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This article relates Swift’s critique of science to his view of women by resorting to Lakoff and Johnson’s theory on the function of metaphors in human conceptualization. Through the overarching conceptual metaphor NATURE IS A WOMAN, the gap between these two areas in Swift studies, which have remained largely isolated so far, is bridged. The analysis shows that Swift’s strange aesthetic view of and peculiar attitude toward women were, through the conceptual metaphor, extrapolated to nature, which can explain his condemnation of science as not only “unaesthetic” and “indecent” but also futile and morbid.

October 2019: HE Xiyao received his PhD from Hong Kong Baptist University and is currently a lecturer at the School of English Studies, Zhejiang International Studies University. His research interests include 18th-century English Literature, Chinese myths and legends, and Pre-1949 Chinese Maritime Customs. He has recently published an article on the criticisms embedded in Chinese myths and legends, and is now working on the collation and translation of historical files from Pre-1949 Maritime Customs in Zhejiang Province, China.

Volume 17, issue 1 Literature and Historiography
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This article examines the manner in which Edward Gibbon attempted to mould his public image for posterity, while writing and rewriting the various versions of his autobiography. It highlights Gibbon’s attempts to anticipate the critical reading of his memoirs and fashion his public image, not least regarding his attitude toward religion. It also discusses, in this context, his views on the proper manner of writing history, and how they developed throughout his intellectual career, specifically in relation to his great historical work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This assessment of Gibbon is then used to criticize the “historicist” critique of Enlightenment historiography, which has blamed Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians for being improperly subjective in discussing past eras. In contrast with this view, the modernity of Enlightenment historiography is emphasized.

 

February 2019: Nathaniel Wolloch is an Israeli independent scholar. He is an intellectual historian of the long 18th century, and the author of numerous articles and three books, Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (2006); History and Nature in the Enlightenment: Praise of the Mastery of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Historical Literature (2011); and Nature in the History of Economic Thought: How Natural Resources Became an Economic Concept (2017).

 

Pamela Brown. 6/8/2003. “Levinas In &Quot;Ithaca&Quot;: Answering The Joycean Worldstage”. Partial Answers, 1, 2, Pp. 61-86. doi:10.1353/pan.0.0051. Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 2 Literature and Philosophy Literature and the Ideas of Space
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This essay contends that in his effort to develop a poetics, Joyce intuits in his writings Levinas’s ethical swerve from Heidegger. By making the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses “dramatic” according to his own terms, Joyce presents a relation that exists prior to, or sets the stage for, the ordinary representational plane of the novel. Although the limits of language necessitate a spatial show, Joyce makes the show “dumb,” altering the relation between knowledge and responsiveness by taking deferral, the usual condition for knowledge, out of the equation. Joyce’s effort is towards the creation of a certain messianic time, or time without space, and his presentation of a non-appearing, non-reciprocal relation delineates the passion, or responsiveness independent of the need for knowledge, by which the chapter moves. By effectively staging responsibility as an infinite desire for the other as such, Joyce begins in “Ithaca,” as in Levinas, are the sound without echo and the journey without return.