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With a foreword by John N. Maclean, son of Norman Maclean The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy provides the first critical reassessment of this celebrated author's work in more than a decade. In his study, Timothy P. Schilling focuses on Maclean's attempt, in A River Runs through It and Other Stories and Young Men and Fire, to come to grips with the tragic side of human existence. From the 1938 death of his brother Paul to the 1949 deaths of thirteen firefighters in Montana's Mann Gulch wildfire, Maclean is driven by a desire to discover ultimate meaning—the truth—in the face of haunting tragedy. Through careful analysis of all of Maclean's published works, Schilling highlights the audaciousness of Maclean's quest to wrest free an answer from “the universe.” Ever open to scientific, literary, philosophical, and theological ways of viewing reality, Maclean found ambiguity, paradoxically, to be an essential tool for probing the truth. Beyond exploring Maclean's use of this tool, Schilling breaks new ground by considering Maclean's invocation of the Transcendentals in “A River Runs through It,” noting the sly homage Maclean pays to Izaak Walton, examining Maclean's often-neglected “Other Stories,” assessing Robert Redford's film adaptation of “A River Runs through It,” and providing the most thorough exploration of Young Men and Fire yet available. With this book, Schilling offers a current and complete analysis of Maclean—one of the most iconic figures in Western American literature.

Love, Subjectivity, and Truth engages in a lively manner with the overlapping areas of philosophy and literature, philosophy of emotions, and existential thought. “Subjective truth,” a phrase used in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, is rich with existential connotations. It invokes Kierkegaard above all, but significantly Nietzsche as well, and other philosophers who thematize love, subjectivity, and truth. In Search of Lost Time is especially concerned about what we can know about others through love. Insofar as it conveys and analyzes experience, the novel is capable not only of exploring existential issues but also of doing something like phenomenology. What we know is shaped by our way of knowing, just as the properties of visible, colored objects are determined by the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. Nowhere does the subjective basis of our awareness appear so evident as it does when we view things through loving eyes. In Proust's novel we find skeptical views about love expressed again and again. However, we also note countercurrents, in which love is shown to provide a unique sort of insight. At those times, love seems to be a prerequisite of veridical apprehension. Love, Subjectivity, and Truth investigates this tension as it is played out in Proust's fiction.

Die Kritik des Wahrheitsanspruchs zwischen Geschichte an sich (Ranke: „wie es eigentlich gewesen“) und Darstellung der Geschichte ist ein auch politisch umstrittenes Erbe der Aufklärung. Eine Geschichte dieser Kritik reicht vom Perspektivismus des 18. Jahrhunderts, der die subjektive Standortgebundenheit historischer Aussagen regelt, bis zum Positivismus des 19. Jahrhunderts, der für den Tatsachenglauben wissenschaftliche Objektivität beansprucht. An der Diskussion über das Verhältnis von Geschichte und Dichtung hatten die hier behandelten Autoren – Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Kleist, Heine, Grillparzer und Fontane – einen maßgeblichen Anteil. Vor dem Hintergrund zeitgenössischer Historiker wie Chladenius, Gatterer, Schlözer, Heinrich Luden, B. G. Niebuhr, Ranke, Gervinus, Droysen, Mommsen, Treitschke und Scherer sowie der Philosophen Kant, Nietzsche und Dilthey haben sie zur kritischen Problematisierung historischer Wahrheitsfindung einen vor allem literarischen Beitrag geleistet, z. B. Lessings Nathan der Weise, Goethes Faust, Novalis'Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Kleists Der zerbrochne Krug, Grillparzers Der arme Spielmann, Fontanes Vor dem Sturm. Allen gemeinsam ist die schließlich existentielle Verunsicherung durch die zentrale Frage der Aufklärung, wie sie Kleist formuliert hat: „ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur so scheint“.

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare's drama. The discourse of folly's wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims – a fool's truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the sole preserve of professional jesters and garrulous clowns, for it is also apparent on a thematic, conceptual, and formal level in virtually all of his plays. Examining canonical histories, comedies, and tragedies, this study is the first to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within European humanist thought, or to argue that Shakespeare's philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy, which itself reflects upon the folly of the wise. This strand runs from the philosopher-fool Socrates through to Montaigne and on to Nietzsche, but finds its most sustained expression in the Critical Theory of the mid to late twentieth-century, when the self-destructive potential latent in rationality became an historical reality. This book makes a substantial contribution to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy. It illustrates, moreover, how rediscovering the philosophical potential of folly may enable us to resist the growing dominance of instrumental thought in the cultural sphere.

A major question in studies of aesthetic expression is how we can understand and explain similarities and differences among different forms of representation. In the current volume, this question is addressed through the lens of make-believe theory, a philosophical theory broadly introduced by two seminal works – Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe and Gregory Currie's The Nature of Fiction, both published 1990. Since then, make-believe theory has become central in the philosphical discussion of representation. As a first of its kind, the current volume comprises 17 detailed studies of highly different forms of representation, such as novels, plays, TV-series, role games, computer games, lamentation poetry and memoirs. The collection contributes to establishing make-believe theory as a powerful theoretical tool for a wide array of studies traditionally falling under the humanities umbrella.

In this new collection of interviews, some of America's most prominent novelists identify the key intellectual developments that led to the rise of the contemporary biographical novel, discuss the kind of historical'truth'this novel communicates, indicate why this narrative form is superior to the traditional historical novel, and reflect on the ideas and characters central to their individual works. These interviews do more than just define an innovative genre of contemporary fiction. They provide a precise way of understanding the complicated relationship and pregnant tensions between contextualized thinking and historical representation, interdisciplinary studies and'truth'production, and fictional reality and factual constructions. By focusing on classical and contemporary debates regarding the nature of the historical novel, this volume charts the forces that gave birth to a new incarnation of this genre.

L'Orient et l'Occident ont toujours eu des rapports tendus et la mondialisation galopante n'a fait que les exacerber davantage. Mais il est difficile d'aborder de tels phénomènes totaux sans une approche globale qui permet de chercher la vérité des événements, des choses et des êtres pour dépasser les malentendus et les risques de confrontation. La trilogie de Yasmina Khadra, grâce aux moyens propres à la littérature, semble nous inviter à une telle investigation.

Erich Auerbach's seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was published more than sixty years ago and is deservedly considered a classic. The book brought into focus the fundamental difference that exists between the two basic approaches to the textual representation of reality in Western culture. These two “styles,” as Auerbach called them, were archetypically displayed in Homer's poems and in the Old Testament, respectively. Auerbach's differentiation is the starting point for Bandera's insightful work, which expands and develops on this theory in several key ways. One of the more significant differences between the two styles transcends and grounds all the others. It concerns the truth of each of the two archetypal texts, or rather, the attitude exhibited in those texts with regard to the truth of what they narrate. Auerbach, Bandera notes, is amazed at the Bible's “passionate” concern for the truth of what it says—a concern he found absent in Homer. Bandera finds that what the prophet Isaiah called “a refuge of lies” defines Homer's work. He draws on his own research and René Girard's theory of the sacred to develop an enhanced perspective of the relationship between these texts.

Ce livre reconstitue le rapport entre vérité et altérité au siècle des Lumières. Il s'agit ici de s'arrêter sur les mécanismes théoriques qui auraient cimenté à jamais l'altérité et la vérité. Avec des exemples tirés de la philosophie et de la théorie littéraire, l'auteur porte un regard sur les antinomies d'un siècle présumé d'avant-garde, des antinomies qui font de la fiction de ce siècle un chef-d'oeuvre esthétique d'une grande modernité.

She, This in Blak takes a fresh look at Chaucer's great Trojan romance, Troilus and Criseyde, in light of recent scholarship on late scholastic discourses on representation and causality as they pertain to human perception and judgment. This study also contributes to a growing literature on the impact of scholastic psychological theory upon contemporary cultural forms by examining the way in which late medieval accounts of perception and cognition can illuminate the construction of the poem's subjects, including one of the most compelling and controversial figures in medieval literature, Chaucer's Criseyde. By examining Chaucer's depiction of Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde within this contemporary cultural context, She, This in Blak offers a better grounded and more historically illuminating view of the poem than is provided by psychological readings based on modern constructions of intentionality.