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What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning?
"This book explores the word meaning as it is used in such expressions as "the meaning of life," "the search for meaning," "ultimate meaning." In many of the "metaphysical" contexts where we find the word meaning, it appears to mean "purpose," "value," "goal," "direction," and even "God." The book answers the following questions: How did the English word meaning come to carry these various sub-senses, given that its original sense has to do with signifying? When did the notion of a "meaning of life" arise in English and other languages? How does the English word meaning, which is a verbal noun, differ in these usages from the roughly equivalent words in other European languages? How did the ...
Dostoevsky’s Religion
Any reader of Dostoevsky is immediately struck by the importance of religion within the world of his fiction. That said, it is very difficult to locate a coherent set of religious beliefs within Dostoevsky’s works, and to argue that the writer embraced these beliefs. This book provides a trenchant reassessment of his religion by showing how Dostoevsky used his writings as the vehicle for an intense probing of the nature of Christianity, of the individual meaning of belief and doubt, and of the problems of ethical behavior that arise from these questions. The author argues that religion represented for Dostoevsky a welter of conflicting views and stances, from philosophical idealism to nationalist messianism. The strength of this study lies in its recognition of the absence of a single religious prescription in Dostoevsky's works, as well as in its success in tracing the background of the ideas animating Dostoevsky’s religious probing.
Flight from Eden
Steven Cassedy takes aim at two of the most enduring myths of modern criticism: that it is secular, and that it is new and autonomous. He argues that though modern criticism is often forbiddingly scientific and technical, the modern critic remains something of a mystic. Every school of modern criticism—from structuralism to postmodern criticism—rests on a faith in an "Eden," an irreducible essence, a myth, like the common myth that there is an intrinsic distinction between "poetic" language and "ordinary" language. The modern critic attempts to abandon all mystical faith; this is the "flight from Eden." But it is always in vain. It is traditionally assumed that modern literary criticism ...
Connected
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Americans underwent a dramatic transformation in self-conception: having formerly lived as individuals or members of small communities, they now found themselves living in networks, which arose out of scientific and technological innovations. There were transportation and communication networks. There was the network of the globalized marketplace, which brought into the American home exotic goods previously affordable to only a few. There was the network of standard time, which bound together all but the most rural Americans. There was the public health movement, which joined individuals to their fellow citizens by making everyone responsible for the health of everyone else. There were social networks that joined individuals to their fellows at the municipal, state, national, and global levels. Previous histories of this era focus on alienation and dislocation that new technologies caused. This book shows that American individuals in this era were more connected to their fellow citizens than ever—but by bonds that were distinctly modern.
To the Other Shore
To the Other Shore tells the story of a small but influential group of Jewish intellectuals who immigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire between 1881 and the early 1920s--the era of "mass immigration." This pioneer group of Jewish intellectuals, many of whom were raised in Orthodox homes, abandoned their Jewish identity, absorbed the radical political theories circulating in nineteenth-century Russia, and brought those theories with them to America. When they became leaders in the labor movement in the United States and wrote for the Yiddish, Russian, and English-language radical press, they generally retained the secularized Russian cultural identity they had adopted in their...
Selected Essays
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A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930
The great age of Russian philosophy spans the century between 1830 and 1930 - from the famous Slavophile-Westernizer controversy of the 1830s and 1840s, through the 'Silver Age' of Russian culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the formation of a Russian 'philosophical emigration' in the wake of the Russian Revolution. This volume is a major history and interpretation of Russian philosophy in this period. Eighteen chapters (plus a substantial introduction and afterword) discuss Russian philosophy's main figures, schools and controversies, while simultaneously pursuing a common central theme: the development of a distinctive Russian tradition of philosophical humanism focused on the defence of human dignity. As this volume shows, the century-long debate over the meaning and grounds of human dignity, freedom and the just society involved thinkers of all backgrounds and positions, transcending easy classification as 'religious' or 'secular'. The debate still resonates strongly today.
A Reader's Guide to Andrei Bely's "Petersburg"
Andrei Bely's 1913 masterwork Petersburg is widely regarded as the most important Russian novel of the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov ranked it with James Joyce's Ulysses, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Few artistic works created before the First World War encapsulate and articulate the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively. Bely expected his audience to participate in unraveling the work's many meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. In their essays, the contributors clarify these complexities, summarize the intellectual and artistic contexts that informed Petersburg's creation and reception, and review the interpretive possibilities contained in the novel. This volume will aid a broad audience of Anglophone readers in understanding and appreciating Petersburg.
Boris Eikhenbaum
This is the first book-length study of Boris Eikhenbaum (1886-1959), a leading Russian Formalist and a pathbreaking Tolstoy scholar. The author carefully traces Eikhenbaum's intellectual trajectory from his pre-Formalist "philosophical" criticism, through Formalism to his later biographical criticism of Tolstoy and Lermontov. Eikhenbaum's contribution to Formalism has not heretofore received clear definition, and the author shows that his ideas and influence were even greater than previously supposed. His shift away from Formalism, with its emphasis on purely literary analysis, toward a criticism that emphasized the writer as a cultural figure is seen as a response to both political exigency...
Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, Volume II
This publication in three volumes originated in papers delivered at two conferences held in May 1988 at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, DC. Like many other conferences organized that year in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union, they were convened to commemorate the millennium of the acceptance of Christianity in Rus'. This collection of essays throws light on the enormous, truly unique role that the Christian tradition has played throughout the centuries in shaping the nations that spring from Kievan Rus'—the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. Although these volumes devote greater attention to Rus...
