Intimate Conflict

Contradiction in Literary and Philosophical Discourse

Edited by Brian G. Caraher

Series: SUNY series, The Margins of Literature
Paperback : 9780791410264, 208 pages, August 1992
Hardcover : 9780791410257, 208 pages, August 1992

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Table of contents

Contributors

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Intimate Conflict
G. Caraher

2 Strife and Contradiction in Hesiod
Henry W. Johnstone, Jr.

3 Plato's Masterplot: Idealization, Contradiction, and the Transformation of Rhetorical Ethos
Charles Altieri

4 The Mechanics of Creation: Non-Contradiction and Natural Necessity in Paradise Lost
Mill N. Clark

5 Money of the Mind: Dialectic and Monetary Form in Kant and Hegel
Marc Shell

6 Metaphor as Contradiction: A Grammar and Epistemology of Poetic Metaphor
Brian G. Caraher

7 Contradiction and Repression: Paradox in Fictional Narration
Richard Kuhns

Index

Description

In a comprehensive introduction and six tightly argued essays, the authors demonstrate how rich and suggestive the notion of contradiction in discourse can be.

Henry Johnstone on Hesiod, Charles Altieri on Plato and Socrates, Mili Clark on Milton and his God, Marc Shell on Kant and Hegel, Brian Caraher on Wordsworth and I. A. Richards, and Richard Kuhns on Melville, Freud, and Bertrand Russell contribute provocative analyses of how rhetorical and conceptual contradictions produce rather than disable constructive discourse. Along the way, strife among competing truth-claims; the ethos of self-evasive irony; the generative nature of paradox; the dialectical sublation of opposites; the experiential structure of poetic metaphor; and the fictional implications of the liar's paradox are engaged.

Brian G. Caraher is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of the forthcoming The Joyce of Reading.