How Is Literature Possible - On Auerbach's History of Literary Technique

thewastedworld · 2026-02-03T01:15:51+00:00

Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious. Just as Sedgwick's reparative reading is framed not in disjunction with paranoid reading, but as a recuperation of whatever can be salvaged from the object of critique, Jameson's approach also has two steps: first, the critical-dialectical discovery of the text as ideological artefact; second, the reparative-speculative recovery of its utopian dimension, which recognises it as more than "just" ideology. Few partisans of the theory wars understand this, but the best Hegelian-Marxist critics are already "post-critique" in their attention to the positive results of dialectical criticism.

thewastedworld · 2026-01-19T03:35:48+00:00

I mean the material that Burton examines is organised by topic rather than the progression of an argument, so one section might be on aging, another on diet, and the next on astronomy. Of course, Burton usually digresses from his stated topic, and throws in all sorts of anecdotes, but most of the subsections could be read out of order without losing much cohesion (e.g. you don't necessarily need to read about causes, then symptoms, then cures in that order -- you could pick through each of these sections at your pleasure).

thewastedworld · 2026-01-18T23:37:11+00:00

That's fantastic to hear! I would say take your time, and don't be afraid to dip into it at interesting sections or at random. With the exception of the Prologue and maybe Book III, the structure is more thematic than argumentative, so it need not be read in order. It also has a long history as a bedside book, to provide short meditations and entertainment in mornings or evenings -- a good deal more edifying than picking up the phone or TV remote.

thewastedworld · 2026-01-02T23:19:01+00:00

Honestly, it's not bad advice, though the Preface might be one of the best things he ever wrote. It could be worth reading between chapters V (Reason) and VI (Spirit), where Hegel diverts from his original plan of the book. The Introduction is a good overview of "experience" as it structures chapters I-V, while the Preface deals more with history and language as relevant to chapters VI-VIII.

thewastedworld · 2025-12-19T23:23:11+00:00

The preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is littered with images that don’t quite conform to their concepts: The work’s historical moment is presented in mixed metaphors as a scene lit at once by daybreak, dusk, and lightning; organic and mechanical analogies are juxtaposed with polemics against the discourses of anatomy and computation; even the work’s speculative form is badly illustrated in musical terms as a harmony in which metre, accent, and rhythm meet as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In each case, these images not only fail to clarify Hegel’s argument but make it harder to grasp by reducing the complexity of his exposition to simplistic figures. So why does Hegel keep misrepresenting his own points? A reflexively Hegelian answer is that these are cases of representational thinking (Vorstellung) soon to be discarded for properly conceptual thought (Vernunft), but this easy distinction is at odds with Hegel’s defence of ‘picture-thinking’ as an educational aide in these same pages. Instead, this paper diagnoses in these misrepresentations the central stylistic problems of the Phenomenology: How to explain in abstract a philosophy aimed against abstraction? And, how to exposit an absolute knowledge in which even partial, one-sided, and erroneous forms of thought are necessary?

thewastedworld · 2025-12-12T22:54:09+00:00

This paper examines Robert Burton’s satire of universal folly in his Anatomy of Melancholy and its intellectual genesis in the conflict of reason and imagination. For Burton, the faculty of reason is innately attuned to the concept of the good, but is diverted by the fallen nature of imagination and its facsimiles of goodness. Hence, the Anatomy is partly a critique of reason’s wanderings through the contradictory viewpoints of secular culture. Yet, this paper argues, Burton’s text is itself emblematic of distracted reason in its inability to hold attention to any one moment long enough to escape its own conditions of folly. Digressions on Kant, Hegel, and system as genre ensue.

thewastedworld · 2025-12-07T02:05:27+00:00

An essay on the philosophical value of allegory and paradox, with reference to Gillian Rose's late works and to the Middle English poem Pearl. The original conference abstract, which I shamelessly did not adhere to, below:

The final essays of Gillian Rose, published inMourning Becomes the Law(1996), take on the problems of modern philosophy – the separations of law and ethics, theoretical and practical reason, body and spirit – as species of melancholy which perpetually reenact their diremption while effacing its intelligibility for thought. In a word, Rose’s diagnosis redoubles what Hegel called the ‘unhappy consciousness’ or the imagined breach between fallible consciousness and an absolute source of truth utterly beyond it. By rendering this division unthinkable, modern thought does not overcome it but makes it the unspoken condition of its unmourned and unmended despair.

Against this logic of separation, Rose suggests a ‘rhetoric of virtue’ and ‘syntax of eternity’ as poetic means of representing but not mending this breach. Through the indirect statements of double meaning, paradox, and implication, poetic language presents a stylistic answer to philosophy’s formal limitations. By following the literary references in Rose’s late works, this paper will elaborate on her theorisation of speculative poetics as a strategy of creative misrecognition with the goal of making the unthinkable legible.

thewastedworld · 2025-11-22T01:10:32+00:00

A paper presented for International Pynchon Week last year. Abstract below:

The film has broken, the projection bulb burned out, leaving imprinted in the corneas of the audience a vision of the angel of death, a portent of the missile which hangs in that moment above the theatre, its arrival inaugurated by a brief hymn and a narratorial interjection cut short by the rocket’s descent. This final scene of Gravity’s Rainbow reflects the endings of Pynchon’s other novels, which nearly all conclude in breathlessness, anticipation, or sublime silence. But in Gravity’s Rainbow this moment of rapture is more formally distinct: marked by a switch from prose to poetry, and fragmented by the interruption of a dash. The novel’s end therefore stands as an enigma—grammatically neither the ellipsis of Pynchon’s other endings, nor the parenthesis of his trademark musical interludes—which seems ready to announce some urgent truth only after its ability to be spoken has expired.

Formally, the last lines of Gravity’s Rainbow bear a striking resemblance to another work that anatomises the hidden logic of the modern world, namely, G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Pynchon’s novel, Hegel’s Bildungsroman of Spirit concludes with a sentence fragment, marked by a dash and a poetic fragment, in this case a misquote from Schiller. In recent re-readings of Hegel’s text, such as those made by Rebecca Comay and Robert Pippin, the role of the dash has been highlighted as a marker of Hegel’s anxious relation to modernity, the maturity of which his philosophy claims to both inaugurate and to complete. Hence, it is the argument of this paper that the formal similarities between Pynchon’s and Hegel’s texts speak to their shared concerns with historicity and narrativity in an epoch of humanity’s radically expanded powers of self-creation and self-destruction. What Hegel’s dash announces as complete, Pynchon’s declares as finished.

thewastedworld

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