Paradox and Perspicacity

Paradox and Perspicacity: Horizons of Knowledge in the Literary Text enters into a dialogue with recent scholarship on a number of fronts. Taking into full account the role played by esotericism in shaping the thought of Leibniz, Cardano, and the Helmonts, Robert Eisenhauer elaborates Lessing's « cybernetic view of historical evolution. The essay on Jean Paul's ars recombinatoria discusses how the discourses of travel, cosmology, and millennial speculation are applied to a Diderot-inspired project of encyclopedic emancipation, concluding with remarks on the author's pedagogical relevance to German-speaking Jews. At mid-century, Margaret Fuller's feminist texts place a Fourierist edge on the consensual reading of Richter, while The Blithedale Romance represents pastoral utopia as a site of mesmeric or, indeed, entropic dislocation. Henry James's The Europeans revisits « Blithedale as a « ship of fools, where the vehicular provides a metaphor for fiction and narrative itself becomes identified with iconic distress. The remaining essays treat Pound in the context of gemology and courtliness, quasi-direct discourse in Dostoevsky, and the role of Zeno's paradox in Claude Simon's fiction.