Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is from a review of new books, contributed to the October HARPER'S Magazine by Joshua Cohen. "Fiction is one of two ways we currently have of traveling through time. The other is to travel from South to North Korea: from Samsung-sponsored clamor to a dictatorship of barbed-wire penal camps with nary a bar of WiFi. It's nearly as difficult for an American to obtain a visa to the SPRK as it is to obtain copies of the hundred books its government has approved for reading." That's a nice passage, and allows Cohen a segue between the sci-fi novels he had just been talking about, into a Korean-American publishing project, Dalkey's Library of Korean Literature.

The April issue of Harper's includes a review of a book by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, Shakespeare's Montaigne. Joshua Cohen, writing the review, calls it "a crash course in Elizabethan lit, a multi-culti study of the development of English and, above all, a revisionist biography of a monumental dramatist who not only cribbed the classical education he lacked but also responded to his sources with a fierce and censorious intelligence." So the working hypothesis of the study is that Shakespeare got his classical education second-hand, largely by reading Montaigne, and that he was at the same time willing to bite the hand that fed him some good material. For example, in his essay "Of the Cannibals," Montaigne sentimentalizes the just discovered people of the Americas, seeing them as peaceful anarchists. He writes that they: hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic super...

The latest issue of Harper's has a round-up, by Joshua Cohen, of new books. The one that catches my eye is a comment on a collection of the writings of art critic Jed Perl. I've probably read a good chunk of that book, as I'm a fan of Perl's work as it appears in The New Republic. Unfortunately, Perl's new book, Magicians and Charlatans , looks a little pricey for me.  So I'll confine myself to just quoting here what Cohen writes about it: "[T]his miscellany's greatest recommending stretches are its critiques of what is essentially unreal: the art market. Shock, that old weapon of Dada and Surrealism, concussing sensibilities since World War I, has become a marketing manifesto licensing a Christ soaked in human urine (Andres Serrano's Piss Christ ) and a Mary slathered in elephant dung (Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary ) not as expressions of rage but as provocations of PR ....The museum is converted into its architectural double, t...