1. Difference & Similarity

2. In language difference and similarity fundamental principles we only know one sound, word, structure as it is different from others pin/bin, only one phoneme difference, voiced/unvoiced b,p pin is close to needle, but very different from bin we have to select paradigmatic / syntagmatic Minimal difference – asperity – clinamen – Paul Virilio

3. In literature, also fundamental concepts What is literature? - Derrida have some similarities, some differences différence/différance literature/non-literature - Italo Calvino - Why Read the Classics? - Return - should we include TV, news reporting, adverts... also, genre comedy and tragedy (Aristotle only couples them once, in passim) shopping list / phone message is vs. is not (Derrida...aporias – the gift, hospitality, forgiveness, mourning) Henri Lefebvre, Other vs Otherness

4. Jacques Derrida, Aporias What would such an experience be? The word that also means passage, traversal, endurance, and rite of passage, but can be a traversal without line and without indivisble border. Can it ever concern, precisely (in all the domains where the questions of decision and of responsibility that concern the border – ethics, law, politics, etc. – are posed), surpassing an aporia, crossing an oppositional line or else apprehending, enduring, and putting, in a different way, the experience of the aporia to a test? And is it an issue here of an either/or? Can one speak – and if so, in what sense – of an experience of the aporia? An experience of the aporia as such? Or vice versa: Is an experience possible that would not be an experience of the aproria?

5. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Carrion Comfort” Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

6. Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

7. Thomas Hardy, The Oxen Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.

8. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel, “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

9. "Describing What Never Happened": My point is not to diminish Persuasion's knowing and therefore bittersweet pursuit of Anne's requital, however moderated. It is to stress that the missed opportunity that informs Persuasion, or just as memorably Pride and Prejudice, is primarily a symptom in Austen's writing rather than a device relating primarily to the exigencies of plot. For it is plot, after all, with its temporal momentum forward, that creates the missed opportunity, making it an historical matter in contrast to which any fulfillment in and over time, whether by marriage to Wentworth or even to Fitzwilliam Darcy, is tantamount to letting "the real perish into art" (in Walter Benjamin's apt description) or into the particular probabilism that we call realism.

10. Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition In other words, we need to examine female images in Jane Austen's work in relation to the liberationist philosophy of that "feminist tradition" which preceded Jane Austen in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, and which, of course, has blossomed into the feminist revolt of our time. And, in the process, we should be able to answer some of the questions which have been raised about her female roles. Does the focus on marriage as a narrative goal in the novels mean that Jane Austen accepts the conventional notion of woman's "instinctual" needs for sexual "dependency" and childbearing? Is marriage presented as a sacrosanct, self-justifying goal, or does it symbolize the fruition, or failure, of certain human relationships?

11. … Obviously Jane Austen is not involved with questions of androgynous marriages, so-called "new“ moralities in sex, or with the socioeconomics of equal opportunities. But, nonetheless, her themes are comparable with the eighteenth century feminism of a Mary Wollstonecraft insofar as such feminism questioned certain masculine assumptions in society.