...Marjorie Perloff Becker Daniel Levin , Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature . ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2012 ), 338 pp. © 2014 by Duke University Press 2014...

... of an opera and its relationship to the work that performers must do to realize the opera in the theater. Rossini wrote many passages that demand the intervention of performers (performing them “as written” is simply an error), yet this does not mean necessarily that “anything goes.” The new edition not only...

... fertile period in poetry, with many talented poets and many potential directions that did not develop into dominant trends. Because literary history almost inevitably looks at dominant directions, it tends to pass over not only individual poets who don't quite fit, but also poetic kinds and directions...

...Lionel Gossman Even if its constituent members still define particular positions and pursue at times somewhat independent policies, the EU acts increasingly in important areas as the unified federal state many have long wanted it to be. It may have come into being in response to practical problems...

...Mark Bauerlein Elizabeth Fox-Genovese died in January 2007. She was a renowned scholar and important public intellectual, but in this reminiscence Mark Bauerlein recalls her as something else: a model colleague. Despite the many attacks on her work and the difficulties she encountered in her...

..., and Mendelssohn). Many of the “other” composers came from Italy, France, or Britain and became famous for opera selections and songs, some termed “popular,” and a substantial number of their pieces were performed throughout the nineteenth century. The present-day narrative of music history has canonic blind spots...

... in Beaumarchais are not fixed and eternal but evolve in historical time. Figaro himself emerges as a characteristically modern figure, neither noble nor base but mixed, many-sided, energetic, and enterprising, an individual rather than a type, and thus a more realistic representative of Enlightenment and post...

... of exchanges, and follow conversations over years — a rare circumstance. The academic staff maintained contact with an impressively large number of internationally active scholars, working in many fields, and the letters are characteristically substantive. In this article, the author indicates how a book she...

...Jill Kraye Against the backdrop of Walter Benjamin's famous essay, “Unpacking My Library” (1931), this article, by the Librarian of the Warburg Institute, tells the story of the many times that the Warburg Library has been packed and unpacked. First it was the private collection of Aby Warburg...

... process for many of the Warburg scholars. The popular belief in the cultural ties between England and Italy fed into the positive reception for the exhibition and into acceptance of the work of the Warburg Institute. The exhibition was published in a large format catalog in 1948, further adding...

... and action; and while there are many possibilities here, in the West the only lively form of such quietism has been Christian-theological, in which political advocacy and action are, ideal-typically and sometimes actually, undertaken under the threefold assumption that: (1) advocacy of a political proposal...

... often continued to explore and prize the many achievements of the vanquished Muslims. This article summarizes the development, during the medieval period, of such positive Christian attitudes toward Islam. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press 2017 Islamophilia xenophilia xenophobia al...

...John Tolan Some of the nineteenth century’s foremost scholars of the Qur’an and hadiths were German and Hungarian Jews. For many of them, their scholarly interest in Islam was entangled with their contemporary concerns about movements of reform and emancipation in European Jewry and about...

...Mikhail Epstein The article suggests that, contrary to widespread opinions and standard encyclopedic definitions, philosophy is a domain not only of thoughts and ideas but also of feelings. Philosophy as (etymologically) love for wisdom includes emotions in both of its components. Among the many...

... of The Education is more ontological than personal, the necessary consequence of his quietistic belief in a materialist determinism so absolute as to reduce persons and history alike to “sum[s].... of the forces” of “nature.” This belief, one shared by many of his contemporaries and most fully evolved in Adams's...

....” Schopenhauer does indeed say much the same thing as Tolstoy says in his epilogue and elsewhere about history and the will. Each of these authors argues that history is not progressing and that it is not governed by the actions of individual political or military leaders alone, but by the infinitely many...

...Mikhail Epstein In this guest column, Epstein offers “a new sign” that, he argues, resolves difficulties that have arisen in many theories and practices, including linguistics, semiotics, literary theory, poetics, aesthetics, ecology, ecophilology, eco-ethics, metaphysics, theology, psychology...

...Pink Dandelion This contribution to a symposium on quietism concerns what is known as the Quietist period of Quakerism in the eighteenth century. Dandelion addresses the key question of conflict between the quietist commitment of the Quaker faithful and the commitment of many among them...

... inspired him, from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. A personal fear of being pinned down, coupled with his tragic Jewish witness to a philosophical quest for certainty gone astray, led the “Sad Rider,” one of many possible Derridas, to want to “erase” as much as he wanted to write — despite...

... societies have dealt with matters of war and peace. He in particular examines and finds wanting the approach that Jared Diamond takes in The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012). Whereas Diamond's theme is that modern states can learn much about many things from...