How do we stand in relation to everything that comes down to us from the past? Is the very idea of tradition still useful in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the Holocaust, changes in the canon, and the end of colonialism? The concept of tradition has gained renewed importance in recent cultural studies. Suspicion of tradition as culturally narrow and oppressive is a persistent theme of modernity and has increased lately with the resurgence of religious traditionalism around the globe. At the same time, various groups demanding recognition for their distinctive cultural identity have reclaimed their traditions. Philosophers from Josiah Royce and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Alasdair MacIntyre have explored the relations between tradition and themes such as freedom, community, self-assertion, originality, and the shared values and interpretations that constitute everyday life. The essays in this volume offer varying, even disparate analyses of religious, literary, and cultural traditions and both responses and resistance to them in a variety of philosophers, novelists, and theologians. They examine works by Gadamer, Royce, MacIntyre, Plato, Jacques Derrida, Charlotte Bronte, S'ren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edith Wharton, Chinua Achebe, John Fowles, Heinrich Bsll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cotton Mather, Thomas Kuhn, Mikhail Bakhtin, Donald Davidson, Antebellum African-American women preachers, and Christian and Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust.

Brings together all of Gadamer's published writings on Celan's poetry, and makes them available in English for the first time. This is accessible commentary on a notoriously difficult poet.

Gadamer on Celan makes all of Hans-Georg Gadamer's published writings on Paul Celan's poetry available in English for the first time. Gadamer's commentaries on Celan's work are explicitly meant for a general audience, and they are further testimony to Celan's growing importance in world literature since the Second World War. Celan's poetry has attracted the attention of many well-known figures, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabe's, Otto Poggeler, and George Steiner. As Steiner has said, "It will take a long time for our sensibilities to apprehend poetry of these dimensions and this radicality". Gadamer's commentaries will help readers to listen to Celan's poetry, and to become acquainted with his only book-length commentary on a poet, using the best example of Gadamer's thinking on the relationship of philosophy and poetry. This book also contains a translation of Who Am land Who Are You?, the centerpiece of Gadamer's most important philosophical project since the publication of Truth and Method (1960).

Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art. As William Carlos Williams says, "A poem can be made of anything," even newspaper clippings. At this point, art turns into philosophy, all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the distinctive genre of modernism. This book takes seriously this transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas. As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and what sort of community defines the work of art-or, for that matter, the work of philosophy. In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience-or, indeed, an alternative form of life-as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.

Poetry is philosophically interesting, writes Gerald L. Bruns, "when it is innovative not just in its practices, but, before everything else, in its poetics (that is, in its concepts or theories of itself)." In "The Material of Poetry," Bruns considers the possibility that anything, under certain conditions, may be made to count as a poem. By spelling out such enabling conditions he gives us an engaging overview of some of the kinds of contemporary poetry that challenge our notions of what language is: sound poetry, visual or concrete poetry, and "found" poetry.

Poetry's sense and meaning can hide in the spaces in which it is written and read, says Bruns, and so he urges us to become anthropologists, to go afield in poetry's social, historical, and cultural settings. From that perspective, Bruns draws on works by such varied poets as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Steve McCaffery, and Francis Ponge to argue for three seemingly competing points. First, poetry is made of language but is not a use of it. That is, poetry is made of words but not of what we use words to produce: concepts, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. Second, as the nine sound poems on the CD included with the book demonstrate, poetry is not necessarily made of words but is rooted in, and in fact already fully formed by, sounds the human body can produce. Finally, poetry belongs to the world alongside ordinary things; it cannot be confined to some aesthetic, neutral, or disengaged dimension of human culture.

Poetry without frontiers, unmoored from expectations, and sometimes even written in imaginary languages: Bruns shows us why, for the sake of all poetry, we should embrace its anarchic, vitalizing ways.

As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice Blanchot has earned tributes from authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Emmanuel Levinas. But their praise has told us little about what Blanchot's work actually says and why it has been so influential. In the first comprehensive study of this important French writer to appear in English, Gerald Bruns ties Blanchot's writings to each other and to the works of his contemporaries, including the poet Paul Celan.

Blanchot belongs to the generation of French intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s, survived the Occupation, and flourished during the quarter century or so after World War II. He was one of the first French intellectuals to take a systematic interest in questions of language and meaning. His focus in the mid-1930s on extreme situations -- death, madness, imprisonment, exile, revolution, catastrophe -- anticipated the later interest of the existentialists. Like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, Blanchot was a self-conscious writer of fragments, and he has given us one the most developed investigations that we have on the fragment as a kind of writing.

In a series of close readings, Bruns addresses the philosophical and political questions that have surrounded Blanchot and his writings for decades. He describes what is creative in Blanchot's readings of Heidegger's controversial works and examines Blanchot's conception of poetry as an inquiry into the limits of philosophy, rationality, and power.

In this wide-ranging meditation on the nature and purpose of hermeneutics, Gerald L. Bruns argues that hermeneutics is not merely a contemporary theory but an extended family of questions about understanding and interpretation that have multiple and conflicting histories going back to before the beginning of writing. What does it mean to understand a riddle, an action, a concept, a law, an alien culture, or oneself? Bruns expands our sense of the horizons of hermeneutics by situating its basic questions against a background of different cultural traditions and philosophical topics. He discusses, for example, the interpretation of oracles, the silencing of the muses and the writing of history, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, the canonization of sacred texts, the nature of allegorical exegesis, rabbinical midrash, the mystical exegesis of the Qur'an, the rise of literalism and the individual interpreter, and the nature of Romantic hermeneutics. Dealing with thinkers ranging from Socrates to Luther to Wordsworth to Ricoeur, Bruns also ponders several basic dilemmas about the nature of hermeneutical experience, the meaning of tradition, the hermeneutical function of narrative, and the conflict between truth and freedom in philosophy and literature. His eloquent book demonstrates the continuing power of hermeneutical thinking to open up questions about the world and our place in it.

Certainly one of the key German philosophers of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer also influenced the study of literature, art, music, sacred and legal texts, and medicine. Indeed, while much attention has been focused on Gadamer's writings about ancient Greek and modern German philosophy, the relevance of his work for other disciplines is only now beginning to be properly considered and understood. In an effort to address this slant, this volume brings together many prominent scholars to assess, re-evaluate, and question Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, as well as his place in intellectual history. The book includes a recent essay by Gadamer on 'the task of hermeneutics', as well as essays by distinguished contributors including Jurgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Gerald Bruns, Georgia Warnke, and many others. The contributors situate Gadamer's views in surprising ways and show that his writings speak to a range of contemporary debates - from constitutional questions to issues of modern art. A controversial final section attempts to uncover and clarify Gadamer's history in relation to National Socialism. More an investigation and questioning than a celebration of this venerable and profoundly influential philosopher, this collection will become a catalyst for any future rethinking of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as a significant starting place for rereading and reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer.