Fusing the methods of comparative literature, intellectual history, and philosophical analysis, Harold Skulsky explores a motif that has fascinated storytellers since antiquity: the miraculous transformation of a character into a plant, an animal, or a different human being.  The thesis of the study is that the fantasy of metamorphosis challenges the narrator and his audience to confront certain basic anxieties about the human condition: Is the mind reducible to physical properties? What constitutes personhood? How does physical form affect personal identity and continuity of the self?  Testing instances in which these and related perplexities appear in literature, Skulsky systematically and provocatively interprets ten major illustrative texts drawn from diverse epochs and languages, including the works of Homer, Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Dante, Donne, Spenser, Keats, Kafka, and Woolf. Through Skulsky's masterly analysis the victims of metamorphosis in narrative literature--whether werewolf, ass, beetle, swine, or tree--provide a profound insight into the complexities of human experience.

Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile

Literature & Fiction

Skulsky, Harold

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

Reference

Some of Shakespeare's plays give us the impression of wisdom or universal insight because they insistently remind us of anxieties rooted in philosophical doubt. Armed with a fresh analysis of Shakespeare's inherited resources for articulating such anxieties, Skulsky shows that in four plays - Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear and Othello - the drama of doubt in search of an exit gives its own kind of urgency to the more familiar Shakespearean drama of action and motive. The result is a book that challenges a good measure of 20th century Shakespearean scholarship. The four plays emerge from this study as insidiously telling exercises in the undermining of our working faith in the rationality of moral choice and the possibility of knowing other minds. The author points out that Shakespeare takes calculated risks with our personal interest in his heroes by assigning to them not only contemptible actions but disturbing convictions. In some of the plays, such convictions end by looking just as plausible as they do at the outset. In others, Shakespeare seems to attempt a special kind of tragic affirmation and compassion - an affirmation that is designed to encompass unrelieved pessimism, and a compassion that finds a place even for the worst of the damned.

Spirits Finely Touched: The Testing of Value and Integrity in Four Shakespearean Plays

The University of Georgia Press

A searching contribution to the study of what gurative language is and how it works, this book is a guide to the sophisticated and powerful artistry of the seventeenth-century English poets who have come to be known by the misleading name of “Metaphysicals.” Harold Skulsky argues that “Metaphorists” is the more apt label. After exploring the dramatic and transactional theory of figurative language that these poets owe to the traditions they share, Skulsky gives close and carefully argued readings of their major poems. We watch metaphor being enacted rather than made in a high-stakes game of cue and response between writer and reader, a game sustained by a network of mutual understandings. In effect, Skulsky provides a reader-friendly manual of the skills we need to be players.

Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor

Univ of Georgia Pr

Drawing extensively on the whole range of Spinoza's philosophical writing, "Staring into the Void" devotes twelve chapters to showing in detail how the architecture of reality as Spinoza saw it rises in stages from a theory of being (the existence of only One Real Thing) to prophetically modern theories of the physical world (actual or possible), of causal law, of perceptual and intuitive knowledge, of determinism (and the kind of freedom that is compatible with determinism), of the roots of human motivation, and of the kinds of civil society that human nature is capable of sustaining. Professor Skulsky tries to disarm the justifiably skeptical reader by showing why Spinoza's thesis about the 'One Real Thing' is as arguable as it is outrageous. The Spinoza of this intellectual portrait is a bleaker and more subversive figure than the hero of Enlightenment humanism now in general circulation. Harold Skulsky is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature Emeritus at Smith College and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Hofstra University.

Staring into the Void: Spinoza, the Master of Nihilism

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

UNKNO

<p>Drawing extensively on the whole range of Spinoza's philosophical writing, <i>Staring into the Void</i> devotes twelve chapters to showing in detail how the architecture of reality as Spinoza saw it rises in stages from a theory of being (the existence of only One Real Thing) to prophetically modern theories of the physical world (actual or possible), of causal law, of perceptual and intuitive knowledge, of determinism (and the kind of freedom that is compatible with determinism), of the roots of human motivation, and of the kinds of civil society that human nature is capable of sustaining. Professor Skulsky tries to disarm the justifiably skeptical reader by showing why Spinoza's thesis about the One Real Thing is as arguable as it is outrageous. The Spinoza of this intellectual portrait is a bleaker and more subversive figure than the hero of Enlightenment humanism now in general circulation.</p>

Staring into the Void: Spinoza, Master of Nihilism

University of Delaware Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Skulsky, Harold. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Skulsky, Harold

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Skulsky, Harold. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile

Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile

Spirits Finely Touched: The Testing of Value and Integrity in Four Shakespearean Plays

Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor

Staring into the Void: Spinoza, the Master of Nihilism

Staring into the Void: Spinoza, Master of Nihilism