Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on
Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
6 comments:
That's hilarious. He is indeed very talented.
What strikes me is the Anglo-centric nature of the discussion. All the authors mentioned but two, Kant and Dante, wrote in English. And yet the madame holds a Comp. Lit. degree, which is a telling datum in a piece written in '74, more or less midway between the appearance of Paul de Man's first two books, Blindness and Insight (1971) and Allegories of Reading (1979).
Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
I got an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1970. Almost everything we read was originally written in English. I took a graduate seminar in Contemporary Literary Criticism and we read a lot of French stuff and even some Lukacs, but it would have been possible to get the degree without reading anything written originally in any language besides English.
Dean, S . Wallerstein, get a grip!! It is a joke, a witty light comic piece, it is not a dissertation on the state of literary studies in the mid-seventies!
Sheesh!
My comment was mildly tongue in cheek. It even performed the same pseudo-intellectual baloney that Woody mocked! But I still kinda think his targeting of Comp. Lit. was a function of the academic times in which he wrote the piece.
Favorite scene from an old Woody Allen movie ("Bananas"): Allen's stressed-out character in the film is driving a Volkswagon, "bug" somewhere in Latin America in deep philosophical conversation with himself about the loss of dignity in modern Man's conception of himself. He parks his car at last on the side of a busy urban street, gets out, and plunges abruptly down the length of an open sewer manhole!
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