Ernesto Grassts rhetorical theory proves helpful in illuminating William Faulkner's conception of humanity's dependence upon language. For both Grassi and Faulkner, language—the fundamental human art—serves metonymically, pointing toward humanity's need for other forms of artifice. Through the use of artificial means, the species is able not merely to survive, but to flourish, to prevail Characters in Faulkner's novels, such as Quentin Compson and Darl Bundren, who seek to transcend human verbalityI conventionality manifest forms of psychic disintegration. Like Faulkner, Grassi considers the attempt to escape artiflce as an act of insanity. Contrariwise, Grassi uses the term folly to refer to the willing recognition of the need to accept theforms of human artifice that allow the species to thrive.

This paper examines Walter Benjamin's argument that the matter—the materials —of materialist historiography are the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Just as Benjamin saw in child's play and children's playthings a potential 'playing out' and 'recollecting' of that which has been dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavor as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through progressivist, universalist history—revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed messianic history The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary custodian and the 'New Janitocracy'.

In 1971, Picasso pulled sixty-six out of 347etchings first executed in 1968 for an edition of Spanish writer Rojas's Celestina. While the complete group of prints, known as the Suite 347, has been discussed in the context of Picasso's late work, few have considered how the location of the sixty-six prints in Rojas's text affects their reading. Understanding where Picasso actually inserted the prints into the text sheds light on the play between narrative and image that Picasso intended when binding his etchings with the Rojas story. Considering the prints as part of a book provides a more complete context for understanding the imagery revealing them to be depictions done to rival Rojas's own narrative strategies.

This paper examines three novels over a two and a half century period—Tom Jones, Great Expectations, and I Am Charlotte Simmons—from the time when the Bildungsroman was just being explored to the present when some are arguing that the form is dead. We shall argue rather that the genre necessarily changes as concomitant ideas change, in particular, the evolving ideas of what an adolescent is and what freedom and maturity mean. Furthermore, we shall claim that the Bildungsroman genre presents us with a tension in the modern (and postmodern) world that may be intractable.

Batailles hook Lascaux has not received much scholarly attention. This essay attempts to fill in a gap in the literature by explicating Bataille's scholarship on Lascaux to his body of writing as a whole—an exercise that, arguably, demonstrates the significance of the book and, consequently, the shortsightedness of its neglect by critics who have not traditionally grasped the relevance of the text for illuminating Bataille's theory of art and transgression

In this paper we explore the complex relationship between the philosophies of Sir William Hamilton and Henri Bergson. We then place these philosophies in a critical relation to French phenomenological philosophy, particularly, Merleau-Ponty's. By so doing we examine a historical and theoretical 'ark' that rises in 19th Century Scotland and falls in 20th Century France, an ark that has received little attention hitherto by historians of philosophy. Our aim is to open up a new dimension of these philosophies and provoke a fresh debate over their relationships and the philosophical tensions that exist between them.

In contemporary art, the term "relational aesthetics" emerged a decade ago as a label for emerging art practices that defied conventional categories. Coined by critic Nicholas Bourriaud, the term describes projects by artists such as Pierre Huyghe, which involve examinations and representations of social systems and contexts, and in which audience participation is a critical component The roots of this approach can be traced to the Minimalism of the 1960s and the phenomenological basis of sculpture by Robert Morris and Richard Serra, which opened up possibilities for later artists to construct more extended situations involving memory, time, experience, and the contingency of context. This paper proposes to examine artfrom the 1960s to the present and trace the developing theory and primacy of audience situations in contemporary art.

This essay interprets the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch with the help of phenomenological examinations by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Heidegger. Pina Bauschs choreography not only shares basic themes like the everyday, the body, and moods with phenomenology, but they also yield similar results in overcoming traditional dualist frameworks. Rather than being an instrument for expressing ideas, the body is in constant exchange with the natural elements, exhibiting vulnerability and passivity. Moods, in turn, are neither subjective nor objective; this also holds for longing, an essential constituent of Pina Bausch's work. Dance theater and phenomenology, each in their unique ways, are capable of acknowledging and accommodating the ambiguity of our human existence.

Scholars have traditionally taken the Marquis de Sade to he a straightforward advocate of immoral hedonism. Without rejecting outright this view, I argue that Sade also presents a theory of the psychology of pleasure, placing him amongst the more insightful psychological thinkers of the late 18th century. This paper outlines Sades description of the immoral will, in particular his account of how an agent can come to enjoy the humiliation, torture and murder of others. I argue for thefollowing claims: firstly, that Sade, perhaps despite himself, suggests that the sadistic will is pathological; secondly, that Sade's work gives a far less flattering view of the sadistic will than is commonly supposed.