Boutling, Noel 'How Philosophy can distort literary interpretation: the case of Sartre on Baudelaire' Should poems be read Iconically - 'the poem is the poem, is the poem' - experientially for their own sake? Must they be read Indexically in terms of their relationship to something external, so that a poem is recognized as part of a collection, part of a product pointing to something beyond itself within some societal context? Or could a poem be interpreted Intellectively in the light of a reader's evoked experience as well as its possible purpose in explicating the historical climate of the times when it was written? Sartre's strategy in reading Baudelaire's poetry has been taken to be Indexical in character: Baudelaire's writings are to be seen in relation to his thoughts about his mother, mistress or even as "the author of the Fleurs du Mal. This characterization, however, obfuscates Sartre's possible employment of a more Intellective strategy: interpreting Baudelaire's writings through his degrees of consciousness theory. That conception posits three degrees of consciousness; first degree consciousness is an unreflecting consciousness concentrating as it does upon an object in relation to practical activities. This form of consciousness can become, at a reflective level, a second degree consciousness, a congealing consciousness, turning "into an in-itself" - a magical or created object for consciousness - "a quasi-object", as a reflected consciousness, for reflection at a further level, that of third degree consciousness; a "reflexive consciousness". How adequate, however, can seeing Sartre's project Intellectively be? In this light, is Sartre able to make sense of Baudelaire's passions and the relation of his poetry to his world better understood? Or is it, rather, that because it fails to explicate fully Sartre's degrees of consciousness theory, his own form of existentialism distorts another reading of Baudelaire's achievement, so showing how a particular philosophy can undo an attempt to understand a literary work rather than clarify it?

Gritzner, Karoline (Aberystwyth) Tragic Philosophy and the Theatre of Catastrophe Conventional understandings of the concept of tragedy imply a fatalistic worldview, showing the heroic demise of human greatness in a context of the absolute. To hold on to the notion of tragedy in postmodernity seems to amount to a dangerously old-fashioned position due to the tragedy's definition of human nature as finite rather than endlessly pliable. Marxist social analysis as developed by Critical Theory, however, defines contemporary society and culture not as a field of unlimited possibilities but as a totalised context of commodification with negative implications for individual experience. As the work of Adorno demonstrates, life in late-capitalist culture has transformed into a reality of suffering, thus making a renewed discourse of tragedy relevant and necessary. Sceptical attitudes to the concept of tragedy can be noted in critics such as George Steiner who argues that the tragic consciousness is incompatible with modernity and went into decline in Romanticism; and tragedy is also problematic for Marxist thinkers such as György Lukács and Bertolt Brecht who believe that the concept stands in sharp contradiction to the notion of political progressiveness. However, by maintaining that the spirit of late capitalism has generated an administered, over-bureaucratised society in which a dehumanising 'withering of experience' can be noticed at all levels of life, Adorno's thinking prepares for the recovery of a consciousness of tragedy as a cultural necessity and possible mode of resistance to the reified structures of society. Central to Adorno's critical theory is the notion of catastrophe which he uses to describe culture 'after Auschwitz'. An argument for a recovery of a tragic sensibility in modern times can do justice to Adornian principles only if it is articulated in terms of the concept of catastrophe. The dramas of Samuel Beckett and Howard Barker provide artistic examples of such reworkings of a theory and aesthetic practice of tragedy in the cultural context of catastrophe.

Gorodeisky, Keren (Auburn) Aesthetic Normativity Redux: Literary Appreciation and the Experience of Love: The statement: "Pride and Prejudice" is a great novel, but I never read it" is not a logical contradiction. It is nonetheless odd. Very odd. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant makes sense of this oddity. Although not a logical contradiction, the statement appears odd because it violates the "grammar" of aesthetic judgment. Kant gives us the means to understand why the statement appears odd to so many of us, by explaining why aesthetic judgment makes a necessary reference to one's own experience of the object.

The aim of the paper is to explain the reasons for which aesthetic judgment, particularly the appreciation of a literary work, makes this necessary reference to the critic's direct engagement with the work. On the basis of Kant's view of the matter, I argue that while the necessary reference to one's own experience in judgments about mere sensual pleasures emerges from the sensory and private nature of these pleasures, in the appreciation of literary works it is called for by the special form of aesthetic normativity. I explain this conception of normativity by means of an analogy I draw between literary experience and the experience of love. I show that just as the central norms that govern love relationships are contingent upon the lovers' direct engagement with one another, so the central norms of literary appreciation are contingent upon the critic's direct engagement with the value of the work. In both cases, the experience is irreducible to the application of any antecedently given norms or standards. Love and literary appreciation are governed and measured by norms that can only be constituted through the direct experience of the possessor of value. The appropriate response to the singular value of a beloved and of a literary work requires engagement with it and with the standards that emerge through this reciprocal engagement.

Markotic, Lorraine Philosophy, Literature, and Adorno's Philosophical Aesthetics: 'The poverty of the participants in Endgame is the poverty of philosophy'.Theodor Adorno. For the most part, the salience of Samuel Beckett's work not only for Adorno's aesthetics, but for his later philosophy in general, has been underestimated. Adorno's essay devoted to Beckett is titled "Trying to Understand Endgame." The title is crucial, for Endgame both embodies philosophy's attempt to understand itself and the world, and represents its inability to do so. When Adorno's final, unfinished work, Aesthetic Theory - which was to be dedicated to Beckett - was first compared with his other works, it was often linked with Dialectic of Enlightenment. In my paper, however, I shall suggest that the key to understanding Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is the philosophy he outlines in Negative Dialectics and that this is best illuminated through his interpretation of Beckett. Just as Hegel insists that dialectics is not a rule that one applies to reality, but that reality itself is dialectical, so Adorno states that 'dialectics does not give any instructions for the treatment of art, but inheres in it' (AT 140). Negative Dialectics is less an actual negative dialectics, in my view, than a call for such a philosophy - a call for which Aesthetic Theory may be seen as a response. In his theory of literature, I shall argue, Adorno sees the manifestation of a philosophical negative dialectic.

In my paper, I focus on Adorno's analysis of Beckett and elaborate the following key philosophical concepts from Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory: immanent criticism, mimesis, false reconciliation, negative dialectics, non-identity, nature, autonomy, philosophical remainder, critique of existentialism, the 'preponderance of the object', semblance [Schein], and natural beauty. The paper demonstates how these concepts connect with one another, and how Adorno interprets Beckett's work as manifesting the philosophical concerns in Negative Dialectics and the philosophical project of Aesthetic Theory.

Rohmer, Stascha (CSIC, Madrid): "La vida es un genero literario": The relation between Life and Literature in the Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) is the most significant Spanish thinker of the twentieth cen-tury. He represents a spiritual pluralism beyond idealism, materialism and dogmatism. His extensive body of work,
which develops a unique and particular awareness of life and treats of a complex spectrum of topics with stylistic brilliance, has had a wide-reaching impact on European culture. The paper I propose considers the question of the relationship between Ortega y Gasset's conception of life and his concept of literature. In view of this, I want to examine the work of José Ortega y Gasset in three stages: In the first stage, I will examine Ortega y Gasset's philosophy as an
integrative system of thought that succeeds in overcoming the traditional metaphysical opposition between subject and world. Ortega's notion of human life as ultimate reality will occupy the centre here. In the second stage of the paper I want to show that it is this assumption of human life as the basic reality, that brings Ortega's thought in proximity to
the life-philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey. Ortega and Dilthey share the concern to bring together life and reason within a broader conception of rationality that would allow the whole person to become an object of philosophical self-reflection. The development of this conception is precisely the task of what Ortega calls "historical reason". Thirdly I will try to explain why Ortega considers this historical reason as a "narrative reason" - a reason of "telling".

Vasalou, Sophia (Cambridge) Schopenhauer and the sublime standpoint of philosophy: Arthur Schopenhauer owes a great part of his reputation to the central place he gave to aesthetic experience and artistic expression in his philosophical preoccupations. Aesthetic experience was valued not only for the cognitive access it gave to a higher reality, but also as a means of escaping the sufferings of a life whose inner nature Schopenhauer had identified as a blindly striving, purposeless will.

One question which has received little attention, however, concerns the status of Schopenhauer's own philosophical discourse and its relation to artistic expression - which includes, amongst the highest arts, literary discourse. On the one hand, Schopenhauer describes philosophical discourse in terms of rational or conceptual knowledge, and such knowledge is sharply contrasted in his account with aesthetic apprehension, which is non-conceptual and consists in the apprehension of (a creative reworking of) Platonic Forms or Ideas. But what I will try to show is that, despite the tensions generated from this description, his own philosophical practice is best understood in terms of the aim of cultivating an aesthetic form of vision, and in particular, as an exercise in the evocation of the sublime. The experience of the sublime is one that involves the contemplation of Ideas containing an element terrible to the human will, and thus a movement of ascent in overcoming this hostility so as to attain an aesthetic - that is, a disinterested - stance. Schopenhauer's philosophical project, in its ramifications, can be identified as a contemplation of the Idea of humanity, enabled by assuming the detached vantage point sub specie aeternitatis whose terrible quality explains the very attraction, otherwise paradoxical, which Schopenhauer's grim philosophy holds for us. This sublime vision of human life from above is accomplished not by means of philosophical argument, but by the literary qualities and visionary force of Schopenhauer's writing, and accommodating this understanding involves a revised view of the status of philosophy as an artistic discourse.