Paradox and Perspicacity: Horizons of Knowledge in the Literary Text enters into a dialogue with recent scholarship on a number of fronts. Taking into full account the role played by esotericism in shaping the thought of Leibniz, Cardano, and the Helmonts, Robert Eisenhauer elaborates Lessing’s «cybernetic» view of historical evolution. The essay on Jean Paul’s ars recombinatoria discusses how the discourses of travel, cosmology, and millennial speculation are applied to a Diderot-inspired project of encyclopedic emancipation, concluding with remarks on the author’s pedagogical relevance to German-speaking Jews. At mid-century, Margaret Fuller’s feminist texts place a Fourierist edge on the consensual reading of Richter, while The Blithedale Romance represents pastoral utopia as a site of mesmeric or, indeed, entropic dislocation. Henry James’s The Europeans revisits «Blithedale» as a «ship of fools», where the vehicular provides a metaphor for fiction and narrative itself becomes identified with iconic distress. The remaining essays treat Pound in the context of gemology and courtliness, quasi-direct discourse in Dostoevsky, and the role of Zeno’s paradox in Claude Simon’s fiction.

The Author: Robert Eisenhauer received his Ph.D. in comparative literature and German from The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Mythology of Souls (Peter Lang, 1987) and Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts (Lang, 2004), as well as articles, reviews, and notes in Paideuma, The Lessing Yearbook, Glyph, and Modern Language Notes. He participated in the 1990 National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at Harvard University and is the author of The Maya Railroad (1995), Sidereal Daylight (1997), and Hellas Borders (1999), poetic texts based on travels in the United States, Mexico, and Europe.