Adler Anthony

The following paper compares Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to the Metamorphoses, also known as the Golden Ass, of Apuleius, arguing that the Meister-novels involve a subtle transformation of Apuleius’s novel of transformation. In this way I hope to argue that the putative realism of the modern novel should not be understood merely as the triumph of secularization, but in fact has a theological basis. At the center of this hidden theology of the novel is the concept of curiosity: Wilhelm Meister recei

When literary scholars speak of "bilingual" and "multilingual" writers, they usually presuppose a very restricted understanding of what it means to "have" a language, in which the norm is the "native" competence of the speaker of a mother tongue. This understanding of "multilingualism" rests on the modern science of linguistics, which, rejecting the methods of traditional philology, privileges the oral over the written in conceiving of "language" as the subject of investigation. Yet it is also r

The Laws, Plato’s longest dialogue and also one of his last, has often been read as either a “popularization” of his more esoteric philosophy, if not a “degenerate” turn away from the rigors of philosophical discourse, or as the attempt to articulate a “second-best republic,” acceding to the limitations of reality. It is only recently, with the work of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Seth Benardete, that scholars have begun to recognize the full importance of the Laws within Plato’s oeuvre. Yet