Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It ...
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This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.Less
This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for ...
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This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.Less
This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter argues that the notion of ‘aesthetic autobiography’, attached by Suzanne Nalbantian to the modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman, in fact originates in the way earlier writers such as ...
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This chapter argues that the notion of ‘aesthetic autobiography’, attached by Suzanne Nalbantian to the modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman, in fact originates in the way earlier writers such as Ruskin and Gosse develop literary forms to construct their lives as aesthetically motivated. Ruskin's impressionist autobiography is investigated as a precursor of early twentieth‐century literary autobiographies by James, Conrad and Ford. Particular attention is paid to time, memory, impressions, and reading. The chapter proposes a changing view of ‘mediation’ through the period, arguing that Realism denies the mediation of reality by art; impressionism accepts the mediation of reality, but locates it in the process of perception and consciousness; modernism combines this interest in phenomenology with an awareness of how language or form mediates between the subject and the object; whereas postmodernism is founded on a denial, or suppression, of the objectivity of the object. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Proust (of all modernists the most indebted to Ruskin, and a sophisticated analyst of impressionism), from the rejection of biography in Contre Sainte‐Beuve to the fictionalization of autobiography in A la recherche. The essay on Ruskin, ‘On Reading’, is used to show how as for Ruskin autobiography is an act of reading, for Proust reading is an act of autobiography. Ruskinian impressionism is thus seen as also anticipating the modernist fictionalized auto/biography discussed in Part II.Less
This chapter argues that the notion of ‘aesthetic autobiography’, attached by Suzanne Nalbantian to the modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman, in fact originates in the way earlier writers such as Ruskin and Gosse develop literary forms to construct their lives as aesthetically motivated. Ruskin's impressionist autobiography is investigated as a precursor of early twentieth‐century literary autobiographies by James, Conrad and Ford. Particular attention is paid to time, memory, impressions, and reading. The chapter proposes a changing view of ‘mediation’ through the period, arguing that Realism denies the mediation of reality by art; impressionism accepts the mediation of reality, but locates it in the process of perception and consciousness; modernism combines this interest in phenomenology with an awareness of how language or form mediates between the subject and the object; whereas postmodernism is founded on a denial, or suppression, of the objectivity of the object. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Proust (of all modernists the most indebted to Ruskin, and a sophisticated analyst of impressionism), from the rejection of biography in Contre Sainte‐Beuve to the fictionalization of autobiography in A la recherche. The essay on Ruskin, ‘On Reading’, is used to show how as for Ruskin autobiography is an act of reading, for Proust reading is an act of autobiography. Ruskinian impressionism is thus seen as also anticipating the modernist fictionalized auto/biography discussed in Part II.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist ...
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This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.Less
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.
John Scholar
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198853510
- eISBN:
- 9780191887925
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198853510.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was ...
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Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement which championed impressionist criticism, he placed the impression at the heart of his own aesthetic project, as well as his narrative representation of consciousness. This book tries to understand the anomaly that James represents in the wider history of the impression. To do this it charts an intellectual and cultural history of the ‘impression’ from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, drawing in painting, philosophy (John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J.L Austin), psychology (James Mill, J.S. Mill, William James, Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano), literature (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), and modern critical theory (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). It then offers close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872–88), his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). It concludes that the term ‘impression’ crystallizes James’s main theme of the struggle between life and art. Coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when it is comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics—bound together by James’s attempt to reconcile the novel’s value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity.Less
Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement which championed impressionist criticism, he placed the impression at the heart of his own aesthetic project, as well as his narrative representation of consciousness. This book tries to understand the anomaly that James represents in the wider history of the impression. To do this it charts an intellectual and cultural history of the ‘impression’ from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, drawing in painting, philosophy (John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J.L Austin), psychology (James Mill, J.S. Mill, William James, Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano), literature (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), and modern critical theory (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). It then offers close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872–88), his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). It concludes that the term ‘impression’ crystallizes James’s main theme of the struggle between life and art. Coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when it is comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics—bound together by James’s attempt to reconcile the novel’s value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity.
Hugh Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474449861
- eISBN:
- 9781474477086
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474449861.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared ...
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The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively investigated by a variety of nineteenth-century empiricists, and mid- and late-Victorian discussions in physics and physiology are seen to be the illuminating texts by which to gauge the acute qualities of attention shared by Hardy’s and Conrad’s fiction. In an argument that re-frames the ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ containers by which the writers have been conventionally separated, thirteen major works are analysed without flattening their differences and individuality, but within a broad ‘field-view’ of reality introduced by late-classical physics. With its focus on nature and the environment, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses displays the vivid delineations of humankind’s place in nature that are at the heart of both authors’ works.Less
The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively investigated by a variety of nineteenth-century empiricists, and mid- and late-Victorian discussions in physics and physiology are seen to be the illuminating texts by which to gauge the acute qualities of attention shared by Hardy’s and Conrad’s fiction. In an argument that re-frames the ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ containers by which the writers have been conventionally separated, thirteen major works are analysed without flattening their differences and individuality, but within a broad ‘field-view’ of reality introduced by late-classical physics. With its focus on nature and the environment, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses displays the vivid delineations of humankind’s place in nature that are at the heart of both authors’ works.
Jesse Matz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231164061
- eISBN:
- 9780231543057
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231164061.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and ...
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Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely “impressionistic” about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies—the positive and the negative—to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.Less
Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely “impressionistic” about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies—the positive and the negative—to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.
Joshua Landy
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195169393
- eISBN:
- 9780199787845
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195169393.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter lays out Proust's theory of knowledge, according to which the data of sense are first filtered through the intuition, where they suffer perspectival distortion of both a general and an ...
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This chapter lays out Proust's theory of knowledge, according to which the data of sense are first filtered through the intuition, where they suffer perspectival distortion of both a general and an individual nature; and then through the intellect, where, depending on the type of data in question, they are either rectified or further distorted. This theory explains the otherwise unaccountable importance given by Marcel to the enigmatic text he penned as a youth, a “prose poem” describing three steeples of Martinville. The prose poem, it turns out, shows both perspectival operations at work, the universal and individual; the paragraphs that frame it, meanwhile, testify to the subsequent work of the intellect. Of the images, some directly reflect Marcel's idiosyncratic network of associations, the way his mind uniquely organizes the data of experience, and others — those based on metonymic connections — indirectly reveal Marcel's continuing belief in the aura of places. Proust's view is not merely that perspective is momentous, inexorably conditioning an individual's experience of the world, as well as rendering that experience fundamentally incomprehensible to others; it is also that perspective is valuable. We may well begin by seeking accurate knowledge of the external world, and by repeatedly bumping up, in frustration, against the perennially curved and coloured glass of perspective. But if we are good Proustians, we will make the Copernican turn, realizing that what blocked our access to our ostensible goal was in fact that which was, all along, most worthy of being known. The secret to life consists of redirecting attention, in recognizing that an apparent liability is, in reality, our greatest asset.Less
This chapter lays out Proust's theory of knowledge, according to which the data of sense are first filtered through the intuition, where they suffer perspectival distortion of both a general and an individual nature; and then through the intellect, where, depending on the type of data in question, they are either rectified or further distorted. This theory explains the otherwise unaccountable importance given by Marcel to the enigmatic text he penned as a youth, a “prose poem” describing three steeples of Martinville. The prose poem, it turns out, shows both perspectival operations at work, the universal and individual; the paragraphs that frame it, meanwhile, testify to the subsequent work of the intellect. Of the images, some directly reflect Marcel's idiosyncratic network of associations, the way his mind uniquely organizes the data of experience, and others — those based on metonymic connections — indirectly reveal Marcel's continuing belief in the aura of places. Proust's view is not merely that perspective is momentous, inexorably conditioning an individual's experience of the world, as well as rendering that experience fundamentally incomprehensible to others; it is also that perspective is valuable. We may well begin by seeking accurate knowledge of the external world, and by repeatedly bumping up, in frustration, against the perennially curved and coloured glass of perspective. But if we are good Proustians, we will make the Copernican turn, realizing that what blocked our access to our ostensible goal was in fact that which was, all along, most worthy of being known. The secret to life consists of redirecting attention, in recognizing that an apparent liability is, in reality, our greatest asset.
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/9780198151609.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter examines briefly the development of the Russian realist novel genre and its significance in the eyes of both the reading public and of the writers themselves. It then examines the ...
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This chapter examines briefly the development of the Russian realist novel genre and its significance in the eyes of both the reading public and of the writers themselves. It then examines the development of new forms of creative expression in fiction, such as character ‘impressionism’ in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's fictional works.Less
This chapter examines briefly the development of the Russian realist novel genre and its significance in the eyes of both the reading public and of the writers themselves. It then examines the development of new forms of creative expression in fiction, such as character ‘impressionism’ in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's fictional works.
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/9780198151609.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
The problem of evolving an adequate definition of literary impressionism has been investigated by J. W. Mains, who distinguishes two main areas in critical usage. The first corresponds to ‘unmediated ...
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The problem of evolving an adequate definition of literary impressionism has been investigated by J. W. Mains, who distinguishes two main areas in critical usage. The first corresponds to ‘unmediated lyricism’, where ‘the writer himself is the impressionist, and it is his sensibility, his perceptions that we get’. The second approach is referred to as ‘mediated lyricism’ and as Mains suggest, it has ‘little or no connection with the Impressionist movement in painting’. This chapter examines the attempts of Andrei Belyi and later critics to associate Chekhov's impressionism with unmediated lyricism.Less
The problem of evolving an adequate definition of literary impressionism has been investigated by J. W. Mains, who distinguishes two main areas in critical usage. The first corresponds to ‘unmediated lyricism’, where ‘the writer himself is the impressionist, and it is his sensibility, his perceptions that we get’. The second approach is referred to as ‘mediated lyricism’ and as Mains suggest, it has ‘little or no connection with the Impressionist movement in painting’. This chapter examines the attempts of Andrei Belyi and later critics to associate Chekhov's impressionism with unmediated lyricism.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with ...
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D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with what would today be described as a logocentric model of language. It now seems that this idea of a naively mimetic realism was something of a shibboleth, and that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury critics deliberately presented it in crude and reductive terms. It is unlikely that unproblematic, one-to-one correspondence between elements of language and world was ever really assumed by realistic art, that art ever aspired to be the world, rendering itself curiously redundant, in the way that many modernist art theorists suggest. This is, however, what Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries tried to argue in order to further the cause of Post-Impressionism and other forms of modern art.Less
D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with what would today be described as a logocentric model of language. It now seems that this idea of a naively mimetic realism was something of a shibboleth, and that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury critics deliberately presented it in crude and reductive terms. It is unlikely that unproblematic, one-to-one correspondence between elements of language and world was ever really assumed by realistic art, that art ever aspired to be the world, rendering itself curiously redundant, in the way that many modernist art theorists suggest. This is, however, what Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries tried to argue in order to further the cause of Post-Impressionism and other forms of modern art.
Marion Thain
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474442244
- eISBN:
- 9781474491075
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442244.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
The modernity of late-nineteenth-century visualities has been influentially and persistently located in a disembodiment of the eye. Yet this was a period which saw theorists of aesthetic perception ...
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The modernity of late-nineteenth-century visualities has been influentially and persistently located in a disembodiment of the eye. Yet this was a period which saw theorists of aesthetic perception such as Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson developing embodied formulations of vision that put sight and the other senses into intimate dialogue. Starting with Vernon Lee’s writing on ‘empathy’ and Berenson’s theorisation of ‘tactile values’, this essay argues for the importance of ideas of embodied perception to impressionist and post-impressionist art and literature, and suggests we can find in late-nineteenth-century aestheticism a colourful thread that needs to be woven into the history of what might now be called embodied cognition. To recognize this is to change our understanding of modernist visualities. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is called on to help bridge, historically and conceptually, between the work of a group of aesthetes and decadents at the turn of the twentieth century and the contemporary framework of distributed cognition that is the basis for our project.Less
The modernity of late-nineteenth-century visualities has been influentially and persistently located in a disembodiment of the eye. Yet this was a period which saw theorists of aesthetic perception such as Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson developing embodied formulations of vision that put sight and the other senses into intimate dialogue. Starting with Vernon Lee’s writing on ‘empathy’ and Berenson’s theorisation of ‘tactile values’, this essay argues for the importance of ideas of embodied perception to impressionist and post-impressionist art and literature, and suggests we can find in late-nineteenth-century aestheticism a colourful thread that needs to be woven into the history of what might now be called embodied cognition. To recognize this is to change our understanding of modernist visualities. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is called on to help bridge, historically and conceptually, between the work of a group of aesthetes and decadents at the turn of the twentieth century and the contemporary framework of distributed cognition that is the basis for our project.
William Oddie
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199582013
- eISBN:
- 9780191702303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582013.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life from 1894–9. Chesterton finally emerged from his periodic depressions two years after leaving St Paul's School. In the springtime of 1894 his mood was one of ...
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This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life from 1894–9. Chesterton finally emerged from his periodic depressions two years after leaving St Paul's School. In the springtime of 1894 his mood was one of determined optimism about the future. But after only one year at the Slade School of Art, Chesterton brought his studies there abruptly to an end, thus changing the direction, not only of his university years, but of his whole life. The decision to bring his time at the Slade so abruptly to an end was attributed to his desire to escape from the prevailing intellectual atmosphere there, and particularly from current theories of art — particularly those surrounding Impressionism — which he thought led ‘to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all’; this was a notion which he unquestionably saw as contributing to the ‘mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon [him]’.Less
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life from 1894–9. Chesterton finally emerged from his periodic depressions two years after leaving St Paul's School. In the springtime of 1894 his mood was one of determined optimism about the future. But after only one year at the Slade School of Art, Chesterton brought his studies there abruptly to an end, thus changing the direction, not only of his university years, but of his whole life. The decision to bring his time at the Slade so abruptly to an end was attributed to his desire to escape from the prevailing intellectual atmosphere there, and particularly from current theories of art — particularly those surrounding Impressionism — which he thought led ‘to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all’; this was a notion which he unquestionably saw as contributing to the ‘mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon [him]’.
Karolyn Steffens
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through ...
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Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through episodes from No Enemy, ‘True Love and a GCM’, and Parade’s End, the compositional evolution that emerges from this comparison displays how Ford’s Impressionism becomes an aesthetic of duality, mirroring Tietjens who becomes the paradigmatic homo duplex in the trenches. Instead of merely representing the violence of war (Thanatos), these three texts illustrate how both Eros and Thanatos become constitutive of the trauma of the Great War for Ford. His Impressionism evolves into one that defines traumatized consciousness as interpenetrated by both Eros and Thanatos, an aesthetic that illuminates the frequently overlooked intersections between sexuality and violence in Freud’s theories of trauma.Less
Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through episodes from No Enemy, ‘True Love and a GCM’, and Parade’s End, the compositional evolution that emerges from this comparison displays how Ford’s Impressionism becomes an aesthetic of duality, mirroring Tietjens who becomes the paradigmatic homo duplex in the trenches. Instead of merely representing the violence of war (Thanatos), these three texts illustrate how both Eros and Thanatos become constitutive of the trauma of the Great War for Ford. His Impressionism evolves into one that defines traumatized consciousness as interpenetrated by both Eros and Thanatos, an aesthetic that illuminates the frequently overlooked intersections between sexuality and violence in Freud’s theories of trauma.
Alexandra Becquet
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. ...
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This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. While Impressionism is first shown as a fitting aesthetics to present the individual’s shattering experience of Armageddon through its subjective perception, the tetralogy’s sights and sounds are then studied for their translation into the text’s fabric and as they appeal to the readers’ senses and memory to immerse them into the narrative. The readers are indeed to synthesize a text stamped by the time-shift, an agent of both fragmentation and composition which relies on memory and on principles operating in music thus revealing the musical structure of Ford’s work. By means of the arts, Parade’s End exposes the trauma engendered by the war to transfer it onto its readers as the design of Ford’s intermedial composition depends on it.Less
This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. While Impressionism is first shown as a fitting aesthetics to present the individual’s shattering experience of Armageddon through its subjective perception, the tetralogy’s sights and sounds are then studied for their translation into the text’s fabric and as they appeal to the readers’ senses and memory to immerse them into the narrative. The readers are indeed to synthesize a text stamped by the time-shift, an agent of both fragmentation and composition which relies on memory and on principles operating in music thus revealing the musical structure of Ford’s work. By means of the arts, Parade’s End exposes the trauma engendered by the war to transfer it onto its readers as the design of Ford’s intermedial composition depends on it.
Adam Parkes
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195383812
- eISBN:
- 9780199896950
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383812.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter considers the intricate relations between Woolf’s theory of the “moment of being,” issues of gender and sexuality, and tensions between Pater’s impressionist aesthetics and Roger Fry’s ...
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This chapter considers the intricate relations between Woolf’s theory of the “moment of being,” issues of gender and sexuality, and tensions between Pater’s impressionist aesthetics and Roger Fry’s post-impressionism. Woolf recognized the subversive aspects of Pater and his male heirs, but she suspected their homoerotic impressionisms of complicity with patriarchal social conventions. Instead of seeing Fry’s post-impressionism as a clean break from conservative aesthetic and political positions, however, she found disquieting continuities in his critical and theoretical practice with the Paterian tradition. Thus Woolf suggests that post-impressionism was an extension of impressionism rather than a rejection of it.Less
This chapter considers the intricate relations between Woolf’s theory of the “moment of being,” issues of gender and sexuality, and tensions between Pater’s impressionist aesthetics and Roger Fry’s post-impressionism. Woolf recognized the subversive aspects of Pater and his male heirs, but she suspected their homoerotic impressionisms of complicity with patriarchal social conventions. Instead of seeing Fry’s post-impressionism as a clean break from conservative aesthetic and political positions, however, she found disquieting continuities in his critical and theoretical practice with the Paterian tradition. Thus Woolf suggests that post-impressionism was an extension of impressionism rather than a rejection of it.
Allison Schachter
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199812639
- eISBN:
- 9780199919413
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812639.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines Leah Goldberg’s 1946 modernist Hebrew novel Ve-hu ha-’or (And That Is the Light). Goldberg’s novel portrays the tensions between Jewish and European literary culture through her ...
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This chapter examines Leah Goldberg’s 1946 modernist Hebrew novel Ve-hu ha-’or (And That Is the Light). Goldberg’s novel portrays the tensions between Jewish and European literary culture through her female protagonist, Nora. Although Goldberg wrote the novel after immigrating to Palestine in 1935, she highlights the gender politics of Jewish culture in interwar Europe. The novel grapples with the triangulation of Hebrew, Yiddish, and European modernist traditions and cultures and foregrounds the ways that the modernist aesthetics of diaspora signal the changing gender system of Jewish culture. In the novel, Hebrew is a deterritorialized language for modernist expression, one that must embrace both Jewish and European literary culture.Less
This chapter examines Leah Goldberg’s 1946 modernist Hebrew novel Ve-hu ha-’or (And That Is the Light). Goldberg’s novel portrays the tensions between Jewish and European literary culture through her female protagonist, Nora. Although Goldberg wrote the novel after immigrating to Palestine in 1935, she highlights the gender politics of Jewish culture in interwar Europe. The novel grapples with the triangulation of Hebrew, Yiddish, and European modernist traditions and cultures and foregrounds the ways that the modernist aesthetics of diaspora signal the changing gender system of Jewish culture. In the novel, Hebrew is a deterritorialized language for modernist expression, one that must embrace both Jewish and European literary culture.
Keith Lehrer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195304985
- eISBN:
- 9780199918164
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195304985.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, General
To understand the exemplar representation of conscious exemplars, we need to examine the character of consciousness. I begin with a theory of the epistemology of consciousness. There are certain ...
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To understand the exemplar representation of conscious exemplars, we need to examine the character of consciousness. I begin with a theory of the epistemology of consciousness. There are certain conscious states, those that most attract our attention, that are immediately known to us. Not all conscious states are immediately known, but all conscious states can be immediately known when attention is directed to them. Aesthetic experience directs attention to the sensory character of experience, to what the artwork is like, effecting exemplar representation. Aesthetic attention makes the conscious state an exhibit of what the artwork is like in exemplarization. The conscious state then becomes part and parcel, vehicle and exhibit, of the content of exemplar representation. The point of art is to absorb your attention in the immediacy of consciousness to obtain the insight and autonomy to remake your world and yourself out of exemplars.Less
To understand the exemplar representation of conscious exemplars, we need to examine the character of consciousness. I begin with a theory of the epistemology of consciousness. There are certain conscious states, those that most attract our attention, that are immediately known to us. Not all conscious states are immediately known, but all conscious states can be immediately known when attention is directed to them. Aesthetic experience directs attention to the sensory character of experience, to what the artwork is like, effecting exemplar representation. Aesthetic attention makes the conscious state an exhibit of what the artwork is like in exemplarization. The conscious state then becomes part and parcel, vehicle and exhibit, of the content of exemplar representation. The point of art is to absorb your attention in the immediacy of consciousness to obtain the insight and autonomy to remake your world and yourself out of exemplars.
John Scholar
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198853510
- eISBN:
- 9780191887925
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198853510.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
The introduction argues that James’s work is best understood as impression-driven rather than impressionist. It allies the book with those critics who take a philosophical view of literary ...
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The introduction argues that James’s work is best understood as impression-driven rather than impressionist. It allies the book with those critics who take a philosophical view of literary impressionism, while arguing that the book’s approach complements more historicist views of literary impressionism of the last decade. It emphasizes that this book’s contribution lies in: its belief that James has a greater debt to the impressions of pre-impressionist painters than to those of impressionist painters; its greater emphasis on the making of, rather than the receiving of, impressions, and its use of theories of the performative to conceptualize this; and in the detailed intellectual and cultural history of the impression that it offers, which helps the book tell a new story about James’s artistic, philosophical, and psychological influences.Less
The introduction argues that James’s work is best understood as impression-driven rather than impressionist. It allies the book with those critics who take a philosophical view of literary impressionism, while arguing that the book’s approach complements more historicist views of literary impressionism of the last decade. It emphasizes that this book’s contribution lies in: its belief that James has a greater debt to the impressions of pre-impressionist painters than to those of impressionist painters; its greater emphasis on the making of, rather than the receiving of, impressions, and its use of theories of the performative to conceptualize this; and in the detailed intellectual and cultural history of the impression that it offers, which helps the book tell a new story about James’s artistic, philosophical, and psychological influences.
John Scholar
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198853510
- eISBN:
- 9780191887925
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198853510.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Chapter 1 explores the anomaly that while James was critical of French impressionist painting and literature, he nevertheless made the impression the centrepiece of his representation of the novelist ...
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Chapter 1 explores the anomaly that while James was critical of French impressionist painting and literature, he nevertheless made the impression the centrepiece of his representation of the novelist at work in ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884). It addresses this anomaly by reading some of James’s early art criticism, literary criticism, and travel writing as a remaking of existing models of the impression, arguing that James’s impression combines the best of the French novel’s attention to sensation with the English novel’s attention to reflection. It also places the impressions of James’s criticism in dialogue with those of painterly impressionism. It observes that James attributes as much importance to the making of impressions as to the receiving of them. It thus introduces a distinction, fundamental to the argument in later chapters, between ‘performative’ impressions and ‘cognitive’ impressions.Less
Chapter 1 explores the anomaly that while James was critical of French impressionist painting and literature, he nevertheless made the impression the centrepiece of his representation of the novelist at work in ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884). It addresses this anomaly by reading some of James’s early art criticism, literary criticism, and travel writing as a remaking of existing models of the impression, arguing that James’s impression combines the best of the French novel’s attention to sensation with the English novel’s attention to reflection. It also places the impressions of James’s criticism in dialogue with those of painterly impressionism. It observes that James attributes as much importance to the making of impressions as to the receiving of them. It thus introduces a distinction, fundamental to the argument in later chapters, between ‘performative’ impressions and ‘cognitive’ impressions.
