I think I'll call it a light day today. It was raining earlier, and I enjoyed that. Now it's turning pretty light outside, and I'll want a few hours to myself before I go out tonight.
These essays were not so hard. I also tended to like their tone better. Sometimes Bloomfield was about to lose me, because he has the great and sweeping style of an old medieval historian, but he brought the information where it counted. Finally, their tone was clear. When you state clearly what the purpose of your essay is, it's not original or brilliant, but neither are most of the first couple of paragraphs of countless essays where I struggle to find the thesis.
Charles Dellheim, "Interpreting Victorian Medievalism." (DA553.H57 1992)
He broke it down. To put it concisely, there were several uses of medievalism in the period. The conservatives sought to use medieval themes to impose a sense of security and social order amidst the apparent upheaval of industrialization. The liberals used medieval themes to uphold claims for freedoms and liberties that were, according to them, older than bondage (see ideas of the "Norse yoke." Gothic architecture, instead of appropriating obscure rules and dictums of the church, were made instead to simultaneously restrain industry and uphold democratic virtues. Medievalists were unified in their appeal to the past, but not to its use.
Morton W. Bloomfield, "Reflections of a Medievalist: America, Medievalism, and the Middle Ages."
Another broad, sweeping essay. Medievalism is split into three uses -
1. Medieval ideas and institutions, carried directly onward, that later come to fruitition.
2. Looking back to medieval ideas and myths and reinterpreting them for the present.
3. Study of medieval history and the past for accuracy's sake.
He argues that the second and the third reinforce each other, to put it most broadly, that the scrupulous and careful study of history provides new modes of expression for the medievalist enthusiasts who start clubs like the SCA, who tend to look back longingly and forward with dread. I disagree with the last point, as a medievalist who is very technologically friendly, but the simplification here does not disrupt the main point.
Friday, August 28, 2009
A cold, cold dose of Romanticism
I enjoy a good deal of Romantic poetry. I prefer the writings on the subject less. Perhaps it is a gut reaction to the ostentatious tones that the critics this week tend to take. I'm not sure.
1. W.K. Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery"
Wimsatt is one of those old-guard critics. He espoused New Criticism, which emphasized study of the form and the structure of a poem. When used well, it provides brilliant close readings of material that would otherwise remain relatively inaccessible. When used dully, it is dry and raw. Wimsatt uses it well, but it occasionally chafes.
Main point: The Romantic poets, as compared to the Neoclassicists before them, moved away from metaphors where both tenor and vehicle were dissimilar and distinct to a mode where the tenor was an abstract quality. As the subject became nature, as the animating principle of the panthetistic spirit and the scientific object became a metaphysics, as the poets and readers became attuned to the thought and feeling, the structure of the poem and the metaphor changed to allow this explosion of imagination. Vividness that approaches direct sensory perception while nevertheless resisting the subrational. Nature gains uncommon power, a haunting character in this way.
I cannot dispute the point.
Unfamiliar words:
Esemplastic - unifying disparate parts. The poetic imagination is said to have an esemplastic power, according to the Romantics. In this case, it is the union of the individual and nature, possibly openng "our primary awareness of the world into symbolic avenues to the theological" (25).
1. W.K. Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery"
Wimsatt is one of those old-guard critics. He espoused New Criticism, which emphasized study of the form and the structure of a poem. When used well, it provides brilliant close readings of material that would otherwise remain relatively inaccessible. When used dully, it is dry and raw. Wimsatt uses it well, but it occasionally chafes.
Main point: The Romantic poets, as compared to the Neoclassicists before them, moved away from metaphors where both tenor and vehicle were dissimilar and distinct to a mode where the tenor was an abstract quality. As the subject became nature, as the animating principle of the panthetistic spirit and the scientific object became a metaphysics, as the poets and readers became attuned to the thought and feeling, the structure of the poem and the metaphor changed to allow this explosion of imagination. Vividness that approaches direct sensory perception while nevertheless resisting the subrational. Nature gains uncommon power, a haunting character in this way.
I cannot dispute the point.
Unfamiliar words:
Esemplastic - unifying disparate parts. The poetic imagination is said to have an esemplastic power, according to the Romantics. In this case, it is the union of the individual and nature, possibly openng "our primary awareness of the world into symbolic avenues to the theological" (25).
2. Geoffrey Hartman, "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness"
Main point: Both the German and the English Romantic poets saw introspection or self-consciousness as a disease, eating at oneself and wasting away like a self-consumed lover. Self-consciousness was both maligned and necessary to them. They thought that by learning enough and projecting their focus outward to nature, they would be able to move beyond self-consciousness to a new experience, a closer communion with nature that would be more original, more healthy. They would explore nature with their images, and not simplify it or cut down, as traditional analysis would tend to do. Poetry, like myth and religion, would resist the analytic destructive impulse and purify it. However, the Romanticists had a peculiar anxiety, because they could not adequately define the function of the art that served as their escape. Art tries to reconcile the subject with nature, but at the same time it is split from nature because it has no authoritative myth. Thus the Romantic poet, like the Wandering Jew, is anxious in his/her own deathlessness.
Unfamiliar words:
Thomas Carlyle: Came up with anti-self-consciousness theory. 19th century author.
Larmoyant: Tearful, maudlin. This author had a tendency of using French or German instead of English. In which the author talks about the tearful Romantics.
Main point: Both the German and the English Romantic poets saw introspection or self-consciousness as a disease, eating at oneself and wasting away like a self-consumed lover. Self-consciousness was both maligned and necessary to them. They thought that by learning enough and projecting their focus outward to nature, they would be able to move beyond self-consciousness to a new experience, a closer communion with nature that would be more original, more healthy. They would explore nature with their images, and not simplify it or cut down, as traditional analysis would tend to do. Poetry, like myth and religion, would resist the analytic destructive impulse and purify it. However, the Romanticists had a peculiar anxiety, because they could not adequately define the function of the art that served as their escape. Art tries to reconcile the subject with nature, but at the same time it is split from nature because it has no authoritative myth. Thus the Romantic poet, like the Wandering Jew, is anxious in his/her own deathlessness.
Unfamiliar words:
Thomas Carlyle: Came up with anti-self-consciousness theory. 19th century author.
Larmoyant: Tearful, maudlin. This author had a tendency of using French or German instead of English. In which the author talks about the tearful Romantics.
3. Paul de Man "The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image"
Lots of people like Paul de Man. I'm more ambivalent. You just don't begin an essay with, "In the history of Western literature..."
Main point: He's concerned with the shift of the status of the image in Romantic poetry to greater prominence and concreteness even as the structure of the poetic language becomes more metaphorical. The metaphors and words attempt to usurp the originary status of nature - they try to be original, but because they are images of something else, cannot be the literal or transcendental flower. Words must originate, and they cannot simply be pre-existing. The subsequent Victorians are tainted by this failure, and must live in the shadow of nature's grandeur. The poetic imagination even for the Romantics must turn away from earthly nature and ascend into some other nature, up in the sky, attempting to ascend beyond the contradictions of nature. Imagination, rather than encouraging coexistence with nature, seeks to establish consciousness independent of it, but he doesn't explain why the preoccupation with nature begins in the first place. (He only explains, via Rousseau, that it is there.)
Lots of people like Paul de Man. I'm more ambivalent. You just don't begin an essay with, "In the history of Western literature..."
Main point: He's concerned with the shift of the status of the image in Romantic poetry to greater prominence and concreteness even as the structure of the poetic language becomes more metaphorical. The metaphors and words attempt to usurp the originary status of nature - they try to be original, but because they are images of something else, cannot be the literal or transcendental flower. Words must originate, and they cannot simply be pre-existing. The subsequent Victorians are tainted by this failure, and must live in the shadow of nature's grandeur. The poetic imagination even for the Romantics must turn away from earthly nature and ascend into some other nature, up in the sky, attempting to ascend beyond the contradictions of nature. Imagination, rather than encouraging coexistence with nature, seeks to establish consciousness independent of it, but he doesn't explain why the preoccupation with nature begins in the first place. (He only explains, via Rousseau, that it is there.)
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