Kirsty Martin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674084
- eISBN:
- 9780191752124
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others’ autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily, and ...
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How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others’ autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily, and troubling? Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Vernon Lee (the first novelist to use the word ‘empathy’), Kirsty Martin explores how modernist writers thought about questions of sympathetic response. Attending closely to the detail of literary texts—to literary depictions of gesture, movement, and rhythm, to literary explorations of the bodily and of transcendence—this book argues that central to modernism was an ideal of sympathy that was morally complex, but that was driven by a determination to be true to what it is to feel. Offering new readings of major literary texts, and original research into their historical contexts, this book also sets modernist texts alongside recent discussions of emotion and cognition. It offers a fresh reading of literary modernism, and it suggests how modernism might continue to unsettle our thinking about feeling today.Less
How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others’ autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily, and troubling? Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Vernon Lee (the first novelist to use the word ‘empathy’), Kirsty Martin explores how modernist writers thought about questions of sympathetic response. Attending closely to the detail of literary texts—to literary depictions of gesture, movement, and rhythm, to literary explorations of the bodily and of transcendence—this book argues that central to modernism was an ideal of sympathy that was morally complex, but that was driven by a determination to be true to what it is to feel. Offering new readings of major literary texts, and original research into their historical contexts, this book also sets modernist texts alongside recent discussions of emotion and cognition. It offers a fresh reading of literary modernism, and it suggests how modernism might continue to unsettle our thinking about feeling today.
Philip Kitcher
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195321029
- eISBN:
- 9780199851317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195321029.003.0021
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter summarizes the principal ideas that have emerged throughout the chapter-by-chapter reading of Finnegans Wake. It aims to serve both as a helpful guide for those who are approaching ...
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This chapter summarizes the principal ideas that have emerged throughout the chapter-by-chapter reading of Finnegans Wake. It aims to serve both as a helpful guide for those who are approaching Joyce's last novel for the first time and as a detailed elaboration and defense of the book's interpretation. Even more, it hopes to inspire others to undertake their own large-scale readings. Meanwhile, music runs through Joyce's prose, and through the Wake, in particular. It is not simply a matter of the constant eruption of the songs Joyce had heard his father sing, or had sung himself but the use of rhythm to set the mood and of tonal coloring to evoke reactions in his readers.Less
This chapter summarizes the principal ideas that have emerged throughout the chapter-by-chapter reading of Finnegans Wake. It aims to serve both as a helpful guide for those who are approaching Joyce's last novel for the first time and as a detailed elaboration and defense of the book's interpretation. Even more, it hopes to inspire others to undertake their own large-scale readings. Meanwhile, music runs through Joyce's prose, and through the Wake, in particular. It is not simply a matter of the constant eruption of the songs Joyce had heard his father sing, or had sung himself but the use of rhythm to set the mood and of tonal coloring to evoke reactions in his readers.
Roger Keys
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198151609
- eISBN:
- 9780191672767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151609.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter examines Andrei Belyi's interest in the homogeneity of music and literature. In the article ‘Forms of Art’, the literal link between music and poetry as acoustic arts developing in time ...
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This chapter examines Andrei Belyi's interest in the homogeneity of music and literature. In the article ‘Forms of Art’, the literal link between music and poetry as acoustic arts developing in time was identified as rhythm, and in later years, Belyi would go on to develop an esoteric theory according to which poetry, like music re-enacts the fundamental rhythms of creation.Less
This chapter examines Andrei Belyi's interest in the homogeneity of music and literature. In the article ‘Forms of Art’, the literal link between music and poetry as acoustic arts developing in time was identified as rhythm, and in later years, Belyi would go on to develop an esoteric theory according to which poetry, like music re-enacts the fundamental rhythms of creation.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once ...
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Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once character and enactment…itself both absolute wilt and contingency’. ‘Will’ is a matter central to the writing of poetry, though it is arguably something less accessible for poetry criticism. The poetry's sense of timing is a matter of importance, and more than just a way of speaking about particular patterns of syntax and metre. This chapter also examines Hill's poem The Triumph of Love and the questions it raises about language and difficulty, as well as rhythm and timing in his other work Speech! Speech!.Less
Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once character and enactment…itself both absolute wilt and contingency’. ‘Will’ is a matter central to the writing of poetry, though it is arguably something less accessible for poetry criticism. The poetry's sense of timing is a matter of importance, and more than just a way of speaking about particular patterns of syntax and metre. This chapter also examines Hill's poem The Triumph of Love and the questions it raises about language and difficulty, as well as rhythm and timing in his other work Speech! Speech!.
Julia Briggs
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624348
- eISBN:
- 9780748651856
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624348.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses the use of numbers in Woolf’s work – such as her numbering of sections, divisions and parts – and demonstrates how she connected these to the rhythms of time. It then studies ...
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This chapter discusses the use of numbers in Woolf’s work – such as her numbering of sections, divisions and parts – and demonstrates how she connected these to the rhythms of time. It then studies comparable processes of revision that can be identified in the works of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and looks at Woolf’s holograph drafts, which tell only a part of the story of her process of composition. The chapter also examines the time sequences and the passage of time in Woolf’s novels. It determines that Woolf used numbers of time as part of her struggle to master twists of fate and unforeseen events, and embedded them in a vision and a design.Less
This chapter discusses the use of numbers in Woolf’s work – such as her numbering of sections, divisions and parts – and demonstrates how she connected these to the rhythms of time. It then studies comparable processes of revision that can be identified in the works of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and looks at Woolf’s holograph drafts, which tell only a part of the story of her process of composition. The chapter also examines the time sequences and the passage of time in Woolf’s novels. It determines that Woolf used numbers of time as part of her struggle to master twists of fate and unforeseen events, and embedded them in a vision and a design.
Caroline Maclean
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199660865
- eISBN:
- 9780191757761
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660865.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter looks at the dissemination of Russian aesthetics in the British periodical press, focusing in particular on the example of Rhythm (1911-13), the short-lived but important modernist ...
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This chapter looks at the dissemination of Russian aesthetics in the British periodical press, focusing in particular on the example of Rhythm (1911-13), the short-lived but important modernist journal edited by the novelist and critic John Middleton Murry and the art critic Michael Sadleir. Rhythm has been described as Bergsonian in philosophy and Scottish Fauvist in its taste in art—less often noted is the journal’s promotion of Russian art and literature, which included the work of Leonid Andreyev, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and, most significantly, Wassily Kandinsky. The distinctively spiritual aesthetics Rhythm promoted and associated with Russian art stood in contrast to the French-influenced formalist aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, which were being developed and publicised simultaneously. This chapter presents Rhythm in the context of competing modernisms in the periodical press and the interpretation of Russian aesthetics in Britain.Less
This chapter looks at the dissemination of Russian aesthetics in the British periodical press, focusing in particular on the example of Rhythm (1911-13), the short-lived but important modernist journal edited by the novelist and critic John Middleton Murry and the art critic Michael Sadleir. Rhythm has been described as Bergsonian in philosophy and Scottish Fauvist in its taste in art—less often noted is the journal’s promotion of Russian art and literature, which included the work of Leonid Andreyev, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and, most significantly, Wassily Kandinsky. The distinctively spiritual aesthetics Rhythm promoted and associated with Russian art stood in contrast to the French-influenced formalist aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, which were being developed and publicised simultaneously. This chapter presents Rhythm in the context of competing modernisms in the periodical press and the interpretation of Russian aesthetics in Britain.
Kirsty Martin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674084
- eISBN:
- 9780191752124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter introduces debates about the importance and nature of sympathy, and it explores how literary modernism might offer a particular insight into such debates. It examines recent ...
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This chapter introduces debates about the importance and nature of sympathy, and it explores how literary modernism might offer a particular insight into such debates. It examines recent philosophical discussion of emotion—especially Martha Nussbaum's account of the cognitive importance of emotion—and shows how such recent discussion might illuminate thinking about modernism, sympathy, and the body. It also introduces important historical contexts for thinking about feeling in the early twentieth century, focusing particularly on vitalist accounts of the energy of bodies. It concludes by exploring the importance of notions of rhythm for thinking about sympathy.Less
This chapter introduces debates about the importance and nature of sympathy, and it explores how literary modernism might offer a particular insight into such debates. It examines recent philosophical discussion of emotion—especially Martha Nussbaum's account of the cognitive importance of emotion—and shows how such recent discussion might illuminate thinking about modernism, sympathy, and the body. It also introduces important historical contexts for thinking about feeling in the early twentieth century, focusing particularly on vitalist accounts of the energy of bodies. It concludes by exploring the importance of notions of rhythm for thinking about sympathy.
Kirsty Martin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674084
- eISBN:
- 9780191752124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the difficulty of Vernon Lee's conception of empathy. It argues that her thinking about empathy was driven by a consideration of how we respond to the rhythms of music and ...
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This chapter explores the difficulty of Vernon Lee's conception of empathy. It argues that her thinking about empathy was driven by a consideration of how we respond to the rhythms of music and visual art, and by her vitalistic interest in the energy of bodies. Lee began to explore the possibility of communal emotion, and how we might respond to the movements and gestures of others. However, this chapter shows how Lee struggled with her conception of empathy, both in terms of understanding how it might apply to the novel and to reading, and in terms of thinking about how feeling could be anything other than selfish: how it could be sympathetic. Her understanding of sympathy remains fragmentary, and implicitly suggests the need for the modernist techniques of Woolf and Lawrence. The chapter includes readings of Lee's novels Miss Brown and Louis Norbert, and her work on emotion and aesthetics.Less
This chapter explores the difficulty of Vernon Lee's conception of empathy. It argues that her thinking about empathy was driven by a consideration of how we respond to the rhythms of music and visual art, and by her vitalistic interest in the energy of bodies. Lee began to explore the possibility of communal emotion, and how we might respond to the movements and gestures of others. However, this chapter shows how Lee struggled with her conception of empathy, both in terms of understanding how it might apply to the novel and to reading, and in terms of thinking about how feeling could be anything other than selfish: how it could be sympathetic. Her understanding of sympathy remains fragmentary, and implicitly suggests the need for the modernist techniques of Woolf and Lawrence. The chapter includes readings of Lee's novels Miss Brown and Louis Norbert, and her work on emotion and aesthetics.
Kirsty Martin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674084
- eISBN:
- 9780191752124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter traces Woolf's changing conception of sympathy across her works. It shows that her understanding of sympathy was driven her sense of feeling as something at once bodily and somehow ...
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This chapter traces Woolf's changing conception of sympathy across her works. It shows that her understanding of sympathy was driven her sense of feeling as something at once bodily and somehow transcendent; and it explores her sense of communal emotion, and of response to the atmospheric rhythms of cities, families, and nature. It offers a new reading of The Waves as a vitalist novel, influenced by thinking about music, and concerned with rhythmic, communal sympathy. However, it argues that Woolf was concerned about such bodily, communal sympathy because it raised moral difficulties, leaving little space for the individual, and it shows that she turned away from such sensuous, intuitive sympathy in Between the Acts. In addition to discussion of The Waves and Between the Acts, the chapter offers close readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.Less
This chapter traces Woolf's changing conception of sympathy across her works. It shows that her understanding of sympathy was driven her sense of feeling as something at once bodily and somehow transcendent; and it explores her sense of communal emotion, and of response to the atmospheric rhythms of cities, families, and nature. It offers a new reading of The Waves as a vitalist novel, influenced by thinking about music, and concerned with rhythmic, communal sympathy. However, it argues that Woolf was concerned about such bodily, communal sympathy because it raised moral difficulties, leaving little space for the individual, and it shows that she turned away from such sensuous, intuitive sympathy in Between the Acts. In addition to discussion of The Waves and Between the Acts, the chapter offers close readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.
Sam Halliday
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748627615
- eISBN:
- 9780748689156
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627615.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter surveys major developments in the history and theorisation of music across the first half of the twentieth century. Schoenberg’s interpretation of musical dissonance facilitates ...
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This chapter surveys major developments in the history and theorisation of music across the first half of the twentieth century. Schoenberg’s interpretation of musical dissonance facilitates discussion of Schoenberg’s own innovations in musical composition, and those of composers with whom he is associated, including Webern. Efforts at ‘modernising’ music other than Schoenberg’s are next considered under the rubrics of pitch (and pitch division), rhythm, timbre, timbre and instrumentation: key figures in these discussions include Ezra Pound, Stravinsky, and Luigi Russolo. Béla Bartók’s activities as both an ethnomusicological archivist of ‘folk’ music and a composer, lead into sustained discussion of sound recording technologies such as the gramophone, and their use to both preserve and (countervailingly) substantially inform the music they record. One musical genre decisively inflected in this way is jazz, which the chapter explores via a range of period commentary, both pejorative and positive, and in discursive contexts ranging from the musicological to the sociological. The theme of music’s ‘writerability,’ via musical notation and other means, is a theme throughout the chapter; the chapter concludes with discussion of how jazz, blues and other musical genres are treated by literary writers, including Langston Hughes, Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot.Less
This chapter surveys major developments in the history and theorisation of music across the first half of the twentieth century. Schoenberg’s interpretation of musical dissonance facilitates discussion of Schoenberg’s own innovations in musical composition, and those of composers with whom he is associated, including Webern. Efforts at ‘modernising’ music other than Schoenberg’s are next considered under the rubrics of pitch (and pitch division), rhythm, timbre, timbre and instrumentation: key figures in these discussions include Ezra Pound, Stravinsky, and Luigi Russolo. Béla Bartók’s activities as both an ethnomusicological archivist of ‘folk’ music and a composer, lead into sustained discussion of sound recording technologies such as the gramophone, and their use to both preserve and (countervailingly) substantially inform the music they record. One musical genre decisively inflected in this way is jazz, which the chapter explores via a range of period commentary, both pejorative and positive, and in discursive contexts ranging from the musicological to the sociological. The theme of music’s ‘writerability,’ via musical notation and other means, is a theme throughout the chapter; the chapter concludes with discussion of how jazz, blues and other musical genres are treated by literary writers, including Langston Hughes, Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot.
