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22038 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 285 of 1102

  • 8 - Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis

  • Edited by Michael N. Forster, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Kristin Gjesdal, Temple University, Philadelphia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics
    Published online:
    27 December 2018
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019, pp 184-210

  • Summary

    This chapter is concerned with the attempts of philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists to determine the correct relation of Freud’s ideas to hermeneutics. My primary aim is to make clear, on the one hand, the reasons for supposing that psychoanalysis is fundamentally consonant with, and has the capacity to enrich, the broad hermeneutical standpoint, and on the other, the difficulties which this project encounters. The second section presents accordingly two classic statements, in Sartre and Wittgenstein, of the irreconcilability of Freud with hermeneutical assumptions. In the third section I sketch the major, large-scale attempts of Habermas and Ricœur to integrate Freudian thinking with hermeneutics, and give some indication of their respective strengths and weaknesses. In the final section I address directly the question of how in the most general terms Freud conceives meaning, and argue, with reference to two major texts of Freud’s, in which we find him in dialogue with Brentano, that his ultimate commitments are to a type of realism regarding the mental which is at variance with the hermeneutical standpoint, as it has come to be understood.

The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics
  • Edited by Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal
  • Published online:
    27 December 2018
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019
  • Hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, is an essential and valuable branch of philosophy. Hermeneutics is also a central component of the methodology of the social sciences and the humanities, for example historiography, anthropology, art history, and literary criticism. In a sequence of accessible chapters, contributors across the human sciences explain the leading concepts and ideas of hermeneutics, the historical development of the field, the importance of hermeneutics in philosophy today, and the ways in which it can address contemporary concerns including intercultural relations, relations between subcultures within a single society, and relations across race and gender. Clearly structured and written in non-technical language, this Companion will be an important contribution to a growing field of study.

  • 7 - Allegories of the Corpus

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 110-126

  • Summary

    This chapter assesses the role of allegory in the Commedia. Medieval discourses about allegory (“other-speak”; alieniloquium) pertained to the communication and interpretation of meaning. The chapter explores how Dante reflected on allegory by using the human body as an image for the text (in Latin corpus meant both body and text). Medieval writers often depicted metaliterary ideas by reference to bodies because God had revealed Christ, his Word, in a body. In employing the body as a textual symbol, Dante reflected on the signifying properties of the Commedia in relation to how God signified in the Bible and creation. He also likened the allegorical properties of the Commedia to divine modes of signification to promote the dignity of literature, which could be perceived as untruthful in comparison to historical or philosophical writing. Moreover, Dante drew on the metaliterary resonances of the body to address how readers should engage with the poem, a text that endeavored to depict all facets of creation. Given this relation between poem and cosmos, Dante’s reflection on allegory centrally concerned how readers should interpret reality. Therefore, an understanding of the allegories of the corpus in the Commedia is essential for appreciating its salvific aims.

  • 8 - Classical Culture

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 127-139

  • Summary

    Composed by a bilingual Latin-vernacular writer, targeting an audience that did not exclude literates, and featuring a wide array of notions, texts, and characters recognizably imported from the ancient world, Dante’s Comedy entered in a close dialogue with classical texts. The rich and complex relation established with the classical past, as it was mediated in Latin works of literature, history, philosophy, and science included moments of substantial continuity with classical antecedents, but pointed signals that an essential intellectual, cultural or poetic divergence existed between the pre-Christian worldview embedded in classical culture and a new, more complete and truer vision of life. As a central character in the plot and cultural point of reference for Dante’s classicizing poem, the character of Virgil and his works are often the catalyst (and the object) of alternate literary coopting and cultural antagonizing, a role that they had already played in Augustine’s works. The cultural negotiation of textual transmission and ethical translation taking place in Dante’s dialectical preservation of the past contributes to making of the Comedy a central, if idiosyncratic, text in the Christian-Humanistic canon.

  • 9 - Vernacular Literature and Culture

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 140-157

  • Summary

    ABSTRACT: This chapter explores how Dante's Commedia negotiates its relationship to medieval vernacular literature and culture. While lyric poetry is the most prominent and visible strand of this culture in the poem's narrative, where several Italian and Occitan poets feature as characters, the chapter argues that a number of other vernacular traditions play similarly important roles. There are six main areas of focus. Firstly, the chapter uses the example of Inferno I-II to highlight the immediate presence of vernacular intertexts in the poem, alongside more well-known biblical and classical sources. Secondly, it uses Inferno V to draw attention to Dante's highly ambivalent treatment of medieval erotic literature, and the Commedia's ongoing participation in poetic debates surrounding love. Thirdly, it examines the legacy of Dante's fellow Florentine, Guido Cavalcanti, whose philosophically inflected love poetry has a crucial if subterranean presence in the poem. Fourthly, the chapter assesses the impact of early Italian prose culture on the Commedia, with a particular focus on Brunetto Latini and his mediation of both French and classical cultural traditions. Next, it analyses the key role of poetic encounters in the Commedia's narrative, which are central to Dante's strategies of self-definition and self-authorization. And finally, the chapter highlights the eclecticism of the Commedia's approach to vernacular culture, and its incorporation and synthesis of a host of different traditions.

  • 5 - Title, Genre, Metaliterary Aspects

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 79-94

  • Summary

    Dante studies have dedicated great energy since the 1970s to investigating the metaliterary aspects of many of the Commedia’s main features, which include the poem’s title and genre, the terza rima verse form, and, in general, the self-conscious means by which Dante asserted, by virtue of the poem’s transcendent subject-matter and its divinely inspired artistry, the supreme authority of ‘my comedy’ vis-à-vis the previous literary tradition. Yet, while striving in the Commedia to provide access to a truth that transcended language and literature, Dante continually recognized not only the limitations of the preceding literary tradition, but also the inevitable failure of his own prodigious attempt to represent that truth. Dante's awareness of the intrinsic limits of human language was such that we find him inviting a metaliterary reflection on the ‘comic’ literariness of his enterprise throughout the poem, for instance, at the very moment when he first announced the poem’s title, Comedìa, midway through the first canticle. A hitherto little understood metaliterary feature of the Commedia is constituted by the poem’s geo-topographical similes, which play a fundamental role in the highly self-conscious poetic construction of the Comedìa's other world while pointing to the ultimately insuperable incongruity between language and truth.

  • 11 - Doctrine

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 173-191

  • Summary

    This chapter examines how, in the Commedia, Dante presents knowledge of all kinds, about God, the universe, and humankind, as well as about the place of humans in relation to one another, love, the cosmic order, and the divine. Its primary aim is to illustrate how Dante brings these and related concerns into the narrative, language, themes, and ultimate messages of the poem.

  • 1 - Narrative Structure

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 4-27
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  • Summary

    This chapter describes and discusses the narrative structure of the poem showing how crucial it is in the generation of its poetry. Dante’s journey through the other world is twofold. There is the physical, psychological and moral journey accomplished by Dante the character, and the metaphorical journey in which Dante the narrator recounts his experience and the challenges associated with the sharing of it. The former is divided into topographical spaces (Hell, Purgatory, Paradise) which are in their turn subdivided into smaller sites (circles and sub-circles in Hell, terraces in Purgatory, heavens in Paradise) and the latter into books (the three canticles), which are in their turn subdivided into chapters (the hundred cantos), and these into stanzas (tercets). Dante’s autobiographical, multifaceted identity (pilgrim, exile, prophet, character, narrator, author) gives the poem its unity, intensity and coherence. The chapter studies the way in which the poet integrates the narrative and textual journeys, how episodes and themes are apportioned their spaces, and how all characters, including Dante, interact with each other and with the reader to elicit reactions that vary according to the poet’s narrative strategy and moral purpose.

  • 10 - Religious Culture

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 158-172

  • Summary

    To comprehend Dante’s attitude towards religion in the Comedy this chapter seeks to answer questions such as: how is devotion portrayed in the Comedy? Is prayer a theme in the poem? Is sacrifice part of Dante’s understanding of worship and the religious life? By analysing a variety of issues, ranging from the use of the bible, the rewording of liturgy and the understanding of devotional practices in the poem, the author argues that Dante’s devotional zeal paralleled that of many members of late-medieval lay communities. At the same time, he also believed that the religious experience and practice of the laity needed to be augmented as a result of better competence in fields which normally were the preserve of learned clerics, most notably theology and biblical exegesis. Among his greatest challenges when composing the Comedy was to create a mirror of and a dialogue on contemporary religious culture that could engage clerics as well as ordinary believers, while at the same time presenting the poem as praise of and an act of sacrifice to God, thereby becoming part of Christian worship, and hence an apt means through which its readers could achieve salvation.

Page 285 of 1102