Puck

I’ve just finished reviewing a couple of books by Plato (The Laws and a new translation of the complete dialogues), as well a classic of Chinese philosophy, Mencius. Sept. 1, 2005.

Several new reviews have been posted in the week of 20-26 August, 2005, including a rave for Thomas King’s The Truth about Stories.

I’ll be delivering a paper entitled “A Change in the Weather: Global Climate Change and the Development of the Gothic Novel” at the Rocky Mountain MLA in Couer d’Alene, Idaho in October, 2005.

Here’s something that supports my long-held thesis that scientists make the best science fiction writers not because they know so much about science but because they’re so damn weird:

“…if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”
From Nematodes and Their Relationships, 1915 by Nathan Augustus Cobb, the “father of nematology in the U.S.“

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative
by Thomas King
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005

In The Truth about Stories, Thomas King, a Native novelist and professor of English at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, explores creation stories, Native history, racism, and the image of the “Indian.” King is upfront with his opinion about narrative: “The truth about stories,” he claims, “is that that’s all we are” (2 and passim). We tell stories, he says, to inform ourselves about where we’re from, where we’re going, and who we are along the way. In this series of essays, originally delivered as the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, King is funny, eclectic, smart, searching, straightforward and, I’m convinced, right: we are our stories.

However, readers looking for evidence in support of King’s claim that we narrate our lives will have to look elsewhere. The Truth about Stories is highly subjective and anecdotal, and full of bold claims like this one: “‘You can’t understand the world without telling a story,’ the Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor tells us. ‘There isn’t any center to the world but a story’” (32). But one only has to look just outside of literary studies (where narrative theory is weak, bound, as it is, to an antiquated misconception of identity between “plot,” “story,” and “narrative”) to find powerful support for King’s claim. Narrative, Ochs and Capps write in an interdisciplinary review of the literature on the centrality and importance of story, “is born out of experience and gives shape to experience. In this sense, narrative and self are inseparable. Self is here broadly understood to be an unfolding reflective awareness of being-in-the-world, including a sense of one’s past and future…. We come to know ourselves as we use narrative to apprehend experiences and navigate relationships with others” (Annual Review of Anthropology 1996:20-21). Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Laws
by Plato
trans. Trevor J. Saunders
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

In the Republic, Plato (using his dead mentor Socrates as a mouthpiece) outlined his idea for the ideal city. The Republic is generally considered the earliest example of a utopian philosophy. The ideal city, in Plato’s view, would be ruled by a benevolent dictator, a “philosopher-king” who would be shielded from corruption but a great number of constraints on his personal freedom. Plato was antagonistic towards democracy, fearing, with some justification, the rule of the mob. It was a democratic vote, after all, that sentenced Socrates to death in 399 B.C., on the charge that Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens and introduced new gods. In general, though, it is recognized that what Plato called “democracy” would be better understood by the modern ear as “anarchy”: the extreme freedom and equality in which “‘there’s no compulsion either to exercise authority if you are capable of it, or to submit to authority if you don’t want to; you needn’t fight if there’s a war, or you can wage a private war in peacetime if you don’t like peace; and if there’s any law that debars you from political or judicial office, you will none the less take either if they come your way” (Republic). We should also remember that Athenian democracy really was the direct participation of its citizens (as the Greek words demo-cracy imply) and therefore unlike modern democracies, where the power and participation of individuals is mediated by elected representatives. Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Arts and Minds
by Gregory Currie
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005

Arts and Minds is a collection of essays in the philosophy of aesthetics written over the past five or so years. Many of the essays have been previously published or presented at conferences but have been revised for book publication. The essays range widely over the major issues of contemporary aesthetics; indeed, the book is divided into three sections, “Ontology,” “Interpretation,” and “Mind,” corresponding to major areas of current concern. As Currie points out in his introduction, aesthetics suffered a setback in the twentieth century in the form of “Attempts to carve out a domain of problems about the arts that could be investigated without serious help from other areas of philosophy” (1). Currie clearly eschews any hermetically sealed form of inquiry: his essays are peppered with insights from other disciplines, mainly philosophy of mind but also anthropology and cognitive science. This makes for challenging and stimulating reading, not only, I think, for philosophers but as well for scholars in other areas of the arts and sciences. Continue Reading »