Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: philosophical perspectives PDF
Preview Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: philosophical perspectives
IBSEN’S HEDDA GABLER oxford studies in philosophy and literature Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College Editorial Board Anthony J. Cascardi, Comparative Literature, Romance, Languages, and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley David Damrosch, Comparative Literature, Harvard Moira Gatens, Philosophy, Sydney Garry Hagberg, Philosophy, Bard Philip Kitcher, Philosophy, Columbia Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Toril Moi, Literature, Romance Studies, Philosophy, English, and Theater Studies, Duke University Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophy and School of Law, University of Chicago Bernard Rhie, English, Williams College David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago Paul Woodruff, Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at Austin published in the series Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Tzachi Zamir Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Kristin Gjesdal IBSEN’S HEDDA GABLER Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Kristin Gjesdal 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gjesdal, Kristin, editor. Title: Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler : philosophical perspectives / edited by Kristin Gjesdal. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Series: Oxford studies in philosophy and literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017026958 (print) | LCCN 2017042971 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190467913 (online course) | ISBN 9780190467890 (updf) | ISBN 9780190467906 (epub) | ISBN 9780190467883 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190467876 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Ibsen, Henrik, 1828–1906. Hedda Gabler. | Ibsen, Henrik, 1828–1906—Philosophy. | Literature—Philosophy. Classification: LCC PT8868 (ebook) | LCC PT8868 .I27 2018 (print) | DDC 839.8/226—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026958 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America CONTENTS Series Editor’s Foreword vii Contributors xi Abbreviations xv Editor’s Introduction: Philosophizing with Ibsen 1 Kristin Gjesdal 1. Nihilism and Boredom in Hedda Gabler 26 Leonardo F. Lisi 2. Where Hedda Dies: The Significance of Place 48 Susan L. Feagin 3. Hedda Gabler and the Uses of Beauty 71 Thomas Stern 4. The Scars of Modern Life: Hedda Gabler in Adorno’s Prism 92 Frode Helland v Contents 5. “My Life had stood, a Loaded Gun”: Agency and Writing in Hedda Gabler 112 Arnold Weinstein 6. Philosophy, Theater, and Love: Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Plato’s Symposium 132 Kristin Boyce 7. Hedda’s Words: The Work of Language in Hedda Gabler 152 Toril Moi 8. Against Interpretation?: Hedda and the Performing Self 174 Kirsten E. Shepherd- Barr 9. Two Pistols and Some Papers: Kierkegaard’s Seducer and Hedda’s Gambit 194 Fred Rush 10. Ibsen on History and Life: Hedda Gabler in a Nietzschean Light 215 Kristin Gjesdal Bibliography 239 Index 253 vi SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD At least since Plato had Socrates criticize the poets and attempt to dis- place Homer as the authoritative articulator and transmitter of human experience and values, philosophy and literature have developed as partly competing, partly complementary enterprises. Both literary writers and philosophers have frequently studied and commented on each other’s texts and ideas, sometimes with approval, sometimes with disapproval, in their efforts to become clearer about human life and about valuable commitments– – moral, artistic, political, epistemic, metaphysical, and religious, as may be. Plato’s texts themselves register the complexity and importance of these interactions in being dialogues in which both deduc- tive argumentation and dramatic narration do central work in furthering a complex body of views. While these relations have been widely recognized, they have also fre- quently been ignored or misunderstood, as academic disciplines have gone their separate ways within their modern institutional settings. Philosophy has often turned to science or mathematics as providing models of knowl- edge; in doing so it has often explicitly set itself against cultural entangle- ments and literary devices, rejecting, at least officially, the importance of plot, figuration, and imagery in favor of supposedly plain speech about the truth. Literary study has moved variously through formalism, structural- ism, post- structuralism, and cultural studies, among other movements, vii series editor’s Foreword as modes of approach to a literary text. In doing so it has understood lit- erary texts as sample instances of images, structures, personal styles, or failures of consciousness, or it has seen the literary text as a largely fun- gible product, fundamentally shaped by wider pressures and patterns of consumption and expectation that affect and figure in nonliterary textual production as well. It has thus set itself against the idea that major liter- ary texts productively and originally address philosophical problems of value and commitment precisely through their form, diction, imagery, and development, even while these works also resist claiming conclusively to solve the problems that occupy them. These distinct academic traditions have yielded important perspec- tives and insights. But in the end none of them has been kind to the idea of major literary works as achievements in thinking about values and human life, often in distinctive, open, self- revising, self- critical ways. At the same time readers outside institutional settings, and often enough philosophers and literary scholars too, have turned to major literary texts precisely in order to engage with their productive materially and medially specific pat- terns and processes of thinking. These turns to literature have, however, not so far been systematically encouraged within disciplines, and they have generally occurred independently of each other. The aim of this series is to make manifest the multiple, complex engagements with philosophical ideas and problems that lie at the hearts of major literary texts. In doing so, its volumes aim not only to help phi- losophers and literary scholars of various kinds to find rich affinities and provocations to further thought and work, they also aim to bridge various gaps between academic disciplines and between those disciplines and the experiences of extrainstitutional readers. Each volume focuses on a single, undisputedly major literary text. Both philosophers with training and experience in literary study and literary scholars with training and experience in philosophy are invited to engage with themes, details, images, and incidents in the focal text, through which philosophical problems are held in view, worried at, and reformulated. Decidedly not a project simply to formulate A’s philosophy of X as a finished product, merely illustrated in the text, and decidedly not a project to explain the literary work entirely by reference to external social configurations and forces, the effort is instead to track the work of open viii series editor’s Foreword thinking in literary forms, as they lie both neighboring to and aslant from philosophy. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, “new centers of reflection are continually forming,” as problems of commitment and value of all kinds take on new shapes for human agents in relation to changing historical circumstances, where reflective address remains possible. By considering how such centers of reflection are formed and expressed in and through literary works as they engage with philosophical problems of agency, knowledge, commitment, and value, these volumes undertake to present both literature and philosophy as, at times, productive forms of reflective, medial work in relation both to each other and to social circumstances and to show how this work is specifically undertaken and developed in distinc- tive and original ways in exemplary works of literary art. ix
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