Abstract
When the historians of thought will characterize the distinctive features of the Twentieth Century, the fact that will impose itself is, I think, the foundational crisis which has shaken Western culture at large. As Christine Brooke-Rose points out,
that this century is undergoing a reality crisis has become a banality, easily and pragmatically shrugged off. Perhaps it is in fact undergoing a crisis of the imagination; a fatigue, a decadence. And rhetoricians usually appear in times of decadence, that is, when stable values disappear, when forms break down and new ones appear, coexisting with all the old ones. Their task is then to try to make sense of what is happening by working out reasoned typologies of structures.… Today the rhetoricians of innumerable kinds are more voluble than they have been for centuries.1
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Notes
Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 3.
J. Naremore, The World without a Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 28.
A. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 33–34.
B. Kawin, The Mind of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), preface.
R. Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 97.
Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), p. 181.
For a fuller analysis of Kafka’s Prüfung, see my article in Annales de l’Institut de Philosophie de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1985.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, I, p. 471; as quoted in S. Rosen, Nihilism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 96.
“The technique of question and answer is of little value when we are concerned with a presentation of a specialized theme addressed to an audience of experts, in physics, history, or law for example, since each discipline possesses a group of theses and methods which every specialist is supposed to acknowledge and which is rarely called into question. (…). It is, on the contrary, in the absence of recognized truths and theses that recourse to a dialectic of question and answers appears to be indispensable” (p. 16).
On the problematological theory of literature, see Michel Meyer, Meaning and Reading (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983).
Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 18.
Jefferson, pp. 19-20.
On the comparison between problematology and deconstruction, see my paper in Revue Internationale de Philosophie, to appear in the special issue on The Philosophical Aspects of Literature, 1987.
Zahava McKeon, Novels and Arguments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 40–41.
McKeon, p. 8.
McKeon, p. 16.
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© 1986 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Meyer, M. (1986). Problematology and Rhetoric. In: Golden, J.L., Pilotta, J.J. (eds) Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs. Synthese Library, vol 183. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4674-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4674-3_8
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