19th c literature(bontila.an2)

7/28/2019 19th c Literature(Bontila.an2)

1/21

Handout Rom. I

1. Why a canon?2. Textuality and the interpreting act.

3. Elements of Romantic poetics.4. Defining Romanticism.5. New elements in the Pre-Romantic Period.6. Romanticism vs. Classicism.7. Paratactic list of features of Romantic Poetics.8. Recent influential studies on Romanticism.9. Romantic reconciliations.

1. old writings and habit of venerating them happen not primarily because they arewitnesses to a merely historical state of affairs, but because the state of affairs hasconsuming relevance to later times. (F.Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry. Essays inLiterary Interpretation, 1989.)

2.1. Period ENCODING DECODING Period

Paradigm StoryDISCOURSE

Author narrator - narratee Reader

Syntagm HyperSignification

Genre Genre

2.2. Writing as textuality undoes logocentricism through its rhetoriocal and tropingfigures.Logocentrism= a form of rationalism that presupposes a presence behind L. and text; (apresence such as an idea, an intention, a truth, a meaning or a reference for which L.acts as a subsurvient and convenient vehicle of expression.)Jacques Derrida - a free floating formalist (Nuttall)

indeterminacy of textual meaning; death of the author

concept of diffrance: difference+deferring

Interpretation will endlessly repeat the interpretative act, never able to reach that finalexplanation and understanding of the text, being a continual play of diffrance.

3. the poet; creative power; nature of poetry.

4. Romantic thought = an initially compensatory reaction to historically new social ills of asociety which was coming to think of man as merely a specialized instrument ofproduction.(R. Williams)Romantic art = a remedy for the ills of thought, a cure drawn from consciousness itselffor the disintegrative effects of self-consciousness.(G. Hartman)

8. M.H. Abrams,The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition ,OUP, 1953H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 1973; Poetry and Repression,1976Paul DeMan, The Rhetoric of Temporality, 1969; The Resistance to Theory,1986; TheRhetoric of Romanticism, 1986Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins,Rilke and Valery, 1954; Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,1993.Raymond Williams, Culture and Society:1780-1950, 1958, ch. The Romantic Artist.

Hegel, Phenomenology, 1807(sublation; thesis; antithesis; synthesis; symbol)9. Harter Fogle: Beauty vs. Truth; the unusual in the usual vs. the usual in the unusual.


2/21

Handout Rom. II

1. Romantic: etymology2. 19th century: cultural milieu

3. The Romantic Periods birth certificate4. W. Wordsworth (1770 1850): a writer with a philosophy, a clearly defined set of

convictions that he presents in his poetry.4.1 W. Ws influence in literature4.2 W. Ws philosophical vision: the egotistical sublime(J. Keats)4.3 W. Ws Pantheism4.4 Themes in Lyrical Ballads4.5 Design in Lyrical Ballads5. Text analysis: Expostulation and Reply; A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

1. Romanticromantic,mod. 1. [Referring to love and adventure] --Syn. adventurous, novel, daring, charming, enchanting,

idyllic, lyric, poetic, fanciful, chivalrous, courtly, knightly.

2. [Referring to languages descending from Latin; often capital] --Syn. romanic, romance, Mediterranean, Italic,

Latinic, Provencal, Catalan, Ladin or Rhaeto-Romanic or Romansh, Ladino or Judezmo, Andalusian, Aragonese,

Castilian.

3. [Referring to the Romantic Movement; often capital] --Syn. Rousseauistic, Byronic, Wordsworthian,Sturm und Drang (German).

2. Reaction against the French Revolution: Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolutionin France (1790). Reactions for: Peter Priestly, Letters to Burke (1790); Thomas Peine,Rights of Man (1791); Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man(1791),Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1791);William Cobbet, Weekly Political Register;W.Godwin, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue andHappiness,(1793).

3. 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads foreworded by the Preface: the Manifesto of theRomantic Movement; Lyrical Ballads inaugurates Modern Poetry, the poetry of thegrowing inner self.

4.1 use of common language; detecting the Spirit of Beauty and Goodness in Nature4.2 Egotistical Sublime (J. Keats) egotistical


3/21

Handout Rom. III

1. S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834) s views of poetry and nature.2. S.T. Coleridges philosophy.

3. Poetry as spiritual and intellectual quest.4. Symbol formation and symbolic functioning.4.1 Symbolization vs. verbalization.4.2 Human consciousness, poetry and religion.5. Coleridges technique.6. Unifying theme in Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel.7. Text analyses: Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

1. Myth-maker< expressing his ideas as SYMBOLS.2. Coleridges antirationalism derives from German idealist philosophers (e.g. Kants

The Critique of Pure Reason).The term, Philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truthis the correlation of being.(Biographia Literaria, ch. 9); intelligence is capable only oflifeless and sightless notion; reason is a source of actual truth, the soul beholds, itdoes not hypothesize.Organic / mechanical knowledge; symbol / allegory; reason / understanding;imagination / fancy exemplified on Shakespeares work.

3. The illogical order of symbolist art coincides with the order of learning and insight.Form is factitious Being, and Thinking is the process, Imagination the Laboratory, inwhich Thought elaborates Essence into Existence. A Philosopher, i.e. a nominalPhilosopher without Imagination, is a Coiner- Vanity, the Froth of the molten Mass is

his Stuff- and Verbiage the Stamp& Impression.(Notebooks, vol.2 no 2444)4. Every living principle is actuated by an idea; and every idea is living, productive,partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containth an endlesspower of semination.'(The Statemans Manual(1817),Lay Sermons)a Symbol is characterized by the translucence of the External through and in theTemporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while itenunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is therepresentative. The others are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associateswith apparitions of matter Alas! for the flocks that are to be led forth to suchpastures.

4.1 symbolization=the imaginative containment of a living idea.

Verbalization=the manipulation of fixed counters(The Friend)4.2 It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness that we should be brought to

this negative state, & that should pass into Custom - but likewise necessary that attimes we should awake & step forward - this is effected by Poetry &Religion.(Notebooks, vol.3 no 3632)

5. Coleridge inspired himself from Lisle Bowles(1762-1850) s technique in theSonnets>viz. the technique of exploring an arrested moment of emotion by fixing it spacially ina particularized landscape; illiterate eye showing a cultivation ofauditory powers.What I call this auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetratingfar bellow the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinkingto the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back,

seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not withoutmeanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, thecurrent and the new and surprising the most ancient and the most civilisedmentality.(T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry, p.111)


4/21

Handout Rom. IV

1. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) and his tradition.2. G.G. Byrons own poetics.

3. Byron and the interpreting act.4. The lure of biography.5. Byronism and the Byronic hero.6. Byrons metafictional strategy.6.1 Colloquial and narrative technique.6.2 Inter- and extratextuality.7. Text analysis: Don Juan

1. If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues,Milton appealed to the avenger, Time;

If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongsAnd makes the word Miltonic mean sublime,

He deigned not to belie his soul in songs,Nor turn his very talent to a crime;

He did not loathe the sire to laud the son,But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (Don Juan, Dedication, St.10)

You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,At being disappointed in your wish

To supersede all warblers here below,And be the only blackbird in the dish;(Don Juan, Dedication, St.3)

2. Byron claims with remarkable clarity that the basis of poetry lies not in individualwords, as Eliot implies, but in the relationships they mutually establish.

3. Byron stresses not the mystery residing in the object but the doubt caused by our ownfallible mental activities.Byron declared about Don Juan, I have no plan I had no plan but I had or havematerials; and indeed the manner in which it is written is just as important as the story as he observed, I mean it for a poetical Tristam Shandy.

4. Byron travels to escape his own ennui: To withdraw myself from myself has ever been

my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Hours of Idleness (1808)Beppo, Mazeppa, Cain, Sardonapalus (1816)

5. The Byronic hero = a moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentantwanderer.

= a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow andmisery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, incapable in revenge, yet capable of deep andstrong affection. (Macaulay)

Byronism = the attitude of Titanic cosmic self-assertion; Bertrand Russell, History of

Western Philosophy, dedicates a chapter to G.G. Byron.I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - I am such a strange

mlange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. (Letterto a friend of hisLady Blessington)


5/21

There are but two sentiments to which I am constant a strong love of liberty and adetestation of CANT.

6. Byron is considered the inventor of a species of discursive narrative poetry, loose

enough to contain an intermittent ironic commentaryon contemporary life and mannersas well as himself.

6.1 Ottava Rima stanza, (a b a b a b c c ) < Italian Renaissance Luigi Pulgi, FrancescoBerni - > a metre whose potential for narrative style of mock-heroic impudence ismagnificently exploited.

6.2 Inter- and extratextuality with Byron, functions comically to foreground the processwhereby literary art creates its illusions through language and so becomes self-referentialcreating those myriad of slippages and maladjustments of that social network [that] createthe gaps in which his irony and satire operate.(P.J. Manning)

Handout Rom. V

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) s specific poetics.1.1 Form; subject-matter; tone; imagery.2. P.B. Shelleys creed.3. P.B. Shelleys works.

4. P.B. Shelleys views on the social part of the poet and poetry.5. P.B. Shelleys symbolism6. Text analysis:Epipsychidion

1.1 The purelyric= a short poem, celebrating nothing but the poets own soul with fewor no attendant circumstances.Shelley idealizes, universalizes the human nature.e.g. Prometheus, Alastor, TheRevolt of Islam.

Terza Rima < interlocking tercets a b a b cb c d c> e.g.The Triumph of LifeThe feeling of a scene rather than the individual elements that constitute it.

2. Shelley inspired himself from Godwins views: evil is not inherentin the system ofcreation but an accident that might be expelled.

3. Queen Mab; Alastor; The Revolt of Islam; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais; TheWitch of Atlas; The Triumph of Life (unfinished); shorter poems.

4. The Necessity of Atheism (1811);A Defence of Poetry (1821).

5. W.B. Yeats says that Shelleys symbolism has an air of rootless fantasy becauseit has never lived in the mind of a people.


6/21

Handout Rom. VI

1. Characteristics of John Keats (1795-1821) s poetics.1.1 The poet as central concept.

2. J. Keatss thinking system.3. The Bowerprinciple vs. The Buildungprinciple.4. A chronology of J. Keatss work.4.1 Imagination and Growth in the Great Odes5. Keatss conception of a general and gregarious advance of intellect in cultural history.6. Keats and the poetic principle ofself-development.7. The allegorical function of self.8. Keatss principle of vale of soul-making.9. Keatss sense of the fellowship with essence.10.Text analysis: Ode to Psyche.

1. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Hearts affections and the truth ofimagination.(Letter to Bailey)I can never feel certain of any Truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.( Letterto George)M. Arnold said that No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare has inexpression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.Appeal to the senses; empathy; negative capability; cultural background; Greekmythology and Middle Ages.

1.1 The Poet endowed with Negative capability < Platos theory of the Daimon.

2. Due to his analogous thinking, Keatss poetry is allusive, programme-free, notnaming things but suggesting them.Keatss mythopoetics is directed towards the achievement of the two eternal concepts:Beautyand Truth.

3. Morris Dickstein introduces two interesting concepts characterizing Keatss work:The Bower principle = the embodiment of a nave rather than a decadent state ofOneness with nature.The Buildung principle = its objective is coexistence with its own self-formation andnot quite the principle of the quest.

= it is connected with a poetics of transcendence (e.g.Endymion) or a poetics ofhistoricity (e.g. the Two Hyperions).

4. Endymion (1818); La Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Ballad (1819); The Fall of Hyperion(1819); The Odes: Ode to Psyche; Ode to A Nightingale; Ode on A Grecian Urn; OdeOn Melancholy; Ode On Indolence; To Autumn (1819); Lamia; Hyperion; Isabella; TheEve of St. Agnes (1820);

4.1 Leading theme: the theme oftransience andpermanence.

5. The Mansion of Many Apartments is a metaphor which represents the life of the mind.(Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818)The Chamber of Maiden Thought is at the heart of the minds mansion, and alldoors open from it. From its original infant or thoughtless Chamber, the soul is

imperceptibly impelled to the next chamber by innate forces beyond its control, byforces which have strangely awakened, on the lines of Coleridges recognition that attimes we should awake and step forward.


7/21

6. I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other Men seeinghow great a thing it is. (Letter to Hunt)

7. The selfs function is to sense and watch the internal manifestations of the Genius of

Poetry the thinking principle, motivated by the eternal Being, the Principle ofBeauty- and the Memory of Great Men. (Notebooks)

They are very shallow people who take everything literal A Mans life of any worth isa continual allegory _ and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life a life like thescriptures, figurative. (Shakespeares Criticism)

Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.

8. Difficulties nerve the Spirit of a Man they, make our Prime Objects a Refuge as wellas a Passion. (The Friend) the principle ofVale of Soul- Making.

A poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination it can scarcely beconceived how Milton might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in alarge gothic vault. (marginal note to Paradise Lost in The Students Manual, LaySermons, ed. R. J. White, 1972)

Keats internalized the model for expanding the mind, taken from Milton, in his ownprocess of metabolizing emotional obstacles by etherealizing, alchemizing ordigesting, (frequent metaphors of his ), such that they become developmental aids inthe Vale of Soul- making, nerving the spirit.

9. The idea of Beauty is the quarry and the food which produces in the poet essentialverse.(in Keatss sense of a fellowship with essence).

Keats always regarded a sense of beauty as the first step in recognizing therichness of any potential mind-forming experience; and by beauty, Keats included a rangeof complex sensations such as pain, ugliness, blindness, etc.

I have the same idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime,creative of essntial Beauty.

According to Keats the imagining-into faculty is secondary to (or consequent on)the being-imagined-into faculty which (in Coleridge' s terms) reflects the mystery of

being.


8/21

Handout Rom. VII

1. Romantic Essayists and their Vision on the Epoch vs Victorian Prose Writers and theirVision on their Own Epoch.

1.1 Representatives, Means of Expression, Degrees of Commitment.1.2 Divergent Views on the Individual / Democracy Dichotomy.2. Religion vs. Science in the 19th Century Context.2.1Reactions to the Religious Impasse.3. Safety Valves as a Result of Individual Alienation.4. 20th Century Reactions to the Victorian Age.5. Characteristics of Victorian Literature.6. Prose as Instrument of Persuasion and Argumentation.7. Victorian Poetry vs. Romantic Poetry.8. Victorian Theories of the Poet.

1. Reformers (Politics + Religion) Conservatives Uncommitted

L. Hunt (1784-1859) W. Hazlitt(1778-1830) Ch. Lamb (1775-1834)

Periodicals practical critic personal essaysl (the ephemeral of (liberty, equality) e.g. Essays of Elia

everyday life) impressionist criticisme.g.Autobiography e.g. The Pleasure of Hating

Th. Love Peacock (1785-1866)

Surviver of the great 18th

c. traditionof satire

e.g. The Four Ages of Poetry Th. De Quincey (1785-1859)

impressionist criticisme.g. Syle; Rhetoric

nightmarish side of humanconsciousnesse.g. Confessions of an English

Opium Eater

1.2 Supporters ofPersonal Freedom: J. S. Mill in Principles of Political Economy(1848

year ofThe Communist Manifesto); On the Subjection of Women (1869) about whichThe Queen had to say: Lady ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject whichmakes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men andwomen different then let them remain each in their position.In Mills view the distinction between 18th c. and 19th c. thinking is : For the apotheosisof Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct whichwe find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace rational fundations.The Cult of the Great Man as supported by Th. Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship,and the Heroic in History.The Ages Protest against Machinery: Th. Carlyle: To me the Universe was all voidof Life, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-Engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.J. Ruskin: The ugliness of urban life made people steal out to the fields and themountains.


9/21

SCIENCE (Darwin) RELIGION LOSS OF FAITH DOUBT / BELIEF FAITH

Utilitarianism Philosophical Conservatives Tractarianism(J. Bentham/Malthus/J. Mill)

EDUCATIONAgnosticism

T.H. Huxley(1825-1895) Th. Carlyle (1795-1881) J.H.Cardinal Newmancontroversialist Sartor Resartus (1801-1890)

On the Physical Basis of Life The Everlasting No Oxford Movement The Everlasting Yea Apologia Pro Vita Sua (vital spark)

John Stuard Mill Th. Macaulay(1806-1873) (1800-1859)

On Liberty History of Englandfrom

Of Individuality the Accession of James IIWhat Is Poetry? (Great debater of progress)

(INDIVIDUAL more importantthan the State or Church.)

J. Ruskin (1819-1900) : If only the Geologists would let

Modern Painters me alone, I could do very well,The Stones of Venice but those dreadful hammers! IThe Nature of Gothic hear the clink of them at the

(a prophet) end of every cadence of theBible verses. (1851)

W. Morris (1834-1896) M. ARNOLD (1822-1888) News from Nowhere The Function of Criticism (ideal of a communist state) Culture and Anarchy

The Beauty of Life Friendships Garland (work-pleasure) (CULTURE=a panacea)

(ag. PHILISTINISM)

W. Pater(1839-1894) : the legitimate contention Is, notAppreciations of one age or school of literary

Aesthetic Poetry art against another, but of allRomanticism successive schools alike,(epicurian preacher, against the stupidity which isimpressionistic critic) dead to the substance, and the

vulgarity which is dead to form.3. Theatre: farce; pantomime; burlesque melodrama; Punch and Judy shows

Journalism: 150 Comic Journals; Literature: Nonsense (Limerick; Jabberwocky)4. for: G. Steiner: Victorian Period: the Great Summer of Human Civilization

against: Georgian reaction: Victorian=Prudery; V. Woolf: dampness, rain;9. Th. Carlyles poet as hero; Sinfields the poet of the margins; J.S. Mills and Lewess

the secular poet of the margins= the poet divorced from the politics, one whose duty is


10/21

to aesthetics, pleasure, beauty and not prophecy, instruction and devotion. (e.g.Tennyson)

Handout Vic. VIII

1. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) as exponent of the secular poet of the margins.2. Alfred Tennysons poetry between solipsism and social involvement.2.1Alfred Tennysons self renewing techniques.3. Signposts in His Evolution.3.1In Memoriam A.H.H.(1850): theme, form, imagery.4. Arthur Tennysons Conception of Language.5. Text Analysis: In Memoriam, Section 54

1. Vex not the poets mindWith thy shallow wit:Vex not thou the poets mind;For thou canst not fathom it.Clear and bright it should be ever,Flowing like a crystal river;Bright as light, and clear as wind. (The Poets Mind, 1830)

2. A. Tennyson confesses in a commentary to Tears, Idle Tears (1847): it is thedistance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not theimmediate today in which I move.Stopford Brooke (Victorian critic, 1894) reconsidered Ts relation to modern life: Tsage was vividly with him as he wrote of patriotism; the proper conception of freedom;the sad condition of the poor; the position of women in the onward movement of the

world; the role of commerce and science in that movement; the future of the race; thenoble elements of English character, their long descent and the sacred reverence weowed to them.

3. The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; The Epic [Morte dArthur]; Ulysses; ThePrincess, A Medley; Idylls of the King (The Coming of ArthurThe Passing of Arthur).

3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) literary sources: Horaces Odes; pastoral elegy; love-sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare; Dantes Vita Nuova and Divina Commediae.

4. (a) The empiricist perspective on language


11/21

Isobel Armstrong: He is a baffling poet because the writing often seems to long for asimplicity which is betrayed by the complexity of its language.Handout Vic. IX

1. Robert Browning(1812-1889)s method in poetry vs. Alfred Tennysons method.2. Robert Browning as a forerunner of 20th century poetry.2.1The Dramatic Monologue as norm.2.1.1 Definition; advantages.3. Vitality: the most outstanding principle of Brownings poetry.4. Aspects Separating Browning from the Victorian Age.5. Robert Browning: the humanist, historicist and dialectician.6. Text Analysis: My Last Duchess1. Browning wrote in McAleer, Dearest Isa: 328 about A. Tennysons Pelleas and Ettare

(1869): Here is an Idyll about a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to thetemptation of that friends mistress after having engaged to assist him in his suit. Ishould judge the conflict in the knights soul the proper subject to describe: Tennysonthinks he should describe the castle, and the effect of the moon on its towers, andanything but the soul.My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul; little else is worthstudy.(Sordello) His poems are described always dramatic in principle, and so manyutterances of so many imagery persons, not mine.(Preface of 1868)

2. The American poet Richard Howard (1969) dedicated a volume of monologues to B.:to the great poet of otherness, who said, as I should like to say, Ill tell my state asthought were none of mine.

2.1 Randall Jarrell remarked: the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for itseffect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form oranother the norm. (Poetry and the Age, 1953)

2.2 D.M. = A poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginaryaudience.

= One instance of the monologue besides monodrama, soliloquy, solo address.(1) A way of lying while seeming to tell the truth or vice versa.(2) each speaker of

D.M. provides a mask for the poet.(3) the triad reader / speaker / poet is broughttogether as the Readers work through the words of the speaker toward themeaning of the poet.

3. I.e. Life is presented as a challenge to be met with positive effort, even if the contest

seems desperate and pointless; through (1) character, action, explicit statement; (2)language, versification and poetic texture.

4. In point ofcharacters and style.Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi; Sordello; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at SaintPraxeds Church; Paracelsus; Caliban Upon Satabos; Men and Women.

5. R. Browning is a skeptical man whose ultimate concern is man preference for theconflict in his characters; forerunner of the stream of consciousness technique; God isrevealed to Man through Love: the infinite becomes the finite through Christ.Brownings Language has an emotional basis: the more emotional it becomes, thegreater the chance to contain approximations of truth personal, existential truth.

Brownings imagination was historical and therefore novelistic: e.g. The Ring and theBook; he dealt more with Facts than Fancies.General theme: Order Vs Disorder


12/21

General mood: an optimistic confidence in the enormous prospects of humanhappiness, capable to overcome human suffering.Diction is denotative to the extreme.Handout Vic. X

1. Gerard Manley Hopkinss (1844-1889) poetry: a means towards a deeperknowledge.

1.1 Significant Data for His Career as an Outstanding Searcher in the Science of PoeticLanguage.

1.2 Poetry between Verbal Sound and Meaning. Definition.1.3 Hopkinss Concept of Identity.2. His Theory of Poetry and Language.2.1 Inscape. Instress. Running Instress.2.2 Language and the taste of Himself.2.3 Vocabulary: A Personal Thesaurus.2.4 Symbols Used by Hopkins.3. Recurrent Themes in Early Verse.4. Hopkins, Aesthetics and Religion.4.1The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875)5. Innovatory Techniques. Deviant Language.6. Hopkins as Critic.7. Sonnets. Terrible Sonnets.

1. Every true poetmust be original, and originality a condition of poetic genius; so thateach poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum orspecificum) and

can never recur. (Hopkins)1.2 Hopkins defined poetry: speech formed for contemplation of the mind by the way ofhearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over andabove its interest of meaning.

1.3 I consider my self being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself,of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale oralum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicableby any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must itbe to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress ofpitch, distinctiveness and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it orresembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the feeling. But

this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and doresemble. But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at onetankard, that of my own being.

2.1 Inscape the outward signs by which a creatures inner identity could be grasped. Instress the emotional force with which inscape impressed itself on his

consciousness.Power of the eye to communicate with the noneye.Power of the man to reveal his inscape to the inscape of the objects.Power of the object to reveal its own inscape.Secures the unity of the world.

Natural urge towards its own proper function, inherent in everything.Running Instress the modification of one INSTRESS by relics of a previous one inthe mind of the observer.

2.2 Language should be appropriate both to the inscape and his own self-being.


13/21

2.3 His thesaurus was gathered from all sources: workday and literary, local andcosmopolitan.

2.4 Fire and Light; the beauty of the sacrifice; regret before the fact of decay and mortality.3 Religious content:A Vision of Mermaids; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection.

4 Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty; Hopkins wrote in his Journal(1866-1875):All the world is full of inscape; and he caught inscapes everywhere: in leaves,flowers, trees, bird-song, bird-flight, horses and distant sheep; in waves, waterfalls,clouds, sunsets and stars. I do think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have beenlooking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.The world might be seen as the INSCAPEofGOD.Duns Scotuss Scriptum Oxonieuse Super Sententies: the theory ofthisness.

4.1 You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuitand resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by thewish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three littlepresentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of 75 theDeutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns,exiles from Germany by the Falck laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected bythe account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someonewould write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work (letter to Dixon, 1878)Sprung Rhythm =the purely accentual verse which he extensively explained inPreface to Poems.

5 Sprung Rhythm; Upbeat (Slack); Downbeat (Ictus); Alliteration; Inscape; Instress.

Ellipses; inversions; substitutions; omission; odd affixation; dialecticism; paradigmaticshifts; syntactic ambiguities; homophones; word order.

5. The ability to hold a special awareness of his own self, inscaping the world.The inscape of speech reveals the inscape of the artists person.Seriousness - the touchstone of highest art

- being in earnest with your subject-realityBeauty has an ethical contingency: a necessary condition to the fullness of theHoliness beauty + good

The Handsome Heart = the beauty of the character

6. Binsey Poplars; Spring; The Starlight Night; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; CarrionComfort; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.


14/21

Handout Vic. XI

1. Romance Vs Novel. Romance Vs Realism1.1 Characteristics ofRomances1.2 Victorian Definitions of the Novel1.3 Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction1.4 Realism as Perfect Agreement between Form and Message2. Characteristics of the Victorian Novel3. Victorian Novelists as Historians of the Two Englands4. Functions of the Novel in the Victorian Age5. Common Victorian Themes6. Original Audience7. Famous Representatives8. Comic Verse, Parody, Nonsense8.1 Punchs (1841) jokes: a national industry8.2 Representatives of the Genre

1.2 A Romance originally meant anything in prose or in verse written in any of the Romance languages; aNovel meant a new tale, a tale of fresh interest now, when we speak of a Romance, we generallymean a fictitious narrative, in prose or verse, the interest of which turns upon marvellous anduncommon incidents; and, when we speak of a Novel we generally mean a fictitious narrative differingfrom the Romance, inasmuch as the incidents are accommodated to the ordinary train of events andthe modern state of society. (D.Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of

the History of British Prose Fiction, 1859).

A good novel should be both [sensational and realistic], and both in the highest degree. (A. Trollope.Autobiography, 1883)

Between realism and idealism, there is no natural conflict. This completes that. (G. Meredith, 1862)

1.4 Jan Watt states that the first use of the term REALISM occurred in 1835 as an aestheticdescription to denote the vrit humaine of Rembrandt opposed to the idalit potique of neo-classical painting; it was later consecrated as a specifically literary term by the foundation in 1856 ofRalism, a journal edited by Duranty.(Jan Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1970).

The novels realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it. (J Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1970)

R.Wellek defines the realism of this period as truth of observation and a depiction of commonplaceevents, characters and settings.

2. Walter Allen in The English Novel, 1954, remarks that: This sense of identity with their times is of

cardinal importance in any consideration of the early Victorian novelists. It was a source alike of theirstrengths and of their weaknesses, and it distinguishes them both from their successors and from theirgreat European contemporaries.

The English saw themselves as preachers sometimes as preachers and always as reformers, always

as public entertainers. Their conception of themselves was modest, their conscious aim nothing muchmore than Wilkie Collinss Makeem laugh, makeem cry, makeem wait. (W.Allen, The English Novel)


15/21

7. the 1840s the 1860s the 1880sthe 1850s the 1870s the 1920s

romance + The Brontsnovelistic devices Charlotte (1816- 1855)

Gothic Novel Emily (1818-1848)W. Scott Ann (1820-1849)S. Richardson Ch.Dickens(1812- 1870) E.Gaskell(1810-1865)

Th.Hardy (1840- 1928)

Novelistic devices G.Eliot (1818-1880)

Prevail W.Thackeray(1811- 1863)Picaresque Novel

Jane Austen G. Meredith (1828- 1909)

H.James (1843-1916)

In F.R.Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948):

J.Austen G.Eliot G.MeredithH.James J.Conrad D.H.Lawrence

8. J.S.Mill said that: Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it isdesirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.

8.1 Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe. (Jabberwocky in L. Carroll,Alice through the Looking-Glass)

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Seven against Sense, 1880

One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is:Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this.What, and wherefore, and whence? For under is over and under:

If thunder could be without lightning, lighting could be without thunder.Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?Why, and whither, and how? For barley and rye are not clover:Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over.Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight:Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate.Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels:God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels.Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which:The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditchMore is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole:Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul?

One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two:Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.Once the mastodon was: pterodactyls were common as cocks:Then the mammoth was God: now is He a prize ox.Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew:


16/21

You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you.Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock:Cocks exist for the hen: but hens exist for the cock.God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see:Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

Handout Vic. XII

1. Charles Dickenss (1812-1870) work: a melting pot of 18th century fictional devices1.1 The Dickens of Coach Journeys1.2 Dickens: The Great StageManager Novelist1.2.1Elements of Macro and Microstructure of his Novels2. Dickens: One of the Greatest Stylists of 19th Century3. Distinctive Features of the Dickensian Style3.1 Sample Analyses4. Dickens Defends Fantasy

1.1Journeys are one of the most controlling metaphors in Dickenss early novels: ThePickwick Papers; Oliver Twist; Nicholas Nickleby; The Old Curiosity Shop; BarnabyRudge; American Notes; Martin Chuzzlewit; The Chimes; A Christmas Carol.

1.2.1 Mario Prazs formula for Dickenss Novel is: melodrama + grotesque + humorouselaboration of characters

2. When confronted with a Dickens text the reader is forced to make some readjustmentof understanding while reading. The readers unsettled experience becomes a principalmeans of recognizing meanings and effects associated with a text.

3. Grandiloquence was the besetting linguistic vice of Dickenss era, and it is clear frommany burlesque treatments of it in his novels (notably in the language of Mr.Micawber),that Dickens himself regarded it as a vice.The occurrence of this device in Dickenss own narrative is a sign of non-seriousness,a linguistic game-playing which is a prose counterpart of the mock-heroic style inpoetry.

3.1 Among the good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadnt robbed the pantry,in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth,with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because Iwas not allowed to speak( I didnt want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the

scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork ofwhich the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No; I should not haveminded that, if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldnt leave me alone.(Ch. Dickens, Great Expectations, Chapter 4)

4. It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is truth. Theexact truth must be there; but the merit of art in the narration is the manner of stating thetruth. As to which thing in literature, it always seems to me that there is a world to be done.And in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal & catalogue-like to makethe thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable creature can do in thatway I have an idea (really founded on the love of what I profess) that the very holding of

popular literature through a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fancifultreatment. (Ch. Dickens, Letter to John Foster, 1859 in J. Foster, The Life of Ch. Dickens(1874) vol.III)


17/21

Handout Vic. XIII

1. W.M. Thackerays (1811-1863) work: a continuous portrayal of the real1.1 Sources of Realism1.2 The novelist on the novel

2. E. Gaskell (1810-1865) and domestic realism2.1 Th. Carlyles concept ofEnvironment of Circumstances2.2 Elements of Macro and Microstructure of her Novels

3. Emily Bront (1818-1848) as best representative of That Family of Poets.3.1 Wuthering Heights (1847) a self reflexive novel _ a book about spiritual war.

1.1 Realism in Thackeray issues out ofParody.Thackerays sense of an unheroic 19th century was based on a specifically anti-heroicreading of history which challenged Carlyles influential views on heroes, greatindividual men who provided the driving force of a nations history.

1.2 The Art of Novels Is to Represent NatureI think Mr.Dickens has in many things quite a divine genius so to speak & certain notes

in his song are so delightful & admirable, that I should never think of trying to imitatehim, only hold my tongue & admire him. I quarrel with his Art in many respects: which Idont think represents Nature duly . The Act of Novels is to represents Nature; toconvey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality _ in a tragedy or a poem or alofty drama you aim at producing different emotions; the figures moving, and theirwords sounding, heroically: but in a drawing-room drama, a coat is a coat and a pokera poker, and must be nothing else according to my ethics, not an embroidered tunicnor a great red-hot instrument like the Pantomime weapon.(W.M.Thackeray, Letter to David Masson, 6 May 1851, Letters 1945)

...We are for the most part an abominably foolish & selfish people desperately

wicked & all eager after vanities. Everybody is you see in that book [i.e. Vanity Fair] for instance if I had made Amelia a higher order of woman there would have been novanity in Doblins falling in love with her, where as the impression at present is that heis a fool for his pains, that he has married a sweet little thing & in fact has found out hiserror, rather a sweet & tender & however quia multum amavit.I want to leave everybody dissatisfied & unhappy at the end of the story we ought allto be with our own & all other stories. Good God, dont see (in that maybe cracked &warped looking glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses;wickednesses, lusts, follies, shortcomings? In company let us hope with betterqualities about which permit discourse. We must lift up our voices about these & howlto a congregation of fools; so much at least has been my misanthropy to task - I wish I

could myself: but take the world by a certain standard (you know what I mean) & whodares talk of having any virtue at all? (W.M.Thackeray, Letter to Robert Bell, 3September 1848, Letters 1945in Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel)


18/21

2. Th. Carlyle endowed the term environmentfor the first time when translating Goethewith a new connotation viz. environment of circumstances: the condition underwhich any person or thing lives or is developed; the sum-total of influences whichmodify and determine the development of life or character.

2.1 R. Williams considers that there is a deliberately close but limited access to thewriting that was actually being done by the class that Mrs. Gaskell was writing about,as in her close reliance on Bamford, or in the inclusion of dialect in that deliberatelyassociating, and yet at the same time outwardly explanatory, way. (Forms of EnglishFiction in 1848, 1986)

R.Williams remarks that the relationship of Margaret and Thornton and their eventualmarriage serve as a unification of the practical energy of the Northern manufacturerwith the developed sensibility of the Southern girl which is stated explicitly by E.Gaskell in her novel. (R.W., 1986)The device of the legacy which usually solves the insoluble problems in the world ofthe Victorian novel is also used by E.Gaskell in North and South, which very well maycome in the category offiction of special pleading. (R.W., 1986)

3. Emily Bront justifies her belonging to that family of poets. (W.M.Thackeray)

3.1 Wuthering Heights , an I-narration novel, apparently takes the form of a diary whichMr.Lockwood writes to himself:

1801 I have just returned from a visit to my landlord the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubledwith. This is certainly a beautiful country! [Ch I]

This narration also includes long passages reporting Nellie Deans narration of theevents of the story to Lockwood:

About twelve oclock, that night, was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights: a puny, sevenmonths child; and two hours after the mother died, having never recovered sufficient consciousness tomiss Heathcliff, or know Edgar. [Ch 16]

Hence the discourse structure of Nellie Deans narration as presented by G.Leech is:

Addresser I Addressee I(Emily Bront) (Reader)

Message

Addresser 2 Addressee 2(Implied author) (Implied reader)

Message

Addresser 3Addressee 3

(Mr. Lockwood) (Mr. Lockwood)

Message


19/21

Addresser 4 Addressee 4(Nellie Dean) (Mr. Lockwood)

Message

(Geoffrey N. Leech & Michael Short, Style in Fiction,Fig8.3, p.2 63, 1981)Handout Vic. XIV

1. The Trajectory of a Woman Writer: George Eliot (1819 1880)1.1 Why Mary Ann Evans was not good enough?1.2 Her Religion: The Humanist Doctrine ofMeliorism1.3 Influences on Her Work1.4 Arguments for Her Belonging with the Real School1.5 Central Concepts of her Thinking1.6 Elements of Macro and Microstructure in Her Novels

2. Thomas Hardy (1840 1928): Between Idealism and Realism2.1 Th. Hardys World: Men in a Perpetual Flight, Pursuit, Homeless People2.2 Influences on His Work2.3 Central Concepts of His Thinking2.4 Elements of Macro and Microstructure in His Novels

1.2Meliorism (John Cross) = a belief which affirms that the world may be made better byhuman effort.

1.3 Like A. Comtes, G.Eliots religion of humanity grew out of historical perceptions.

free will coexists with determinism(U.L.Knoepflmacher) = moral choice and the idea ofa version which can be acted upon are central to her thinking.1.4Her aim: I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles to win your tears for

real sorrows: sorrow such as may live next door to you such as walks neither in ragsnor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.Still there is a strong attachment to exploring the relationship between the real and theideal.

1.5Her novels are novels of crisis = crisis as a mode of historical explanation of thishumanised apocalypse.

Im not denyin the women are foolish: God Almighty made em to match the men.

(Adam Bede, 1859)1.6Adam Bede,(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner(1861), Ramola (1863),

Felix Holt, the Radical(1866), Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-1872),Daniel Deronda (1876).

The dark secret: Tis grievous, that all amplification of travel both by sea and land, aman can never separate himself from his past history. (motto in Felix Holt)Our deeds still travel with us from afar; and what we have been makes us what weare.(motto to Ch. 70 in Middlemarch).

The portrayal ofimperfect souls: I wish less of our piety were spent on perfect

goodness and more given to real imperfect goodness.

Intrusive authorial narrator: But we insignificant people with our daily words and actsare preparing the lives of many Dorotheas whose story we know. (Middlemarch,Finale)


20/21

G.Eliots aim: My function is that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher therousing of nobler emotions, which mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing, ofspecial measures.

2.Hardys idiosyncratic mode of regard justifies his idealistic conception on Art: If I were apainter, I would paint a picture of a room as viewed by a mouse from a chink under theskirting.(Florence Emily Hardy, Life of Th.Hardy)

The artists disproportioning = viewing the world in varying lights or from unusualperspectives: I have been looking for God 50 years and I think that if he had existed Ishould have discovered him. staid, worn, weak man at the railway station, whose blacklegs, hands, and face were longing to be out of the world, but whose brain was notbecause like the brain of most people, it was the last part of his body to realize asituation.(Life of Th. Hardy, 29 January entry)

2.3 Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists, 1943, identifies 3 masks forfate:(1) natural force; (2) innate weakness of character; (3) chance, destiny

2.4 Plot: D.Lodge considers Th. Hardy a cinematic novelist = one who deliberatelyrenounces some of the freedom of representation and report afforded by the verbalmedium, who imagines and presents his materials in primarily visual terms.Leon Edel observes in Novel and Camera in The Theory of the Novel, 1974, about allthe great 19th century realist novelists: Novelists have sought almost from the first to

become a camera. And not a static instrument but one possessing the movementthrough space and time which the motion-picture camera has achieved in our century.We follow Balzac, moving into his subject, from the city into the street, from the streetinto the house, and we tread hard on his heels as he takes us from room to room. Wefeel as if that massive realist had a precision of the cinema wherever we turn in the19th century. We can see novelists cultivating the camera-eye and the camera-movement.

Setting: stands in a living, cooperative relationship to the character, plot, themes.Time: analysed in relation to A.Comtes looped orbit = a forward and thusprogressive cyclic movement of history.

Character-drawing: D.H.Lawrence in Study of Hardy(1914) wrote of Hardys peopleof Wessex always bursting suddenly out of bud and taking a wild flight into flower,always shootingsuddenly out of a light convention, a tight, hide-bound cabbage stageinto something quite madly personal. They are struggling hard to come into beingand the first and chiefest factor is the struggle into love and the struggle with love.Focalization: R. Barthes has observed that the discourse of the traditional novelalternates the personal and the impersonal very rapidly, often in the same sentence,so as to produce a proprietary consciousness which retains the mastery of what itstates without participating in it. (To Write: An Intransitive Verb,The StructuralistControversy, 1972)J.Hillis Miller refers to Hardys reliance on specified observers due to the writers

unconscious wish to escape from the dangers of direct involvement in life as it iswithout being seen and could report on that seeing. (Hillis Miller, TH.Hardy: Distanceand Desire, 1970)


21/21

Atmosphere: The New York Bookman said ofJude the Obscure (1895): It is simplyone of the most objectionable books we have ever read in any language whatsoever.Pessimistic tone: The doctor examining the corpse of Little Father Time, Judes sonsays that the boy represents the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.

(Jude the Obscure, VI 2)

19th c literature(bontila.an2)

Documents