Swift's most ambitious, most accessible, and most enduring literary work - Gulliver's Travels - first appeared on October 28, 1726, just over a month before his fifty-ninth birthday. Its actual title was Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and it appeared anonymously, or rather pseudonymously, as by “Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.” Swift had gone to elaborate lengths to disguise his authorship and create a sense of mystery about the book's origins, but “Gulliver” quickly became the talk of the town and Swift's authorship soon was an open secret. The first printing sold out in a matter of days, and within five weeks two more printings were issued. We do not know the size of the print runs, but it is a safe guess that more than 20,000 copies of Gulliver's Travels were circulating among London's half-million people by the end of December - almost seven times the number of copies of The Spectator that Addison claimed would reach 60,000 readers - and the book's fame spread quickly throughout both England and Ireland.

Politics is the art (techne) of human government. Political science, in its classical sense, is the body of knowledge informing the practice of this art. According to Maimonides, in his Treatise on the Art of Logic, political science “falls into four parts: first, the individual's governance of himself; second, the governance of the household; third, the governance of the city; and fourth, the governance of the large nation or of the nations.” Governance of the city has traditionally been the axial political activity. It is from the city, the polis, that the art receives its name: politics. Indeed, “governance of the city is a science that imparts to its citizens knowledge of true happiness and imparts to them the [way of] striving to achieve it.” The science of the governance of the city furthermore prescribes for the citizens “the rules of justice that order their associations properly.” The comprehensive quality of the city determines the specific shape of individual ethics and household management. The government of an empire is an amplification of the basic comprehensive unit, the city.

Maimonides’ definition of political science raises important questions. Medieval Jews did not have a city (or state) of their own, and although the Jews are a nation, they were dispersed among many nations; they lacked sovereignty and a specific territory of their own. Is there any significance to a discussion of politics for a people in exile?

The nineteenth-century realist novel is in general founded on a bedrock of history. The status of history as the modern scientifically based humanism was largely unchallenged at the middle of the century and little doubt was entertained about the finality and accuracy of historical knowledge, “as it actually happened,” in Leopold von Ranke's words. Similarly, the accuracy and reliability of the mimetic procedures of fiction tended to be taken for granted: the novel's purpose, it was thought, was to reflect objective reality precisely, and it was to be judged by its success in accomplishing this aim. Clearly, there are important reservations to be made concerning this forthright and confident approach. First, it is evidently not shared by modern theorists like Hayden White, who react sharply against concepts of historical certainty and even against the relevance of history in general (Roland Barthes). Second, in their practice novelists were by no means fully observant of these norms.

It follows, nonetheless, that history – viewed as the objective reality of thepast – plays, from the socially based novels of Balzac onwards, a vital rolein the portrayal of the present in the contemporary novel. Lukács is correctin establishing a direct link between Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels andBalzac’s Comédie humaine. In fact, in Spain it would be broadly true tosay that imitation of Scott’s much-admired model divided into two divergentdirections, corresponding to the Romantic, exotic, or costumbrista sideand the realist side of his achievement respectively.

INTRODUCTION

Medieval Jewish thought flourished under the aegis of Islamic civilization from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries when the venue shifted to the Christian West. Its language was Arabic, its concerns determined by issues raised in the context of Islamic thought. The same issues (e.g. the nature of the divine, creation, prophecy, providence, human perfection, and immortality) were later pondered by Jewish thinkers in the Christian milieu, and Hebrew scientific terminology was modeled on Arabic.

For Islam, as for Judaism, the religious law is paramount, a comprehensive guide to life in all its aspects. Study of Qur’an, tradition (hadith), theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (fiqh) dominated Muslim intellectual life. The ‘ulama’ (clerics) regarded “the ancient sciences” as alien and useless, as an insidious threat to religious faith.

Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (d. 1198), a philosopher and jurist, justified philosophy as a religious obligation, but his opinion had no effect on the career of philosophy in Islam, which was emphatically rejected by religious authorities. Even the Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) felt the need to refute philosophy.

The medieval Islamic world had no universities as did Europe, where philosophy was taught alongside theology. Muslim rulers sponsored scientific research, which was institutionalized in libraries, hospitals, and observatories. Philosophers taught privately or to circles that met in their homes or in other venues such as bookstores.

Introduction

A century of French film-making has provided us with a unique perspective on a range of aspects of French culture: from the earliest recordings of the Belle Epoque period, to the twenty-first century appetite for fairytales like Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulin (Amelie, Jeunet, 2001), the cinema has revealed, like no other medium, the myriad moments of a national life lived in modern times. People, places, events, ideas: as all have passed in front of the lens, so they have left behind them not only a wealth of creative products that speak to us of the country, its citizens and their artistic energies, but equally a record of patterns of cultural practice and production that reflect the wider apparatus and structures of national life. This would be true in any culture, but as the birthplace of cinema, the midwife of much global debate and theory about film practice, and the school yard of many of the world's most significant players, France provides a rare insight into how cinema functions as the locus of art, industry and intellectual interest, and thus as a significant indicator of questions of national identity.

Jonathan Swift had a lifelong interest in the English language. The extent of this interest is extraordinary. It includes language history and theories; dialect, jargon, and slang; vocabulary, orthography, and punctuation; etymology; rhetoric and dialectic; code and private languages; puns and language games; the social and political function of language and its abuse in propaganda. A received view in the extensive modern scholarship on Swift and the English language is that Swift is a linguistic conservative. He deplores the impurity, instability, and impermanence of English and aspires to arrest its obsolescence and purge it of corrupt words. He prescribes standardization in spelling and punctuation. He insists on simplicity and stylistic propriety, which he polices in his satiric invective against offending authors. Yet, paradoxically, Swift's stylistic practice is characterized by unconstrained linguistic freedom. Swift was certainly called to account by contemporary critics for his impropriety. In the “Apology” for his brilliant early satire A Tale of a Tub the “Author”acknowledges that “he gave a Liberty to his Pen, which might not suit with maturer Years, or graver Characters” (PW i: 1-2).

Philosophers sometimes argue that there are particular expressions that are so frequently fought over that they are best characterized as “essentially contested concepts.” The concept of Jewish philosophy is just such a concept. There has always been a lot of controversy about what it is, and whether it is anything at all. This is not a problem for Jewish philosophy alone, of course, but affects all philosophies that are described in religious and ethnic terms, and familiar issues of definition then enter the discussion. Is Jewish philosophy philosophy by Jews? That is not such a simple question either, since the whole issue of who is a Jew is complex, and although at the time of the Third Reich the Nazis thought they had a neat definition of the Jewish race, we would probably hesitate to call Catholic priests Jewish thinkers merely on the basis of the fact that they had one Jewish grandparent. On the other hand, it would be wrong to define as a Jewish philosopher only those Jews who had a commitment to Judaism itself, since we know that many people feel themselves to be Jewish and are ethnically Jewish without sharing any religious beliefs at all with their more observant coreligionists. Yet they may have interesting views on religion and philosophy and it seems wrong to disqualify their work as potentially being Jewish philosophy. On the other hand, perfectly observant Jews may write on topics in philosophy that have nothing to do with Judaism, and it would be strange to classify what they do as Jewish philosophy.We seem to be getting back to the idea of Jewish science, a doctrine popular with racists but without much to be said for it otherwise.

“When a true Genius appears in the World,”Swift wrote, “you may know him by this infallible Sign; that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him” (PW i: 242). He may well have been speaking about himself. After his death, his ghost was said to haunt the aisles of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, complaining that “The Pamphlets wrote against me, would have form'd a Library.” Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) lived a contentious life in a contentious age.

Frequently remembered as the legendary Irish patriot who rallied his people against Robert Walpole's corrupt English regime, Swift cut his teeth as a political writer - no other phrase seems appropriate - in the service of English administrations. Defending the nation against self-interested coffee-house factions, he proved a thoroughly partisan enemy of party and faction. Asserting that he understood neither party labels nor the passions they aroused, he represented himself as a judicious independent while allying himself first with the Whigs and then with the Tories. A brilliant polemicist, he crafted for general readers deeply interested in politics a body of writing that now tests the scholarly mettle of specialists in remote partisan squabbles. No wonder Swift mordantly satirizes political writers in his great narrative satires. A Tale of a Tub savages hacks who write for rival factions, as he would soon do. Gulliver's Travels opens when Lemuel Gulliver is thirty-eight, just a little older than the Swift who published A Tale of a Tub to impress potential Whig patrons and only a little younger than the Swift who began editing the Tory Examiner in 1710. In Gulliver's perpetual surprise that self-serving pettiness dominates court politics, Swift surely recalls his own political naiveté. Since Gulliver too wants to eliminate party and faction, Swift as surely recollects his own vanity of authorship when Gulliver complains that “after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions” (PW xi: 6).

Historical overview

If one understands the term mutation sociale (social transformation) in the sense in which it was established in French sociology around the work of Georges Balandier at the beginning of the 1970s, it is with just this kind of phenomenon that French society in the second half of the twentieth century was confronted: values and principles of social organisation no longer held, broke down and disappeared even while surviving as a reflex of thought and in the form of superficial ritualism. Meanwhile, new problems and new collective concerns developed under the effects of imported cultural behaviours, the impact of innovation, and the discovery of social forms unforeseeable from the vantage point of what France had been since the nineteenth century. In examining such a shift, the word 'culture' is to be taken in its widest sense. Thus, it refers not only to cultural objects produced and distributed by practitioners, but also and more generally to all of the styles of doing, thinking and feeling that distinguish a particular group, its conscious or semi-conscious shared beliefs. This is because a shift always affects, at differing rates, all levels of experience. It is also because culture, as a collective concern, has become broader in its contemporary definition, and its globalisation has become an important issue today. Finally, it is because many social and political problems can be, and are, treated as cultural issues.

A crumbling monolith?

Issues relating to language have been debated in Francophone culture ever since French replaced Latin in the sixteenth century as the dominant medium for writing. But the nature of the debates, and the assumptions underlying them, have evolved markedly over the centuries, reflecting the fortunes of the language itself. This chapter will mainly be devoted to presenting a picture of twentieth-century tendencies and the controversies accompanying them. Particularly relevant is the most recent change to affect French speakers' linguistic beliefs and attitudes: since the Second World War especially, confidence and optimism about the state of the language and its prospects have tended to give way to uncertainty and even pessimism. Partly as a consequence, traditional norms and practices are nowadays increasingly liable to be challenged and even disregarded.

The erstwhile mood of confidence set in three-and-a-half centuries ago, when the speech of the royal Court was gradually established as the cultivated standard - essentially the formal written French of today. Seventeenth-century grammarians prided themselves on creating a new and perfected language: 'worthy of the greatest monarch on earth', as one of them put it (in a reference to Louis XIV). Far from adopting a conservative, backward-looking perspective, theirs was an innovative approach, and they made a particular point of distancing themselves from the chaoti cusage of the sixteenth century, dismissing it contemptuously, though quite inappropriately, as le gaulois ('ancient Gaulish').

INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW

Defining Jewish Neoplatonism is no easy task, due in no small part to the difficulty of defining “Neoplatonism.” In an effort to best understand these categories, I will isolate two conceptual issues – the nature of the Godhead, and its relation to the cosmos – in Plotinus (the pagan third-century founder of Neoplatonism), and then, with recourse to Solomon ibn Gabirol in the first case and Isaac Israeli in the second, I will examine the extent to which these issues can be seen to exist – unmodified – within the corpus of Jewish Neoplatonism. By suggesting, first, ways in which each of these Plotinian issues seems, prima facie, at odds with the parallel Jewish Neoplatonic views, but then by emphasizing how in fact they are reconcilable with the Jewish versions, I will challenge oversimplified estimations not only of the nature of Plotinus' own philosophy, but of what real differences exist between it and Jewish Neoplatonism. In this way I will have indirectly been examining what exactly counts as “Neoplatonism,” Jewish or otherwise. By proceeding in this way, I hope to do justice to the elusive connections that exist between various Neoplatonic textual traditions. By focusing on the works of two early Jewish Neoplatonists, this chapter, rather than attempting to be comprehensive, suggests conceptual starting points from which one might address and evaluate the degree, implications, and development of Neoplatonism in any number of other Jewish texts.

Neo-Symbolism and renewal

Poetic modernity may be traced back to and even beyond Charles Baudelaire's searing paradoxes or Gustave Flaubert's clinical ironies, Stéphane Mallarmé's retreat into textual interiorities or Arthur Rimbaud's abandonment of self-illumination, via his flight to Abyssinia and the recognition of the failure of his poetic enterprise. Twentieth-century poetic modernity ushers itself in with a mixture of relatively silken-smooth post-Symbolist manners and rather more jarring or vigorously rethought modes that prefigure both Cubist and Surrealist preoccupations. The principal figures on this early stage are nine in number: Valéry, Claudel, Segalen, Péguy and Perse, Apollinaire, Cendrars and Reverdy, and one often misunderstood woman, admired by Apollinaire and Cocteau and the friend of Colette and Proust: Anna de Noailles.

Paul Claudel's work as a whole is marked by a spiritual questing that conveys itself sometimes in surging lyrical, hymnal modes, sometimes in rather more emotionally taut tonalities to which the elastic and free-flowing verset claudélien (Claudelian verset) or a poetically dramatised prose form bring suppleness and renewed rhythm. Connaissance de l'Est (Knowledge of the East, 1900) offers a set of discreetly narrative/ descriptive and contemplative and emotionally charged prose poems that caress the natural and human phenomena of a distant world, that of the Far East.

INTRODUCTION: FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PHYSICS

The fourteenth century saw the emergence of a new trend in medieval philosophy and science. While continuing to adhere generally to an Aristotelian understanding of nature, Christian scholars began to question and modify certain premises of Aristotelian physics and to suggest non-Aristotelian alternatives, reviving pre-Socratic or Hellenistic views and developing original ideas based on observation and experience. Such remarkable figures as Thomas Bradwardine and his successors in Oxford, and Jean Buridan and his students in Paris challenged basic Aristotelian tenets about infinity, place, vacuum, motion, and material substance, suggesting the possibility of an infinite cosmos filled by multiple worlds. Although motivated largely by Christian doctrine and the condemnations of Aristotle, this move towards critical inquiry led to a new conception of the universe, which anticipated and contributed to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The outstanding Jewish representative of this critical trend in European philosophy was Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410/11), legal scholar, communal leader, and courtier in Barcelona and Saragossa. Perhaps influenced by the Paris physicists, and motivated by similar theological interests, Crescas in his Light of the Lord subjected Maimonides’ summary of Aristotelian physics to a searching attack. Unlike his Christian counterparts, however, Crescas was not content merely to speculate about problem areas within a generally coherent natural science.

When we think of realism in fiction, we think first of mimesis – the imitation of life – a concept that at once implies the existence of something outside the writer's own mind which he or she is trying to imitate. The imitation of this supposedly external “thing” undergirds the term “realism,” whether applied to painting, philosophy, literature, or film. As Harry Levin reminds us, “Etymologically, realism is thing-ism. The adjective 'real' derives from the Latin res [meaning 'thing'] and finds an appropriate context in 'real estate'” – land, property, things. The realist novel in Spain places a special emphasis on this primary engagement with the things of this world. In this emphasis, nineteenth-century Spanish realism harks back even to the epic Poema de Mío Cid (1140), in which a close-up focus on things – cages laid bare, emptied of hunting falcons, weeds growing on the threshold of an abandoned castle – participates vividly in telling the story of exile.

Writing in this realist tradition, Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920), in his1870 essay on the art of the novel, first evokes the principle of mimesis. Hisstated aim is to reproduce life as objectively as possible, depicting things asthey “really” are – houses, dress, furniture, gestures, and habits of speech. Ina later essay (1897) he affirms that language itself constitutes the most tellingsign of personal and national identity.

Directing grand opera in the early twenty-first century is somewhat like being required to remake Ben Hur for an art-house budget. The essence of the aesthetic of grand opera was rooted in the fact that it was a commercial enterprise, designed with a lavish sense of the spectacular to flatter the newly rich bourgeoisie, for whom the pompous splendours of theatres like the Palais Garnier were created. It took the aristocratic art form par excellence, transformed it into a celebration of conspicuous consumption, and trumpeted the dominance of new money in its natural home at the heart of the newly industrialised city. Garnier's fantastic building, and the construction of the Avenue de l'Opéra, remind us today of the luxury that clothed grand opera during and after the Second Empire, though it is revealing that the home of opera, once an adjunct of the Court, has now become a traffic island.

The parallels with Hollywood are apt, and especially the Hollywood of escapist fantasy and spectacle of the 1930s and 1940s. It is significant for instance that the main achievements of grand opera are scenic and structural as much as musical. There are probably only two true musical masterpieces which can be correctly attributed to the genre – Guillaume Tell and Don Carlos – although it is clear that neither Les Troyens nor even the libretto of Götterdämmerung is free of its influence.

Introduction

Britain and the Americas, lacking any significant and continuous native operatic traditions, depended upon foreign opera for much of the nineteenth century. Although Italian opera (and to a certain extent French opéra comique) often formed the basis of the repertory, German and serious French opera became increasingly popular in certain areas of Britain and the Americas in response to local circumstances: the nationality of immigrant populations, the tastes of a ruling élite, the experiences of local impresarios and the impact of political events.

In the 1830s the phenomenal popularity of grand opera – works such as Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828) and Gustave III (1833), Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), Halévy's La Juive (1835) – spread quickly throughout Europe and across the Channel. In London such works were translated into Italian or English and performed in a variety of faithful productions and pirate adaptations. From Europe they were exported to the East coast of America, often by English impresarios. Travelling troupes in America incorporated occasional grand operas into their still largely Italian repertories, and took them across the continent from where they entered Central and South America and were absorbed – to a lesser extent – into the repertories of local companies. Celebrated singers who had performed these operas in Paris brought to new audiences the roles for which they had become known.