Amours Criticism Flashcards
Grand Tour as “intellectual tourism”
Patrick Scott
Definition of a traveller - Chloe Chard
- traveller sets himself the task of deriving pleasure by imposing a demand for a departure from the mundane and familiar onto the foreign topography
- if this is not found - dissatisfaction at the lack of alterity occurs
- 1768: Account of the Manner and Customs of Italy by Giuseppe Baretti
- suggests that foreignness offers satisfaction for man’s “love of novelty”
How do writers make the foreign seem more pronounced?
- rhetorical device of scattering foreign words into the text which make it appear
- evidence of departure from the familiar
Amours de Voyage is published in 1858 - what was happening with travel writing in the 1740s and 1830s?
- travel writing itself was making great use of the rhetoric of intense emotional response
- provoked a lot of parodies of travel writing
- most famously perhaps - Laurence Sterne’s ‘A Sentimental Journey’ which is a parody of Tobias Smollett’s ‘Travels through France and Italy’
Outline the ‘Romantic approach’ to travel
- emerged at the end of the 18th century
- travel was seen as a form of personal adventure
- held the promise of discovery/ realisation of the self through interaction with the ‘other’
Definition of a tourist - Chloe Chard
- tourist recognises the potential for danger/ destabilisation in travel and thus attempts to keep these at bay
Who makes the distinction between Grand ToURR and tourism?
John Urry in ‘The Tourist Gaze’
What was an accepted way of experiencing the foreign?
seeing of the ‘sights’
A traveller expects the foreign to contain ‘otherness’ but what is the mediating factor?
- that it should have alterity but not so much that it resists all understanding/ assimilation
How does the Grand Tour satisfy the demand for ‘otherness’ but not too much ‘otherness’?
- because the foreign is an ‘other’ but the familiarity comes from their classical education
Quotes in Christopher Hibbert’s ‘The Grand Tour’, what did Dr Sharp remark on arrival in Rome?
“narrowness of the streets, the thinness of the inhabitants, the prodigious quantity of monks, and beggars” giving a “gloomy aspect to this renowned city”
The religious disparity between the Roman religions and Catholicism pervade Amours de Voyage - in a similar vein, what was Edward Gibbon quoted saying in 1764?
“barefoot friars were chanting their litanies in the temple of Jupiter”
- quoted in Christopher Hibbert’s ‘The Grand Tour’
What did Evelyn Waugh say in 1930?
“every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist”
How has Paul Fussell summarised the status of the tourist?
“tourism soothes you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shocks of novelty and oddity”
Why is James Buzard’s text titled ‘The Beaten Track’?
- because he highlights that it is a tourist who stays to the beaten track and the traveller that journeys towards the authentic ‘culture’ of a place - requires the sensitivity of the traveller
Even abroad, what does the ‘tourist’ become?
- a relentless representative of home
Why does Robert Micklus assert that Claude is unable to share in the ‘Amours de Voyage’?
- because he cannot cope with the juxtapositions of Rome which are reflected in the contrasting opposites that exist in continual flux
When Claude finds juxtaposition, what does he believe he finds?
- chaos
Vanessa Ryan has identified the revival of Clough in academic study - what does she suggest as the reasons?
- revive a poet who has fallen out of interest
- academics taking an interest in formal aspects of Clough’s poetry
- prevelance of themes in Clough’s work that are of central interest to cultural and new historicist criticism
‘Travel’ is said to come from ‘travail’ - who pushed this further?
- 2004: Simon Winchester in The Best Travelers’ Tales
- states “travel” and “travail” both share an even more ancient root: a Roman instrument of torture called thetripalium(in Latin it means “three stakes”, as in to impale)
What did M.J. Waithe (lecturer) describe J.M.W Turner’s painting ‘Modern Rome’ as a work of desubstantialisation?
- this means ‘to remove the substance’
- the implication being that when you reduce something to static representation you remove the fluidity and complex substance of a place
Rosalind Buckton-Tucker wrote on the Romantic approach to travel - what three aspects does she identify?
- appreciation of the grandeur of nature and may sense in it an almost mystical power
- man has greater affinity to nature - can find core values away from modern conveniences/ consumer culture
- innate love of adventure - natural curiosity towards the unknown
Summarise what Rosalind Buckton-Tucker reports Frank Smythe have said in 1935?
- he gives a theory on why travellers put themselves through such physical and mental challenges
- it is ultimately so that they can not only discover the landscape etc. but actually discover themselves
In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea experiences the discomforting effects of experiencing too much novelty when looking at pictures in Rome. How does she react?
“when I begin to examine the pictures one by one, the life goes out of them, or else is something violent and strange to me. It must be my own dulness”
- blames herself - internalises shame in being unable to appreciate the culture
- could say that Claude reorientates this by blaming the landscape instead of himself
How does the narrator of Middlemarch characterise Rome?
“the city of visible history”
How does Sigmund Freud compare a city to the human mind?
- nothing is forgotten, things are merely repressed and pushed aside
How does Dorothea’s attitude of the incongruity between past and present reflect that of Claude’s?
- she says:
“Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present”
How does Dorothea react to this carnival of history?
- it becomes gaudy and terrifying
- she has an urge to escape which leads to her mental disturbance - even when shown the greatest ‘sights’ - she is uninspired/ unawed by the “greatest ruins” and “glorious churches” and desires to be “alone”
- describes it as a “masquerade of ages” - feels self-implicated in the bizarre display
Why is travel not a simple transaction for Dorothea?
- travel has brought consequences and burdens which she could not have imagined
- she is overwhelmed by the pressure of travel and culture etc.
- it is only when she looks at the pictures one by one that the initial “awe” does not fully satisfy the requirement of her reaction - “I am seeing so much at once and not understanding half of it”
- finds it particularly “painful” - “like being blind”
- she clearly feels very individually victimised by society
Why might we say that Dorothea is more a tourist than a traveller?
- she experiences Rome in a particular way because of the unhappiness of her home life (ie. the lifelong impending consequences of her marriage)
- shows that she carries with her all of the consequences etc. of home
- structurally - the reader has just found out that her husband is spending their honeymoon in the Vatican Library
- then she describes herself with “dulness” “sad” “like being blind” - self-deprecating, pitying, being trapped/ restricted/ being excluded from potential experience
Give a text which exemplifies the long tradition of life as a journey
1678: John Bunyan’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’
For which text does the centrality of the Christian pilgrimage provide a framing device?
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
During which century did writing become an essential part of travel writing
16th century
How does Francis Bacon characterise the value of travel writing? How did it do this?
- says that it laid the foundations for scientific and philosophical revolutions of the 17th century
- gave rise to information based on experience and observations rather than recourse and subordination to the ancients
Who wrote, and when, ‘On the Uses of Foreign Travel’?
Richard Hurd - 1763
What does Richard Hurd’s 1763 dialogue essay’ ‘On the Uses of Foreign Travel’ say?
- a dialogue between the fictional ‘Shaftesbury’ who advocates the travel undertaken in the ‘Grand Tour’
- Locke declares that it is better to stay at home until fully formed young men
- then states that ‘to study human nature to purpose, a traveller must enlarge his circuit beyond the bounds of Europe’
What does the genre of travel writing create the expectation for?
- an aspect of literal truthfulness
In what text did Jean-Jacques Rousseau claim that the best knowledge of human societies had to be achieved by visiting ‘far-flung’ places?
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
(from Hume and Youngs’ introduction)
What influence did Rousseau have on the travel landscape?
- swayed people into the attitude of Romanticism
- people began to explore places in Britain like Scotland and the Lake District etc. which had scenery which became known as the ‘picturesque’ or ‘romantic’ or ‘sublime’
How is the concept of the ‘traveller’ a more modern one?
- in a 1863 essay Baudelaire coined the term ‘modernite’
- the concept of the traveller is aligned with the aristocratic flaneur who (though a persona of the past) is
Give some evidence of the literature that would support James Buzard’s claim ‘writers seemed to be travelling, in reality or in their imaginations, just about everywhere’
- figures such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft all ‘produced one overt travel book’
- then also - Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gullivers’ Travels’, Samuel Johnson’s ‘Rasselas’ (imaginary travelogues)
What significance did John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding have on the significance of travel?
- espoused the ‘blank slate’ approach, declared that knowledge was rooted in experience - meaning travel gains importance and desirability
Although a number of books recounting experiences of travel were published in 1660 - 1840, what form did a lot of the recounting of the Grand Tour take? (2 answers)
- private manuscript correspondence
- in the form of arguments about the value of travel (more than recounting the experiences)
What did Richard Lassels write in 1670?
An Italian Voyage
Why is Richard Lassels’ ‘An Italian Voyage’ relevant?
- gave credence to the value of the Grand Tour
- said that personal experience of the places referenced in Latin texts which the traveller would have read in school would seal the bond between ancient and modern empires (especially post-Augustan Age)
What did Samuel Johnson say in 1776?
‘(a) man who has not been to Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see’
How did the tourist’s relationship to the Roman Catholic Church change across the period?
- as the 18th century progressed and the threat of the Reformation became more distance - the anxiety/ potential danger gave way to a satisfying feeling among British Protestants that they could savour the pitiful contrast between Rome’s former glory and its current state impoverished state under Catholicism
How does Will try and reassure Dorothea?
- implies that appreciation of art and cultural education takes time to be cultivated
- he says that he can only appreciate art due to his education from “many different threads”
How does Dorothea characterise the religious condition of Rome?
“sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence”
Give an example of a text that demonstrates the new geographic mobility in the 18th century and how
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- demonstrates the new concept of picturesque knowledge which was shaped by new geographic mobility (perhaps as a result of trusts who were responsible for the upkeep of roads)
