Literature & Britain THEME Flashcards
Transference of chronotopes N&S
Margaret moves from Helstone to Milton;
- adjusts to a ‘factory town’ where she must ‘speak factory language’ and operate within factory time
Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history 1973 Grundrisse
‘Not only do the objective conditions change, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language’
Chronotope
literally ‘time-space’
- developed by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) to refer to the ‘inseparable unity’ of time and space invoked by a narrative, or the setting viewed as a patio-temporal whole
Milton evocation of…
Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ in preface ‘Milton (1804)
Childers on railways
‘the railroads enact the profundity of industrialism, bringing with them new senses of time, new organisations of space’
Marx on the clock and mill
‘the two material bases on which the preparations for machine industry were organised within manufacture… wreathe clock and the mill’
Factorization is implicated in the sweeping progress of cultural homogenisation and degradation
time becomes a currency; factory timetable
Lewis Mumford on the clock and its implications on human meaning
‘moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created’
with the internalisation of the clock (that ‘piece of power machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes”…)
comes an unnatural indifference for the pattern of movement of the sun; so the fog Ruskin’s writing takes on figurative and literal significance
Ruskin on plague-clouds
‘in bringing on their peculiar darkness, [the plague-clouds] blanch the sun, instead of reddening it’ ; reifies rupture; sun as a ‘dry black veil which no ray of sunshine can pierce’ ; enacts human alienation
JS Mill acknowledging Utilitarian/Romantic dichotomy
1840 declares that ‘Every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgian…’
Dickens parodies Bentham’s hedonic calculus in Hard Times 1854
‘I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must appeal to is a person’s self interest. It’s your only hold’
George Simmel 1903 work
‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ ;emergence of mechanical men and robotic figures like the Tin Man demonstrates Childers claim that ‘industrial culture threatens to turn all of society into a kind of large factory… Devouring beings who have lost the capacity for feeling and human connection’
Gaskell on machine men; Utilitarian
workmen ‘reckoned on their fellow-men as if they possessed the calculable powers of machines, no more, no less; no allowance for human passions getting the better of reason’
Priveleging of individualism ; pursuit of individual interests over value of the collective is what Arnold denounces as….
the individualistic ‘anarchy’ which leads to moral solipsism. Arnold argues that ‘perfection is…. at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our maxim of “every man for himself”
