Chapter 5 : Modernity, Multiplicity, and Becoming

Question 1

During the 19th century, what significant historical change was happening and what change of orientation occurred in literature and criticism?

What did literary criticism shift its focus to?

What artistic movement was giving way to Aestheticism and what did this represent?

Answer 1

This was a time of rapid change (Industrial Revolution) and there was a change of orientation in literature and criticism from the ideal world to the world of history.

The new question became:

What is the relationship between the literary text and the historical context?

Romanticism was giving way to Aestheticism and during this transition, the Romantic unity of the self was giving way to MULTIPLICITY.

In literature, a discernible shift from Eliot to Thomas Hardy / Henry James in authorial voice, going from an omniscient third person narrator, who stands above the many characters’ perspectives.

Question 2

For Karl Marx, modernity emerges out of what new economic system?

Answer 2

Capitalism.

Question 3

How do Marx and Engels describe capitalism? What do they critique?

Answer 3

For them, capitalism is at once good and evil. It is this way because it brings about unprecedented, rapid and unceasing change.

Good because it has the power to sweep away old powers and authorities.

Capitalism is like Prometheus bringing fire to man.

Evil because (similar to Shelley) they condemn the gap between the rich and the poor.

Question 4

What do Marx and Engels consider foolish about the bourgeois class in Europe during the Industrial Revolution?

Answer 4

They consider the bourgeois class as callous and stupid, failing to look after the perpetuation of the working class, on which it relies for profits.

Question 5

What did Robert Owen write and what does he call for in this work?

Answer 5

He wrote “A New View of Society” (1813-16) and in it, he calls for legislative reform of industrial conditions as a high priority for British public.

Question 6

What did Thomas Carlyle write and what does he argue?

Answer 6

Carlyle was one of the great Victorian “sages” and wrote the pamphlet, “Chartism”. In Chapter 6, Laissez-Faire, he argues against and rejects the laissez-faire principles.

In “Past and Present” he argues a paternalistic neofeudal model of reform.

Question 7

John Ruskin was an ____ and ______.

Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, he wrote __________, which was a _______ for a _________.

Answer 7

art critic and thinker.

Unto This Last ; moral case ; living wage

Question 8

William Morris responded to Ruskin and founded the _______ movement in the 1860s.

This movement can be described as : ____________.

Answer 8

Arts and Crafts Movement

An anti-industrialist applied arts and design movement valorizing traditional materials and craftsmanship as a part of a larger focus on social and economic reform.

Question 9

In George Eliot’s theoretical elaboration of 19th century “realism” or “classical realism”, she posits what two goals as the aim of of her art?

Answer 9

Truth and sympathy.

Both must come together and both are required.

Question 10

For Eliot, what is truthfulness (5 parts)?

Answer 10

1. Involves CLOSE OBSERVATION
   of external reality, likens her art to life drawing
2. Aspires to DEMOCRATIC INCLUSIVENESS
3. Observes and describes the COMPLEXITY OF CHARACTER, the complexity of internal reality

(real people are inconsistent - the good and bad are entangled within them)

4. Truthfulness involves a sense of MORAL SERIOUSNESS and RESPONSIBILITY
5. Involves an ANXIOUS RECOGNITION of difficulties: the author is a mirror but the mirror is doubtless defective because of a DIVIDED SOCIETY.

Question 11

According to Eliot, why does art involve an anxious recognition of difficulties? What are these difficulties that arise?

Answer 11

While the author is a mirror, the mirror is defective because of a DIVIDED SOCIETY.

The difficulties that arise are the following:

(one has to summon formidable powers of observation and social sympathy in order to avoid unwittingly projecting one’s own class perspective on others)

(another difficulty is language because one word stands for many things and many words for one)

(Eliot however embraces the “fitful shimmer of many hued significance” rejecting “a patent deodarized and nonresonant language”)

Question 12

While affirming truthfulness in the above senses, Eliot self-consciously examines its limits elsewhere and explores the limits of observation.

Describes the continuities and discontinuities Eliot shares/inherits with/from :

Romanticism

the 18th century realist novel

Charles Dickens

Answer 12

Romanticism:

Eliot shares Wordsworth’s serious treatment/sympathy for low and rustic life and shares Shelley’s social sympathy

18th Century Novel:

Shares observation, attention to past and present, common people, complex characters. But treats people comically / or as light entertainment.

Charles Dickens:

Shares in a reforming spirit and both avoid idealization and demonization of characters.

Question 13

The novels of Eliot and Dickens also share an elastic form. What does this mean?

Answer 13

Their realism includes the romantic side of familiar things (the imagination).

Thrive on metaphor and metonymy.

Recognize differences of perspective and shifting perspectives ( HETEROGLOSSIA : many lanugages coming into one; MAN CODES - noting that there is more than one voice in the community)

Work to avoid falsehood and a dogmatic imposition of empty formulae on life

Question 14

How does Dickens differ from Eliot? What change occurs from Dickens to Eliot?

Answer 14

From Dickens to Eliot, an increased attention to psychological realism occurs.

In Eliot’s view, Dickens had not avoided idealization and demonizations.

Question 15

In Thomas Hardy and Henry James, what is emphasized even more?

Answer 15

In Hardy and James, the study of literary characters’

SUBJECTIVITY
PASSIONS
IMPRESSIONS

is intensified.

Question 16

Leo Bersani, an American critic, argues what about characters in 19th century realism?

Goulimari argues that in the transition from Romanticism to Aestheticism, __________ gives way to ___________.

Answer 16

there is an assumption of the unity of the self underlying the complexity of characters in 19th century realism’

Romantic unity of the self ; MULTIPLICITY

Question 17

From Eliot to Hardy and James, there is a discernible shift in ________.

Describe Eliot’s literary style here. How does this change throughout the century?

Answer 17

AUTHORIAL VOICE.

In Eliot, the authorial persona addresses the reader directly and makes its presence felt throughout the novel, telling us the story and is passionately engaged in doing so

As an omniscient third-person narrator, conveys many characters’ perspectives, but also stands above them and guides our interpretations.

(Eliot’s attempt at a perfect synthesis of truthfulness and sympathy.)

Later in the century, in Flaubert, this synthetic labor is abandoned. The narrator becomes IMPARTIAL and IRONIZING : we are shown a fictional reality and invited to draw our own conclusions.

Question 18

Eliot attempts to write from a perspective ideally synthesizing a variety of individual and group perspectives. This synthesis is grounded in what serious study?

Answer 18

The study of SOCIAL CONTEXT and HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT,

fed by her interest in a new science of sociology pioneered by Auguste Comte, which receives new impetus by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species,

in which ENVIRONMENT is crucially important.

(See Transcendental Subjectivity, a sociological phenomenon, an attempt at reducing human subjectivity, but also a method which results in homogenizing and stereotype.)

Question 19

What term does Charles Baudelaire coin and what iconic figure does he focus on?

How does this figure compare to the artist?

Answer 19

Baudelaire coins the term MODERNITÉ.

He considers modern life a life of speed, where the fleeting and ephemeral rule.

And focuses on the figure of the FLANEUR, a man about town strolling aimlessly along the new boulevards of Paris, which is a figure close to the artist.

However, the ARTIST has a nobler aim than the pure idler (flaneur), looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call MODERNITY, for want of a better term to express the idea in question. The aim for him is to distil the ETERNAL from the TRANSITORY.

What is important to note here is that Baudelaire is not proposing an escape from the fleeting; the eternal is to be sought in the transitory, not away from it.

Baudelaire valorizes the poet’s descent into the historical world, from INNOCENCE to EXPERIENCE.

Question 20

While Baudelaire valorizes the poet’s descent into the historical world, MATTHEW ARNOLD, Baudelaire’s British contemporary, outlines in his “Culture and Anarchy”, the diagnosis of what in the Victorian spirit?

What does he not subscribe to in Victorian culture?

Answer 20

Arnold diagnoses the “diseased spirit of our time”.

He doesn’t subscribe to VICTORIAN OPTIMISM and SINGLE-MINDED pursuit of PRACTICAL GOALS and MORAL ZEAL.

The disease is: the SOCIAL MULTIPERSPECTIVISM of Victorian England and consequently, lack of shared values.

Question 21

According to Arnold, what is the disease of social multiperspectivism during Victorian England?

What are the outcomes of this diagnosed disease?

What is its antidote?

Answer 21

Barbarians = Aristocracy
Philistines = Middle Class
Populace = Working Class

The result is that society is ailing due to absence of
COMMON GROUND
SHARED VALUES
SHARED IDENTITY

Antidote to this disease is CULTURE

Question 22

According to Arnold, what are the two tendencies in culture?

Answer 22

HEBRAISM:

strictness of conscience, excess of moral feeling blind overactive pursuit of unexamined aims (DOXA) that tend to coincide with one’s class interests (ex: FREE TRADE, LARGE FAMILIES)

HELLENISM:

harmonious temperance; cultivates a human nature complete on all sides

multifaceted, promises harmonious relations between different parts