The Task

The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:10:23 -0500

George P. Landow, 1971.

The Frame of Art

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:06:41 -0400

David Marshall, 2005

Enlightenment Epistemology

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:33:05 -0400

Enlightenment Epistemology:

I should have done this months ago. Too lazy to fill it all in now, but I want to get around to it before my exams.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:35:53 -0400

David Hume, 1748.

Observations on Man

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:33:00 -0400

David Hartley, 1749.

Hartley’s is a materialist version of associationism.

BASICALLY: There is a white medullary substance in our brains. When we receive sense impressions, the ether next to it vibrates, causing (?) the brain to receive the idea. After many repetitions of the same sensation an impression or “vibratuncle” is formed in the brain. That is, sensation A, repeated many times, causes vibratuncle a. Association occurs when, say, sensation A, which usually happens at the same time as sensation B, happens by itself. Vibratuncle a will vibrate, but so will vibratuncle b. This is the whole “grooves in the brain” thing, which gets taken up by William James.

Elements of Criticism

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:32:33 -0400

Henry Home, Lord Kames, 1762.

An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry*

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:12:00 -0400

John Aikin, 1777.

Beginning with the problem of the insipidity of modern [nature] poetry. Science is new and exciting, with everything seemingly ahead of it, but poetry is repetition, backwards looking, etc. This is especially true of descriptive poetry—no poet is willing to “look into the face of nature.” Even good poets repeat the same images over and over.

Imitation and repetition aren’t the only problems, though. This kind of writing also leads to description that is faint or simply inaccurate. Aikin goes through many examples, ancient and modern, of inaccuracy of description.

A greater attention to natural history in poetry would not only eliminate the problems of inaccuracy and repetition, but it would also bring out the beauties of nature more vividly. Maaany examples of this. Of course, The Seasons turns out to be the crowning instance.

Discussion of use of nature in homeric similes, as well as pure description. Homer, etc. Natural history is good for moral poetry as well (keep Charlotte Smith in mind.)

Conjectures on Original Composition*

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:09:00 -0400

Edward Young, 1759.

Young begins with a defense of “composition” in general, in answer to the claim that too many people write. His argument is essentially consolations-of-philosophy-through-writing. He imagines that those who write are men of Letters and Leisure. I’m guessing that no one else gets consideration.

For Young, imitative literature is of inferior quality to original literature (he says that you can imitate literature or nature, so I assume he includes descriptive poetry in the category of imitative.) Even the best imitative works have to share their glory with the original. They do not produce as much of an effect on the reader as originals do.

But why are their so few originals in comparison to imitations? Not because there are no good writers anymore, but because writers are (1) prevented from examining themselves by undue attention to works that came before (2) they are prejudiced by the works that come before them and (3) they are intimidated by such works, and think they couldn’t produce anything as good. The moderns are inferior to the ancients, not because anything inherent in their capabilities, but because they have been cowed down by the circumstance of having to deal with an ancient legacy of literature.

Young is not degrading the ancients, but saying that original composition is made possible without reading their works. Composition and learning are two different things, and authors need to distinguish between them. Learning that leads only to imitation weakens our thinking, genius, and imagination. We can’t depend on genius entirely, but it must not be beholden to learning.

Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:07:25 -0400

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1796.

Confessions

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:42:55 -0400

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1770s.

Reveries of a Solitary Walker*

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:42:00 -0400

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1770s.

Walk 1: A general (paranoid) explanation of why Rousseau is writing these reveries, how he came to be alone, and how this work differs from his other writings.

Walk 2: Remembering reveries makes one relive them. He recounts the Great Dane episode, and both the fantastic reveries he had after it, and the paranoid attitude he took toward people after it happened.

Walk 3: He recounts arriving at middle-age and casting off worldly ambition. This also coincides with his attempt to establish his religious principles through his own rationality, for which he was exiled from society. Relying on one’s true knowledge, got only by the work of one’s reason, etc.

Walk 4: A reflection on the true meaning of lying, and the kinds of lies that he had told during his life, including in his Confessions.

Walk 5: Description of his life on Ile de St Pierre, the solitude it afforded him, and the botanizing he did there. It is not that nature is the basis for reverie, but that it facilitates it in the best possible way.

Walk 6: A discussion of the pleasures of charity vs. duty. Once you do favors for other people, then they expect it of you, and it is no longer an act that brings pleasure. Then the realization that even the good things he did for other people was not out of selflessness, but out of the desire to bring himself pleasure.

Walk 7: Botany has once more become his main interest. After shitting on the other natural sciences because they are too distant or difficult, he claims that he likes botany, not for itself, but for the chain of associations and memories that botany produces.

Walk 8:

Headlong Hall*

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:06:00 -0400

Thomas Love Peacock, 1816.

Headlong Hall is in the same format as Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle. It’s definitely not as good as the other two, but it’s interesting for me because it satirizes both Humphrey Repton (Marmaduke Milestone) and Richard Payne Knight (Sir Patrick O’Prism.) My edition says that Uvedale Price is O’Prism, but Peacock knew what he was about: Sir Patrick does not distinguish between the picturesque and the beautiful; Peacock references an Edinborough Review article (XIV, 295-328) that lays out the differences between their beliefs perfectly clearly.

Other than that, not much of interest to say that I haven’t said about the two other novels, etc: Why is Peacock still concerned with this stuff when it seems like old news?

Castle Rackrent*

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:04:00 -0400

Maria Edgeworth, 1800.

This was written while the Act of Union with Ireland was under debate in parliament, and framed as a story put to the public by an “editor” who asks his audience to use the story to consider if Ireland should be annexed to Britain. It tells the story of the Rackrent family, from the late 17th-mid 18th centuries from the point of view of Thady Quirk, the estate’s elderly steward. The family go from being the noble benefactors of a community to being corrupted by outside influence, especially through marriage with outside women. The estate finally comes into the hands of Sir Condy, a lower-class relative of the family, who knows what is write for the estate, but consistently does what he feels he is pressured to do. Eventually, the estate goes bankrupt and goes in to the hands of Thady’s scheming son Jason. Sir Condy dies and the novel ends, asking the reader whether or not Ireland should become part of Britain.

Ecology without Nature

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:59:04 -0400

Timothy Morton, 2007.

Rural Rides

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:57:23 -0400

William Cobbett, 1830.

The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place*

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:15:00 -0400

John Barrell, 1972.

This is my favorite book of literary criticism EVAR.

Chapter 1: 18th century writers like James Thomson and 18th C landscape painters had a preordained idea of landscape that they brought to any view, arranging it syntactically so that it can only be perceived and known in a certain manner by the reader/viewer.

Chapter 2: The rural professional class—men who in the latter half of the 18th century became involved with experimental agricultural improvement and the trappings of enclosure: small experimental farmers, surveyors, ETC. Their aesthetic notions of what land should look like are, of course, firstly dominated by the land’s utility, but it stands in tension with the picturesque. Mountainous or rocky landscapes near agricultural ones are always described together in a weird way.

The process of enclosure makes the landscape knowable to outsiders, of opening the landscape outward to knowledge.

Chapter 3: Clare has a sense of place, not an idea of landscape. Clare’s sense of place is buried in his language—in the syntax and the dialect. He immediately goes to the particular, and his description is paratactic, rather than syntactic like Thomson’s. His description is the content, his knowledge is what he sees. This is not depicting a landscape, like in a painting, but gesturing toward what it’s like to be in the place. This is not happy times yay localness, this is being forced to detail a place because you know no other. Because when enclosure comes through and destroys the place you live in, and you have no recourse to another, your sense of place is destroyed.

Rural Scenes and National Representation

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:41:22 -0400

Elizabeth Helsinger, 1997.

Helsinger’s book focuses roughly on the first half of the 19th century in Britain. To put it broadly, the book is about constructions of Britain as a nation through literary and visual representations of the English countryside. There’s some stuff I like about it.

It would be a mistake, however to read in these [privately owned estate] landscapes simply the representation of private property, space that has been emptied out, rationalized, and controlled for profitable production. Much more than maps and chorographies, landscapes point to appropriation as a process: to an idea of order continually working on local disorder, where general structures emerge in an encounter with the messily particular or the unrecognizable wilderness. The appropriative struggles on which georgic celebrations of a cultivated land depend are especially visible—and relished as a source of imaginative pleasure—in Gainsborough’s small landscapes, or in picturesque landscapes of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (Introduction, p. 23)

Will read intro, and the chapters on Clare and Cobbett, and maybe Constable and Turner, I’m not sure.

The Improvement of the Estate*

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:12:00 -0400

Alistair Duckworth, 1972.

Duckworth’s first axe to grind (and mostly rightly so, I think) has to do with the notion that Austen’s portrayal of society was ironic and subversive, and that any reward for a return to tradition or the affirmation of communal values over individual ones in her novels is only the manifestation of social pressures on Austen, not reflective of her true beliefs.

I agree: on most counts, Austen was an orthodox (although leaning toward evangelism) C of E Christian, and was socially conservative. However, she’s too complex to be pinned down in any one camp, and, to my mind, trying to derive her entire set of political opinions from her novels is not worth the effort.

I think Duckworth’s book is prescient because it was published a few years before the book that really broke the “Austen was conservative” argument wide open: Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. I think Duckworth also gave Austen credit for her thought in a way that I don’t think previous critics did. She was not a passive victim of ideology, but neither are her novels the weapons of the weak, in which are encoded a hidden record of rebellion. Duckworth gives her credit for thinking about her society, rather than merely reacting to it.

I also agree with Duckworth (although admittedly for reasons of personal taste) that Mansfield Park is central to Austen’s thought.

However, I cannot agree with how the uses he estate as a tool of analysis.

On one hand, there is this amazing sentence:

In the possession of a public language and of common modes of behavior, in the very disposition of buildings and landscape, such a community manifests an organization that has evolved over a long period of time. (2)

This is so true and so well stated that it makes me want to cry. But what seemed like an analysis of experience and perception, of bodies moving around in landscape and doing things from day to day, the true “grounds” of experience that Duckworth talks about, he makes Mansfield Park and other Austen estates into symbols instead.

My god, I fucking hate symbols. I will never teach them because they are lazy. They can be ANYTHING. Arguing about symbolism in a novel is like arguing about the role a dog’s pancreas plays in its emotions.

This is where Duckworth and I part company. I want a grounds of experience and knowledge before a grounds of opinion, and life before symbols.

Ah, well.

Discourses on Art -- Discourse XIII*

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:51:00 -0400

Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1786.

Works of art address themselves to the imagination and sensibility, not to the reason. Therefore, trying to found your opinions about art upon reason will never work out. You do, however, over the course of a lifetime, build up a sort of repository of knowledge and taste about art, which is not “contradictory to right reason” (230), although superior to it. The best way to judge art, then, is to take very careful note of your first impression when seeing a work of art for the first time. Because if you don’t, you may reason yourself out of liking something good, or reason yourself into liking something bad. The trick is to ferret out the sound reason that lies under imagination and sentiment.

Turn to Plato and his false reasoning: painting is NOT an imitation of nature. There is nothing natural about it; only the lowest form of an art affords “natural” pleasure to the uneducated.

“If we suppose a view of nature represented with all the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great Artist, how little and mean will the one appear in comparison of the other, where no superiority is supposed from the choice of the subject. The scene will be the same, the difference will be in the manner in which it is presented to the eye.” (237)

Art is not about the best way of representing nature, but the best way of deviating from nature. (I think he says something similar to this earlier in the essay. Or maybe that was Walpole on gardening. At any rate, it’s not my original thought.)

“All these circumstances [that is, the style of the picture] contribute to the general character of the work, whether it be of the elegant, or of the more sublime kind. If we add to this the powerful materials of lightness and darkness, over which the Artist has complete dominion, to vary and dispose them as he pleases; to diminish or increase them as will be suit his purpose, and correspond to the general idea of his work: a landskip thus conducted, under the influence of a poetical mind, will have the same superiority over the more ordinary and common views, as Milton’s Allegro and Penseroso have over a cold prosaick narration or description; and such a picture would make a more forcible impression on the mind than the real scenes, were they presented before us.” (238)

Then some stuff about theater. AND THEN:

So also Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden, Even though we define it, “”nature to advantage dress’d, and in some sense it is such, and much more beautiful and commodious for the recreation of man; it is however, when so dress’d, no longer a subject for the pencil of a Landskip-Painter, as all Landskip-Painters know, who love to have recourse to Nature herself, and to dress her according to the principles of their own Art; which are far different from those of Gardening, even when conducted according to the most approved principles, and such as a Landskip-Painter himself would adopt in the disposition of his own grounds, for his own private satisfaction. (240)

SUCK IT, Richard Payne Knight. Actually, this is a pretty confused passage. While Reynolds is thinking through the garden with a painter’s eye, he is not thinking through the relationship between the landscape gardener’s art and the painter’s art. It seems that gardens which do not lend themselves to being painted are not his concern. I’m sure Knight has something to say about this passage; I will have to look it up.

On Taste in Modern Gardening

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:55:24 -0400

Horace Walpole, 1764.