Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
5 - Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
Summary
In ‘Formalism as the Fear of Ideas’, his review of Caroline Levine’s Forms, Michael Clune takes Levine specifically and literary critics generally to task for merely pointing out moments where literary authors ‘anticipate’ subsequent developments in various theoretical fields, and for not daring to go further and argue for substantive claims in those fields. He writes:
We should attend closely to Levine's claim that the nineteenth-century poet anticipates twentieth-century social science. The term anticipation appears designed to free the critic from the kind of work that a term like influence requires. Whereas a claim of influence necessitates carefully uncovering causal links between a literary work and the various social scientists whose thinking was shaped by it, a claim of anticipation requires merely demonstrating that a certain literary idea resembles a later scientific idea.
Merely noting ‘resemblance’, Clune goes on to argue, does a disservice to the real power of literary ideas. Citing the example of H. G. Wells’s invention of time travel and the influence of the concept on theoretical physics, Clune points out that ‘Literature is full of the most astonishing ideas on every imaginable topic’, and literary critics interested in interdisciplinary research and connections between literary study and ideas and other fields should not limit themselves to merely noting resemblances – we need to take the next step and look for the open discovery of new ideas.
Clune's point is well taken, but his dismissal of the emphasis on ‘anticipation’ moves too quickly. As Julie Orlemanski puts it (in a phrase I have quoted once already), ‘I am inclined to give more credence to what we do in our discipline than to what we say about what we do.’ The prevalence of this interpretive technique reveals something about the experience of literature, and it would be too hasty to abandon it in pursuit of more expansive forms of interdis-ciplinarity. Criticism that notes the way a writer anticipates later theoretical developments reflects at heart the basic impulse to connect the ideas in literature to issues that readers are concerned with now, and is thus simply the latest iteration in a lengthy tradition of reading for the content, even when it calls itself reading for the form.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Ideas in Victorian LiteratureLiterary Content as Artistic Experience, pp. 173 - 202Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020