Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity

384 Pages·1995·35.397 MB·English

by  Alexander Gelley

Unruly Examples
On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity
co NTRI B UTO R s Daniel Boyarin
Cathy Caruth
Alexander Gelley
Irene E. Harvey
Thomas Keenan
David Lloyd
John D. Lyons
Louis Marin
J. Hillis Miller
Stephen G. Nichols
Herman Rapaport
Ewa Ziarek
Unruly Examples
ON THE RHETORIC
OF EXEMPLARITY
Alexander Gelley
EDITED BY
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California 199 5
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California
© 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
err data appear at the end of the book
Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction
I
ALEXANDER GELLEY
PART 1. Historical Forms of Exemplarity
Take the Bible for Example: Midrash as Literary Theory 27
DANIEL BOY ARIN
Example versus Historia:
Montaigne, Eriugena, and Dante
STEPHEN G. NICHOLS
Circe's Drink and Sorbonnic Wine:
Montaigne's Paradox of Experience 86
JOHN D. LYONS
The Discourse of the Example: An "Example,"
Chapter IV of the First Part of The Logic of Port-Royal 104
LOUIS MARIN
PART I I. Exemplarity in Literature
Fables of Responsibility 121
THOMAS KEENAN
The Pragmatics of Exemplary Narrative
142
ALEXANDER GELLEY
vi Contents
Parabolic Exemplarity: The Example of
Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
J. HILLIS MILLER
"The Beauty of Failure": Kafka and Benjamin
on the Task of Transmission and Translation I75
EWA ZIAREK
PART I I I. Exemplarity in Philosophy
Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation 2II
IRENE E. HARVEY
Kant's Examples 255
DAVID LLOYD
The Force of Example: Kant's Symbols 277
CATHY CARUTH
Of the Eye and the Law
HERMAN RAPAPORT
Notes 327
Index 373
Contributors
DANIEL BoYAR IN is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Cul
ture at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent
books are Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture and
A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. He is currently
working on a project called "Jewishness as a Gender; or, The
Invention of the Jewish Man."
cATHY cAR u T H is Associate Professor of English at Emory
University. She is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical
Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud and Unclaimed Ex
perience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, and has edited
Trauma: Explorations in Memory.
ALEx ANDER GEL LEY is Professor in the Department of
English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cali
fornia at Irvine. He is the author of Narrative Crossings: Theory
and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction.
IRENE E. HARvEY is Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Derrida and
the Economy of Difference and of numerous articles on decon
struction, postmodernism, and contemporary French thought.
She has completed a study on the issue of exemplarity and is
currently working on essays concerning feminism and spiritu
ality.
THoMAs KEEN AN teaches in the English Department at
Princeton University. He is the author of Fables of Responsi
bility and coeditor, with Werner Hamacher and Neil Hertz, of
Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, 1939-43 and of Responses.
viii Contributors
He is at work on Windows of Publicity, a book on television
and the public sphere.
DAvID LLoYD is Associate Professor of English at the Uni
versity of California at Berkeley. He is the author of National
ism and Minor Literature and Anomalous States: Irish Writing
and the Post-Colonial Movement, and coeditor, with Abdul
Ben Mohammed, of The Nature and Content of Minority Dis
course.
JoHN D . LYoNs is Commonwealth Professor of French at
the University of Virginia. He is the author of Exemplum. The
Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy and
coeditor, with Mary McKinley, of Critical Tales. New Studies
of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture.
LoUIs MARIN (1 93 r-1992) was director of studies at L'Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He was the
author of over 300 essays and of sixteen books, including Utop
ics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, Le Critique du
discours: Etudes sur la "Logique de Port-Royal" et les "Pen
sees" de Pascal, Portrait of the King, Food for Thought, and
Des pouvoirs de ]'image.
J. HILLIs MILLER is Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine.
His most recent books are Versions of Pygmalion, Ariadne's
Thread, Illustration, and Topographies.
STEPHEN G. NICHOLS is James M. Beall Professor of
French at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of
Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconogra
phy, The New Medievalism, The New Philology, Boundaries
and Transgressions, and Commentary as Cultural Artifact. He
is currently working on a book entitled Modernism and the
Politics of Medieval Studies and another called Seeing Great
Beauty: Myth, Image, and Culture in the Early Middle Ages.
HERMAN RAPAPoRT is Professor of English and Compar
ative Literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of
Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language and
Between the Sign and the Gaze. His essay in this volume is
part of a forthcoming book on the inhuman.
Ew A z I ARE K is Assistant Professor of English at the Uni-
Contributors ix
versity of Notre Dame. Her publications include articles on
Melville, Kafka, Joyce, Levinas, Kristeva, and Marianne Hauser.
She was a Lilly Fellow during the 1991-92 academic year and
is currently completing a book entitled Rhetoric of Failure:
Skepticism, Modernism, Deconstruction.