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Three Review Essays:Cormac McCarthy, PhilosopherReview of:Eagle (ed),Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Beyond Reckoning.Mundik,A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy.Hawkins,Cormac McCarthy’s Philosophy.Three Ways of Looking at a Horse: Literature and Media / The Medium of LiteratureReview of:St Clair,Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel ListeningBarton,Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction: Gaps, Gestures, ImagesBruhn,The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter“Where in the World is American Literature?” Tracing the Postnational in Postmodern and Contemporary FictionReview of:Coffman,Rewriting Early America: the Prenational Past in Postmodern LiteratureGarcía-Caro,After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas PynchonMcClintock,Topologies of Fear in Contemporary Fiction: The Anxieties of Post-Nationalism and Counter Terrorism[a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature—especially in the present format of single review essays covering multiple related books—please send an email proposing a review toreviews@pynchon.net]&nbsp

This project explores the intersection between nineteenth-century British and Russian realist novels and philosophical accounts of how we realize the world through perception and cognition. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines Wittgensteinian philosophy with comparative reading practices, I argue that fiction is real insofar as it acts as a performative space that refracts the world through a purpose-driven interpretive and affective framework that allows readers to realize internal change. Treating readings as `moments of realization,' which participate in, reflect upon, and transform lived realities, I advocate reading practices that deploy critical self-reflection to promote ethical self-development. The first chapter argues that realism's seemingly objective descriptive style is significant not for the accuracy of its mimetic picture, but rather for organizing the world into an intersocially available space conceived in Kantian terms. Moving from an objective to subjective perspective, the second chapter explores the basis of psychological realism as a self-directed means for articulating one's position within society to oneself. The third chapter connects these outward and inward gazes to the development of becoming subjects who realize internal change in response to fiction. Finally, the fourth chapter raises ethical questions that arise as a result of this becoming-oriented approach. Woven through these reflections are extended dialogues with the historical and literary contexts of the realist movement designed to promote interdisciplinary discussion.

This essay addresses J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a Booker Prize winner in 1999. The novel captures South African political and cultural turmoil attending the post-apartheid transitional period. Far from overlooking the political allegory, I propose instead to expand on a topic only cursorily developed elsewhere, namely liberty and license. The two terms foreground the textual dynamics of the novel as they compete and/or negotiate meaning and ascendency. I argue that Disgrace is energized by Coetzee’s belief in a total liberty of artistic production. Sex is philosophically problematized in the text and advocated as a serious issue that deserves artistic investigation without restriction or censorship. This essay looks into the subtle libertinism in Coetzee’s text, which displays pornographic overtones without exhibiting a flamboyant libertinage. Disgrace acquires its libertine gesture from its dialogue with several literary works steeped in libertinism. The troubled relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical yields an ambiguous text that invites a responsible act of reading.

El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la influen - cia de la tradición clásica de los ejercicios filosófi - co-literarios en Motivos de Proteo (1909), de José enrique Rodó. Centrándome en las coincidencias existentes entre el ensayo de Rodó y las obras de autores como marco Aurelio, erasmo o montaig- ne, analizaré algunos de los aspectos principales de dicha tradición, como son las ideas de «conver - sión», «salvación», «disciplina», «regla de vida» o «ejercitación» filosóficas. The objective of this article is to study the influen - ce of the classical tradition of the philosophical- literary exercises on Motivos de Proteo (1909), by José enrique Rodó. Focusing in the coincidences between Rodo’s essay and the works of authors such as marcus Aurelius, erasmus or montaigne, I will analyze some of the main aspects of this tradition, such as the ideas of «conversion», «sal - vation», «discipline», «rule life» or «exercise» in a philosophical sense.