Rezensionen 144 texten zu fokussieren. Und sicherlich mag man bedauern, dass Fludernik die Erzähltheorie fast ausschließlich für die Analyse fiktionaler Erzähltexte heranzieht und das Drama, aber vor allem die Lyrik nahezu unhinterfragt als nicht-narrative Gattungen ausschließt. Gerade transgenerisch und transmedial ausgerichtete Forschungsbeiträge haben der Erzähltheorie jüngst wichtige Impulse verliehen und dürften durch ihr interdisziplinäres Anwendungspotential maßgeblich zur Renaissance dieses schon totgesagten Forschungsansatzes beigetragen haben. Aber Fluderniks Monographie will vor allem als Einführung verstanden und gelesen werden, und als solche stellt sie zweifelsohne einen ebenso gelungenen wie wichtigen Beitrag dar. Der Band kann angehenden Literaturwissenschaftlern, die einen Einstieg in die Narratologie suchen, daher nur wärmstens empfohlen werden. Birgit Neumann Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Gießen Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Ulf Schulenberg One of the most scandalous claims of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry was certainly that it would be possible to imagine a world not shaped by the thought of philosophers such as Locke, Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau, but that it was impossible to imagine what the moral condition of the world would have been without the work of poets such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton. Richard Rorty’s texts always sought to underscore that in order to understand a culture, and to imagine the possibility of changing it, it is important to ask who its heroes are: the priests, the philosophers, the scientists, or the poets. Rorty, who died in June 2007, at least since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) had felt closer to the poets, those innovative, creative, and imaginative redescribers who, as anti-Platonists and antifoundationalists, introduce new vocabularies and new and stimulating sets of metaphors. For Americanists and English Studies scholars it is crucial to see that Rorty always tried to present literary scholars and literary critics in a positive light because they contribute to what he termed a literary or poeticized culture. As a selfproclaimed neo-sophist, neo-Hegelian, nominalist, and leftist intellectual, Rorty fought on numerous fronts - against Platonists, realists, rationalists, positivists, Kantian moral philosophers, (some) analytic philosophers, and in general against those unreconstructed metaphysicians who look for the solidity, reliability, and purity of what is more than another human invention. In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, the final volume of his Philosophical Papers, Rorty once more makes it unequivocally clear that he sees philosophy not as an autonomous and esoteric discipline, but that he wants it to play an important role as AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 145 far as cultural change and the development, or invention, of new social practices are concerned. This above all signifies that philosophy ought to contribute to the establishment of new vocabularies which are then used in moral and political deliberation. Suggesting new ways of speaking, imaginative new sets of metaphors, to Rorty is a means of intervening in cultural politics. In the preface to his final collection of papers an idea can be found which was already central to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, namely, that of philosophy being a part of the conversation of mankind. In his new book, Rorty maintains: “Philosophers should choose sides in those debates with an eye to the possibility of changing the course of the conversation. They should ask themselves whether taking one side rather than another will make any difference to social hopes, programs of action, prophecies of a better future” (x). It is important to grasp that the Rortyan idea of philosophy as cultural politics means that he wants philosophy to become useful and relevant to the problems of men in a Deweyan sense. He writes. “The more philosophy interacts with other human activities - not just natural science, but art, literature, religion and politics as well - the more relevant to cultural politics it becomes, and thus the more useful. The more it strives for autonomy, the less attention it deserves” (x). In one of the essays, which discusses the main differences between analytic philosophy and what he calls conversational philosophy, Rorty contends that he does not think it necessary to put philosophy on the secure path of a science and that he is thus “content to see philosophers as practicing cultural politics” (124). They do this “by suggesting changes in the uses of words and by putting new words in circulation - hoping thereby to break through impasses and to make conversation more fruitful” (124). In many of the papers collected in Philosophy as Cultural Politics it becomes obvious that Rorty’s antirepresentationalism is not only an epistemological position, but that it also ought to be considered a political gesture. Rorty’s antirepresentationalism, antirealism, and antifoundationalism only do the dirty work necessary for the act of calling attention to the possibility of new vocabularies, new ways of speaking which will eventually lead to cultural change and progress: “The point of philosophy, on this view, is not to find out what anything is ‘really’ like, but to help us grow up - to make us happier, freer, and more flexible. The maturation of our concepts, and the increasing richness of our conceptual repertoire, constitute cultural progress” (124). Philosophy as Cultural Politics is divided into three parts. Part I is called “Religion and Morality from a Pragmatist Point of View”. It contains the following papers: “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God”, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism”, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty”, and “Honest Mistakes”. The second part of Rorty’s book, which is the most important for literary scholars, is entitled “Philosophy’s Place in Culture”. Four essays belong to this part: “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude”, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre”, “Pragmatism and Romanticism”, and “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy”. The third and final part is called “Current Issues within Analytic Philosophy”. It contains the following papers: “A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy”, “Naturalism and Quietism”, “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn”, “Holism and Historicism”, and “Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation in Moral Philosophy”. Most of these thirteen papers were written between 1996 and 2006, and three of them have not been published before: “Pragmatism and Romanticism”, “Naturalism and Quietism”, and “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn.” Rezensionen 146 1 In this context, see “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance” and “Religion as Conversation-stopper” in Rorty’s (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. New York and London: Penguin, as well as Rorty and Gianni Vattimo (2005). The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia UP. 2 Morris Dickstein (ed.) (1998). The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham: Duke UP. One of the consequences of the much-debated renaissance of pragmatism is a renewed interest in the relation between pragmatism and religion. Rorty, together with other pragmatists like Cornel West and Giles Gunn, for instance, has played an important role in this context 1 . Does a pragmatist understanding of religion necessarily have to go back to William James? Or should it rather offer a new interpretation of Dewey’s A Common Faith (which is one of his weakest texts)? Arguing for the contemporary significance of Mill’s version of liberalism as developed in On Liberty, Rorty consigns religion to the private sphere. In other words, his contention is that the increasing privatization of religion during the last 200 years has been a good thing and that one ought to be highly critical of organized religion (e.g., churches). Rorty calls this position anticlericalism. Furthermore, he advances the argument “that we should substitute the question of the cultural desirability of God-talk for the ontological question about the existence of God” (24-5). In “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” originally the first essay in the important volume The Revival of Pragmatism, Rorty illustrates his idiosyncratic use of the term polytheism 2 . On his account, [y]ou are a polytheist if you think that there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs. [. . .] To be a polytheist in this sense you do not have to believe that there are non-human persons with power to intervene in human affairs. All you need do is abandon the idea that we should try to find a way of making everything hang together, which will tell all human beings what to do with their lives, and tell all of them the same thing. (30) Whether one speaks of polytheism, antifoundationalism, poetic pragmatism, or romantic utilitarianism, it becomes obvious in this piece that Rorty uses his discussion of religion to once more draw attention to his idea of a postmetaphysical and postepistemological, democratic liberal culture in which problems of men are (creatively) solved by men and in which human happiness is all that matters. A clear distinction between projects of individual self-creation, self-renewal, or self-development, on the one hand, and projects of social cooperation or experimentalist tinkering, on the other, would be of utmost importance for such a culture. Rorty’s notorious privatepublic split has of course been the topic of countless discussions. Following Rorty, the substitution of poetry for religion as a source of ideals began with the Romantics. Concerning the Rortyan pragmatist framework, the importance of Romanticism and its understanding of the task the Shelleyan ‘unacknowledged legislators’ have to fulfill cannot be overestimated. As regards the priority of imagination over reason, Rorty avers that [a]t the heart of both philosophy’s ancient quarrel with poetry and the more recent quarrel between the scientific and the literary cultures is the fear of both philosophers and scientists that the imagination may indeed go all the Rezensionen 147 way down. This fear is entirely justified, for the imagination is the source of language, and thought is impossible without language. (106-7) Further below in the essay on “Pragmatism and Romanticism”, he formulates even more pointedly: “No imagination, no language. No linguistic change, no moral or intellectual progress. Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play” (115). Yet Rorty is much more than a postmodern Romantic. What makes his (anti-)theoretical endeavor truly stimulating is that he seeks to creatively bring together the Romantic anti-Platonism, in its Shelleyan, Emersonian, and Nietzschean versions, with the work of various twentieth-century analytic philosophers such as Sellars, Davidson, and Brandom. Especially Robert Brandom, an analytic philosopher strongly influenced by Hegelian historicism (a very rare combination), has come to play a crucial role in Rorty’s texts. It is in “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude” that Rorty most clearly warns against the danger of simply identifying pragmatism with Romanticism. It was the Romantic poets, together with strong poets like Hegel, Darwin, and Freud, who initiated the radical change that would eventually offer the possibility of imagining a postmetaphysical literary culture. However, Rorty maintains that “it is important to emphasize the difference between a pragmatist and the kind of Romantic who buys into the Platonic reason-passion distinction and then exalts passion at the expense of reason” (76). At the center of his critique is “the Romantic metaphor of descent to the very bottom of the human soul” (80). Rorty holds that this metaphor of descent inevitably has to be seen in connection with the Romantic ideas of depth, profundity, the infinite, and the ineffable. In other words, even Romanticism is still governed by the Platonist appearance-reality distinction, or by the poet’s desire to penetrate through appearance to the really real and thereby to discover the uttermost depths of the human soul. According to Rorty, what adds to pragmatism’s contemporary significance is that most Western intellectuals have become commonsensical finitists and materialists, people to whom the infinite and the ineffable have been losing their charm (with the possible exception of deconstructionists like de Man and Derrida, of course). The secularization of high culture, as Rorty argues, “has put us in the habit of thinking horizontally rather than vertically - figuring out how we might arrange for a slightly better future rather than looking up to an outermost framework or down into ineffable depths” (88). The idea of a post-Philosophical culture has preoccupied Rorty since his introduction to The Linguistic Turn (1967). It was central to many of the essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and it played a decisive role in the last chapter (“Philosophy without Mirrors”) of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In its most fully developed form the idea of a post-Philosophical culture as literary or poeticized culture is one of the primary aspects of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). It is interesting to see that in his description of his ideal poeticized culture most of the crucial elements of his neopragmatist thinking come together: his antifoundationalism and antiessentialism, Davidsonian and late-Wittgensteinian nominalism, Hegelian historicism, Darwinian naturalism, Nietzschean and Proustian perspectivism, as well as his Freudian conception of the human self. Rezensionen 148 In “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” Rorty states a thesis which he often repeated: “It is that the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature” (91). According to Rorty, we live in a (not fully realized) literary culture. The transition from a philosophical to a literary culture began with Hegel. It was with Hegel that philosophy reached its most ambitious and presumptuous form which almost instantly turned into its dialectical opposite, that is, the Hegelian system eventually turned out to be a kind of utterly unironical selfconsuming artifact. Hegel’s system was serious in its desire to depict things as they really were and it sought to fit everything into a single context. Rorty contends: “Since Hegel’s time, the intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy. This amounts to losing faith in the idea that redemption can come in the form of true beliefs” (92). In today’s literary culture (in the Rortyan sense), philosophy and religion have become marginal, they appear as only optional literary genres. This also means that the search for God was replaced by the striving for Truth, and that the latter has finally been replaced by the search for novelty and by the recognition that redemption can only be found in human creations and artifacts and not in the escape from the temporal to the eternal or transcendental. It seems that Rorty’s suggestion that (Western liberal) intellectuals should contribute to the establishment of a literary or poeticized culture is one of his most important legacies. It is a very pleasant side effect, as I have already pointed out above, that it makes professors of literature and literary critics, who are often regarded as rather wimpy, anemic, or otherworldly figures, look good. Throughout the final part of his book, which discusses some issues within analytic philosophy, Rorty underlines that philosophy has to redefine and rethink its purpose lest it will further degenerate into technical problem-solving and esoteric scholasticism. The first sentence of “Naturalism and Quietism,” for instance, reads as follows: “Philosophy is an almost invisible part of contemporary intellectual life” (147). Rorty’s idea of a conversational, historicist, or hermeneutic philosophy offers a solution to this problem. He proposes that philosophers, seeking to escape from Platonist and Kantian presumptions, should see themselves as storytellers, as people offering creative redescriptions and narratives about cultural evolution. Following Rorty, “[i]f we have a plausible narrative of how we became what we are, and why we use the words we do as we do, we have all we need in the way of self-understanding” (181). What is urgently needed is a new understanding of the history of philosophy in which it becomes clear that, contrary to the high expectations of Platonists, Kantians, and most analytic philosophers, “philosophers, like other intellectuals, make imaginative suggestions for a redescription of the human situation; they offer new ways of talking about our hopes and fears, our ambitions and our prospects. Philosophical progress is thus not a matter of problems being solved, but of descriptions being improved” (133). Rorty’s way of thinking might, of course, be seen as an unbearably frivolous and decadent philosophie informelle, governed by the nonchalant gestures of a languid Proustian aesthete. The fact that this kind of critique has been repeatedly advanced in the confrontation with Rorty’s texts does not make it less nonsensical. What most of these critics overlook is that the real ‘foundation’ of the radical antifoundationalist Rorty was a certain sadness, or rather, melancholy. A melancholy, and profound disappointment, of the young and aspiring philosopher because Platon- Rezensionen 149 3 See Rorty’s autobiographical piece (1999). “Trotzky and the Wild Orchids”. In: Philosophy and Social Hope. ism had not kept its promise 3 . Throughout his lifetime, this melancholy accompanied him and turned him into one of the most elegant and original philosophers of the twentieth century. Ulf Schulenberg Hochschule Vechta Institut für Anglistik und Germanistik Christoph Henry-Thommes, Recollection, Memory and Imagination: Selected Autobiographical Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, vol. 132). Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. Flutur Troshani Henry-Thommes argues that Nabokov’s version of life-writing is a “secularized” embodiment of St. Augustine’s theory of recollection, memory, and imagination. By revisiting Augustine’s interpretation of these concepts, he argues, Nabokov emphasizes not only their synthesis but also their potential to give symbolic meaning to particular events that have been narrated in the text. Hence, Nabokov puts forth a sophisticated formulation of life-writing whose mission is to create ‘a true reality’ that is ‘creative, perceptive, and subjectively artistic’ (11). Henry-Thommes has developed the following strategy to look into the problem. He begins by locating two constituent dimensions - investigating if there exist stable links between Augustine and Nabokov’s oeuvres, and inspecting the role that recollection, memory, and imagination play inside Nabokov’s autobiographical paradigm. Each of these dimensions corresponds to a separate part of the book. In the first part, “Structural Analogies in the Works of Augustine and Nabokov,” Henry-Thommes examines Augustine’s Confessiones, Books Ten and Eleven, Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, and “The Texture of Time,” a philosophical essay that Van Veen, Ada’s fictional autobiographer, includes in the fourth part of the novel. Going through these texts, Henry-Thommes examines the periodic resurfacings of a number of structural analogies, which are points of contact between Augustine and Nabokov’s paradigms. They are sense perception, recollection, forgetting, memory, and imagination. It should be noted in addition that they are intended by the author as criteria towards formulating what he calls a “grammar of autobiography.” His purpose is to sketch a list of sustainable features that autobiographical writing reveals, regardless of the dominant paradigm. AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1