James Harriman-Smith

Category: Philosophy

  • Magical Thinking

    I remember when I first told someone that I played the fantasy cardgame Magic: The Gathering. That was nearly a decade ago now, and the excruciating set of emotions I experienced then have faded, but I still don’t tell many people this. To the best of my knowledge, none of my colleagues know that I…

  • The Game

    Warning: spoilers I watched Ender’s Game last night, and, with only a vague memory of the novel by Orson Scott Card on which it is based, was newly struck by all the moral questions raised by the story. One or two of them – as with most things these days – seemed to connect with…

  • Syncopation

    I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since I went to a seminar on Stein’s idea of ‘syncopation’ in her essay ‘Plays’, and have decided to do it now, even if my memory of what happened is fast fading. Actually, the question of the temporality of response is one that fascinates Stein, so perhaps…

  • Marian Hobson-Jeanneret and My Thesis

    Following on from my post on Anne Barton (née Righter), this post is dedicated to Marian Hobson-Jeanneret (née Hobson), and, more particularly, her book The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France, published in 1982. Like Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, this book grew out of Hobson-Jeanneret’s thesis, so…

  • A School for Hazlitt

    I am not a Hazlitt specialist, but I do enjoy reading and studying his writing a great deal. So I spent Saturday 14th September at UCL listening to a series of lectures on ‘Hazlitt and the Theatre’. They were all good, and, as a consequence, there is no way I could summarise them all here.…

  • Anne Barton and My Thesis

    I came across Anne Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play on a nicely named ‘local interest’ shelf at the Chaucer Head bookshop, Stratford-upon-Avon. The title immediately leapt out at me, as it offered a way of formulating my own thoughts on Shakespeare and drama in the eighteenth-century: the phrase ‘the idea of’ neatly…

  • What an actor knows…

    In 1785, Thomas Whately was persuaded to publish something he’d first drafted in the 1760s and put back in the cupboard in order to work on a treatise on Modern Gardening. This was his Remarks on the Characters of Shakespeare, which, when it finally did appear, had some success (whether more or less than the…

  • Back to Johnson

    I have lost count of the number of times that I have read Samuel Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765). This time, however, I came to it with some pretty sharp questions, and this post will offer a brief look at what this approach led me to in the text. The questions were,…

  • A Brief Response to A General View of the Stage

    Thomas Wilkes’s A General View of the Stage (1759) is an enormous and rich mine of information about the eighteenth-century stage. An attempt at raising the profile of the stage, defending it from its many detractors is both the book’s starting point and its over-arching theme. What I hope to do here is sketch out…

  • Reynolds vs Fielding (avec version française)

    Over the course of his tenure as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds gave a series of Discourses, one a year, on the occasion of the annual prizegiving in December. These speeches were not easy to compose for a number of reasons: first, as delivered by the president of…