearity, silence and stasis; and second, the scholarship on late Schubert, with key conceptual tools such as landscape, late style, lyricism, songfulness and interiority, formulated in the works of Adorno, Burnham, Mak and Taylor. I will also provide the cultural context of musical time in the early-nineteenth century, focusing on the wider paradigm shift from form-as-architecture to form-as-process in music. My analysis reflects a phenomenological orientation within a hermeneutic, narrative mode. I highlight the often disorienting subjective experience of time as evoked by moments that deflect from norms and expectations, specifically the tension between the transient nature of music and the sense of permanence evoked through Schubert’s cyclic, paratactic procedures. I then show how Schubert’s construal of temporal consciousness acquires a historiographical import and resonates with the broader intellectual world by framing it in terms of Schlegel’s three stages of history. I conclude by promoting phenomenological approaches in analysing Schubert’s works and nineteenth-century music at large.

Contesting Discourses and Transmodalization in J.M.Coetzee’s Fiction

South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this contributes to the meaning of the fictional word. This study is a narratological research of Coetzee’s technique of transmodalization (narrative mode shifts) between two types of discourses, the pedagogical and performative, and employs Homi K Bhabha’s (1994) theoretical framework of representative discourse. In examining the narrative mode shifts between frame breaks, metanarrative, narrative of words, narrative of dreams, and narrative of topography, this research argues that a non-position is generated between the contesting discourses. This research becomes a model for the study of colonial dynamics in metafictive white writing. It aims to unravel the elements integral in voicing the conditionality of the colonized subject and the contention of representation. This study also explores the metonymical relationships in narrative that reflect intrinsic aspects of the signification of representation.

Het tweedepersoonsperspectief als autobiografisch masker: verdichting van auteur, verteller, protagonist, en “narratee” in Herman Teirlinck, “Zelfportret of het galgemaal”

This article explores the novel Zelfportret of het galgemaal (The Man in the Mirror, 1955) by the Flemish author Herman Teirlinck, who planned it as a literary self-portrait. Its interpretation as an autobiography hinges on one’s understanding of the second-person point of view that makes up substantial parts of this novel. Multifocality of the “you” appears to be a key feature characterizing this little explored narrative mode in autobiography. Departing from structuralist narratology by Genette and Lejeune, I investigate reader-driven reading modes as elaborated by Fludernik, Bonheim, and Schmitt to explore how the deferred referentiality of the “you” blurs the traditional dichotomy between factual historical reality and the narrative world. The narrator involves the reader in interpreting the “you” to address both the narratee (Teirlinck) and the protagonist (Henri) at the same time.

Precolonial Igbo Voices in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018): A Palimpsestic Search for “Home”

The present article examines how Freshwater (2018), the debut novel of the Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi, offers a layered portrayal of precolonial Igbo and western narratives. By recourse to the auto-fictional narrative mode, the fiction deploys a constant tug of war which suggests the culturally hybrid nature of discourses connected to spiritual belief, self-identity dynamics and gender. My analysis pivots around three main discussions. Firstly, I trace and exemplify the aesthetic and thematic imbrication between Igbo cosmology (and Animism) and Christianity. Secondly, I seek to evince the unconventional depiction of plural consciousnesses coexisting in an individual in an effort to contest long-established truisms of self formation. I also focus on the ensuing amalgam between western conceptions of mental illness, trauma and Igbo mystic interpretations of reality. Considering the peripheral Igbo stance the novel depicts, the fiction will be contextualised within the current literary meta- and trans-modernist axis. Thirdly, I refer to transgender issues mapped up and brought to the fore through the main character’s predicament; a search for existential answers commingling divergent paradigms. Thus, Freshwater offers a peculiar polyphony of numinous narratorial voices which strive to question extant (neo)postcolonial truths.

Epistemic Responsibility and the Literary Journalist

<p>The primary purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of epistemic responsibility in the practice of book-length literary journalism. Literary journalism offers a powerful alternative to mainstream journalism. Its narrative mode and storytelling techniques open possibilities of representation often closed by traditional reporting practices. Subsequently, literary journalists have attracted criticism for unorthodox modes of representation and attendant “truth claims” in many texts. In this thesis I draw on the work of epistemologist Lorraine Code to highlight the tension between the branches of ethics and epistemology, and argue that holding them apart for the purposes of explication yields important insights into the practice of literary journalism. I argue that criticism of literary journalism has at times conflated ethical and epistemic concerns, resulting in censure of the practitioner on primarily moral grounds. While such a critique is often valid, I propose that it can mislabel problematic cognitive processes as moral deficiencies. A re-examination of significant controversies raised by literary journalism shows disputed areas stemming from epistemic “blind spots”. These “blind spots” are often characterised as ethical lapses, but I argue that framing criticism in this way inhibits progress in sound practice. Recurring controversies over works by practitioners such as Janet Malcolm and Australia’s Helen Garner bear this out. I also offer close readings of three works of contemporary US literary journalism through their paratextual frames. The limits of transparency are demonstrated here, including the fact that disclosure can hide more than it illuminates. Code’s “epistemic responsibilist” approach is subsequently presented as an important addition to literary journalism scholarship, as it offers a sound foundation for reflexive practice—for both writers and critics. Using this approach, I offer critical readings of the “truth claims” in three contemporary US texts: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family (2003), Dave Cullen’s Columbine (2009) and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010). A secondary aim of this thesis is to characterise contemporary Australian book-length literary journalism. Using Code’s concept of an “epistemic community”, I propose that the nature of national discourse influences the voice of the Australian literary journalist, as revealed by anxiety over representation in the texts under analysis. These texts highlight the pressures of subjectivity on truth, which results in a destabilisation of “truth claims”. In comparison with the US practitioners analysed, their three Australian counterparts analysed place less emphasis on disclosure transparency, and rely more heavily upon self-presentation as seekers, rather than discoverers, of knowledge and truth. I further maintain that these three texts represent a dominant national function of book-length literary journalism. Issues of national identity are bound up in the relationship between the land and its people, and are evident in the work of Margaret Simons, Chloe Hooper and Anna Krien, three of Australia’s most notable literary journalists. Through the lens of a civic dispute, each of these practitioners join one of the most pressing cultural issues in contemporary national discourse, that is, to explore what it means to be “Australian”.</p>

Epistemic Responsibility and the Literary Journalist

<p>The primary purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of epistemic responsibility in the practice of book-length literary journalism. Literary journalism offers a powerful alternative to mainstream journalism. Its narrative mode and storytelling techniques open possibilities of representation often closed by traditional reporting practices. Subsequently, literary journalists have attracted criticism for unorthodox modes of representation and attendant “truth claims” in many texts. In this thesis I draw on the work of epistemologist Lorraine Code to highlight the tension between the branches of ethics and epistemology, and argue that holding them apart for the purposes of explication yields important insights into the practice of literary journalism. I argue that criticism of literary journalism has at times conflated ethical and epistemic concerns, resulting in censure of the practitioner on primarily moral grounds. While such a critique is often valid, I propose that it can mislabel problematic cognitive processes as moral deficiencies. A re-examination of significant controversies raised by literary journalism shows disputed areas stemming from epistemic “blind spots”. These “blind spots” are often characterised as ethical lapses, but I argue that framing criticism in this way inhibits progress in sound practice. Recurring controversies over works by practitioners such as Janet Malcolm and Australia’s Helen Garner bear this out. I also offer close readings of three works of contemporary US literary journalism through their paratextual frames. The limits of transparency are demonstrated here, including the fact that disclosure can hide more than it illuminates. Code’s “epistemic responsibilist” approach is subsequently presented as an important addition to literary journalism scholarship, as it offers a sound foundation for reflexive practice—for both writers and critics. Using this approach, I offer critical readings of the “truth claims” in three contemporary US texts: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family (2003), Dave Cullen’s Columbine (2009) and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010). A secondary aim of this thesis is to characterise contemporary Australian book-length literary journalism. Using Code’s concept of an “epistemic community”, I propose that the nature of national discourse influences the voice of the Australian literary journalist, as revealed by anxiety over representation in the texts under analysis. These texts highlight the pressures of subjectivity on truth, which results in a destabilisation of “truth claims”. In comparison with the US practitioners analysed, their three Australian counterparts analysed place less emphasis on disclosure transparency, and rely more heavily upon self-presentation as seekers, rather than discoverers, of knowledge and truth. I further maintain that these three texts represent a dominant national function of book-length literary journalism. Issues of national identity are bound up in the relationship between the land and its people, and are evident in the work of Margaret Simons, Chloe Hooper and Anna Krien, three of Australia’s most notable literary journalists. Through the lens of a civic dispute, each of these practitioners join one of the most pressing cultural issues in contemporary national discourse, that is, to explore what it means to be “Australian”.</p>

Coloniality and Solitude in García Márquez’s Public Speeches and Newspaper Articles

Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist narrative mode has been criticized by some scholars and by younger Latin American writers of resorting to a certain tropicalism that exoticizes Latin America as a region where violence and sensuality dominate every aspect of daily life, thus selling a magical Third World underdevelopment full of superstitions, mythical legends, popular folklore, and distortions of time for the Global North’s reading markets that is quite different from everyday reality in the region. Yet whether or not one agrees with this assessment, there is undoubtedly a different image of Latin America when one reads García Márquez’s journalism and public speeches. This article contrasts the author’s novelistic, magical realist image of Latin America in some of his works with the typically more realistic one (there are some exceptions) presented in his speeches collected in the volume I’m Not Here to Give a Speech (2010). Thus, in his 1982 speech “The Solitude of Latin America,” given during his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance, as well as in his 1995 speeches “Latin America Exists” and “Dreams for the Twenty-First Century,” one finds an anti-Eurocentric stance, in which he demands that Europe try to conceive of Latin America in a different, less paternalistic way. He demands that non-Eurocentric, Latin American worldviews and ways of being in the world be respected in equal terms. Moreover, a sober, realistic denunciation of injustice, infant mortality, disappearance, genocide, imperialism, the abundance of forced exiles and refugees, and other social evils pervades many of these speeches.

Zur Operationalisierung literaturwissenschaftlicher Begriffe in der algorithmischen Textanalyse. Eine Annäherung über Norbert Altenhofers hermeneutische Modellinterpretation von Kleists Das Erdbeben in Chili

The present article discusses and reflects on possible ways of operationalizing the terminology of traditional literary studies for use in computational literary studies. By »operationalization«, we mean the development of a method for tracing a (theoretical) term back to text-surface phenomena; this is done explicitly and in a rule-based manner, involving a series of substeps. This procedure is presented in detail using as a concrete example Norbert Altenhofer’s »model interpretation« (Modellinterpretation) of Heinrich von Kleist’s The Earthquake in Chile. In the process, we develop a multi-stage operation – reflected upon throughout in terms of its epistemological implications – that is based on a rational-hermeneutic reconstruction of Altenhofer’s interpretation, which focuses on »mysteriousness« (Rätselhaftigkeit), a concept from everyday language. As we go on to demonstrate, when trying to operationalize this term, one encounters numerous difficulties, which is owing to the fact that Altenhofer’s use of it is underspecified in a number of ways. Thus, for instance, and contrary to Altenhofer’s suggestion, Kleist’s sentences containing »relativizing or perspectivizing phrases such as ›it seemed‹ or ›it was as if‹« (Altenhofer 2007, 45) do by no means, when analyzed linguistically, suggest a questioning or challenge of the events narrated, since the unreal quality of those German sentences only relates to the comparison in the subordinate clause, not to the respective main clause. Another indicator central to Altenhofer’s ascription of »mysteriousness« is his concept of a »complete facticity« (lückenlose Faktizität) which »does not seem to leave anything ›open‹« (Altenhofer 2007, 45). Again, the precise designation of what exactly qualifies facticity as »complete« is left open, since Kleist’s novella does indeed select for portrayal certain phenomena and actions within the narrated world (and not others). The degree of factuality in Kleist’s text may be higher than it is in other texts, but it is by no means »complete«. In the context of Altenhofer’s interpretation, »complete facticity« may be taken to mean a narrative mode in which terrible events are reported using conspicuously sober and at times drastic language. Following the critical reconstruction of Altenhofer’s use of terminology, the central terms and their relationship to one another are first explicated (in natural language), which already necessitates intensive conceptual work. We do so implementing a hierarchical understanding of the terms discussed: the definition of one term uses other terms which also need to be defined and operationalized. In accordance with the requirements of computational text analysis, this hierarchy of terms should end in »directly measurable« terms – i. e., in terms that can be clearly identified on the surface of the text. This, however, leads to the question of whether (and, if so, on the basis of which theoretical assumptions) the terminology of literary studies may be traced back in this way to text-surface phenomena. Following the pragmatic as well as the theoretical discussion of this complex of questions, we indicate ways by which such definitions may be converted into manual or automatic recognition. In the case of manual recognition, the paradigm of annotation – as established and methodologically reflected in (computational) linguistics – will be useful, and a well-controlled annotation process will help to further clarify the terms in question. The primary goal, however, is to establish a recognition rule by which individuals may intersubjectively and reliably identify instances of the term in question in a given text. While it is true that in applying this method to literary studies, new challenges arise – such as the question of the validity and reliability of the annotations –, these challenges are at present being researched intensively in the field of computational literary studies, which has resulted in a large and growing body of research to draw on. In terms of computer-aided recognition, we examine, by way of example, two distinct approaches: 1) The kind of operationalization which is guided by precedent definitions and annotation rules benefits from the fact that each of its steps is transparent, may be validated and interpreted, and that existing tools from computational linguistics can be integrated into the process. In the scenario used here, these would be tools for recognizing and assigning character speech, for the resolution of coreference and the assessment of events; all of these, in turn, may be based on either machine learning, prescribed rules or dictionaries. 2) In recent years, so-called end-to-end systems have become popular which, with the help of neural networks, »infer« target terms directly from a numerical representation of the data. These systems achieve superior results in many areas. However, their lack of transparency also raises new questions, especially with regard to the interpretation of results. Finally, we discuss options for quality assurance and draw a first conclusion. Since numerous decisions have to be made in the course of operationalization, and these, in practice, are often pragmatically justified, the question quickly arises as to how »good« a given operationalization actually is. And since the tools borrowed from computational linguistics (especially the so-called inter-annotator agreement) can only partially be transferred to computational literary studies and, moreover, objective standards for the quality of a given implementation will be difficult to find, it ultimately falls to the community of researchers and scholars to decide, based on their research standards, which operationalizations they accept. At the same time, operationalization is the central link between the computer sciences and literary studies, as well as being a necessary component for a large part of the research done in computational literary studies. The advantage of a conscious, deliberate and reflective operationalization practice lies not only in the fact that it can be used to achieve reliable quantitative results (or that a certain lack of reliability at least is a known factor); it also lies in its facilitation of interdisciplinary cooperation: in the course of operationalization, concrete sets of data are discussed, as are the methods for analysing them, which taken together minimizes the risk of misunderstandings, »false friends« and of an unproductive exchange more generally.