Week 8 Flashcards
Brander Matthews
Brander Matthews: The Philosophy of the Short-Story (1883; published variants in 1885, 1888 and 1901)
Although Poe played an important role in the early history of short story theory, it was Brander Matthews who first claimed the short story as a distinct genre and coined the term ‘short story.’
BM: influenced by Poe
Brander Matthews’ central points:
- The difference between a Novel and a Novelet is one of length only: a Novelet is a brief Novel.
- The difference between a Novel and a Short-story is a difference of kind.
- A true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short.
- A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression
- The Short-story is the single effect, complete and self-contained, while the Novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes. Thus the Short-story has, what the Novel cannot have, the effect of “totality,” as Poe called it, the unity of impression.
- The writer of Short-stories must be concise, and compression, a vigorous compression, is essential. Again, the novelist may be commonplace, he may bend his best energies to the photographic reproduction of the actual; if he show us a cross-section of real life we are content; but the writer of Short-stories must have originality and ingenuity.
- Short-stories should have brevity and brilliancy, neatness of construction and polish of execution.
- The more carefully we study the history of fiction the more clearly we perceive that the Novel and the Short-story are essentially different––that the difference between them is not one of mere length only, but fundamental.
Romanticism
Romantic literature is generally considered as psychoanalysis avant la lettre and is believed to contain psychoanalytic insights that only some 60 or 70 years later were explicitly spelled out by Sigmund Freud.
The romantic attitude may be detected in literature of any period.
But as a historical movement it arose in the late 18th century in England in reaction to rational literary, philosophical, religious etc. standards.
A central idea of R. has been uttered by the British Romantic William Wordsworth, cf. his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1802 for the 2nd time:
“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind.”
Neo-classicism v. Romanticism
interest in antiquity v. re-discovery of the Middle Ages
Regelpoetik/aesthetics of production v. aesthetics of effects
poetic diction (formulaic language) v. plain, ‘natural’ language
imitatio v. innovation and originality
formal values v. associative & suggestive
objectivity and universality v. subjectivity and particularity
Reason / restriction v. emotion / imagination
literature as a didactic means v. autonomy of art
the beautiful -> the picturesque -> the sublime (Burke: “delightful horror”)
American Romanticism
AR is a belated ‘event’ – it takes place in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, i.e. some 30 or 40 years after British Romanticism had started.
American Romantic authors helped to forge an independent cultural identity for which the nation had already been longing for many decades. [1776: declaration of political independence]
AR draws heavily on British Romanticism which itself has inherited many of its ideas from French and German idealistic philosophers and writers such as Rousseau (who believed in the natural goodness of man and in the negative influence of institutions which have made man wicked), Kant and Schopenhauer.
Apart from the important role of the just mentioned foreign sources, AR was also engendered by a range of indigenous forces such as:
- a realized political democracy
- the individualism and optimism of the frontier
- intimacy of the wilderness /importance of nature
- a predominantly agrarian background
- and the recognition of the heroism of early Americans
The Oxford Companion to American Literature lists the following characteristics of the romantic movement as exemplified in American literature:
- sentimentalism (a sen. romance by Susanna Rowson called Charlotte Temple, publ. in England in 1791 and in the US in 1794; by 1933 it had gone through 161 ed. in the US //Washington Irving’s familiar The Sketch Book which contains familiar essays and tales (“Rip Van Winkle” and “The legend of Sleepy Hollow”), publ. serially in the US 1819-1820
- ‘primitivism’ and the cult of the noble savage (Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, a narrative poem in unrhymed trochaic tetrameter, publ. in 1855)
- political liberalism (Jefferson, Paine)
- the celebration of natural beauty and the simple life (Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau)
- introspection (Poe, Thoreau) aesthetics of effects; -associative and suggestive language; emotion and -imagination
- idealization of the common man, uncorrupted by -civilization (Cooper)
- interest in the picturesque past (Irving, Hawthorne)
- interest in remote places (Melville)
- medievalism (Longfellow)
- antiquarianism leading to the revival of the popular ballad (Longfellow)
- the Gothic romance (Brown)
- concern with a crepuscular world of mystery (Poe)
- individualism (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman)
- poetry: technical innovation (Whitman’s prosody) -> Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
- humanitarianism (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin publ. serially in The National Era 1851-1852 and in book form in 1892)
- morbid melancholy (Poe)
- native legendry (Longfellow’s Evangeline, a narrative poem in unrhymed English hexameters, publ. in 1847)
- the historical romance (Simms, Cooper)
Current-Garcia/Walton on Poe and Romanticism
Chief representatives of AR: Melville, Poe and Hawthorne
Hawthorne and Poe differed markedly from each other:
Hawthorne’s stories, generally unfolding against a New England background, were often symbolical and almost always stressed a moral theme.
Poe: no particular locality; he generally avoided allegory, but revealed an extremely tight and unified construction, as well as an astonishing power to evoke atmosphere; anti-moralistic; creation of novelty and surprise.
xxi-xxii> Poe’s earliest stories were published separately in annuals and magazines like the Courier and the Southern Literary Messenger.
As he became better known he succeeded in publishing in 1840 a two-volume edition called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, containing all but one of the twenty-six stories he had written up to that time.
Poe attempted to meet the market’s demands by exploiting the sensational devices then current in popular magazine fiction.
His early stories, accordingly, were done in the popular Gothic manner of the time: they were morbid horror tales, full of the supernatural, of madness, premature burial, mutilation, and weird, unearthly scenes.
xxiv> Ruin/the disintegration of human life/psyche are the prevailing themes in these stories.
Poe has often been called a “dark Romantic.”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) – Biography
Born in Boston, Mass.
Son of actors, became an orphan in early childhood, and was taken into the household of John Allan, a tobacco exporter of Richmond.
He came to England with the Allans (1815-1820) and attended Manor House School at Stoke Newington.
After their return to the US, he spent a year at the University of Virginia, which he left after incurring debts and gambling to relieve them.
He then entered the army, but was dishonourably discharged in 1831, for intentional neglect of his duties.
In 1836 he married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm.
His publication of poems and tales brought him fame, but no financial security. He and his wife suffered poverty and ill health, his wife dying in 1847 and he himself struggling with alcohol addiction and nervous instability.
His end was characteristically tragic; he died in Baltimore five days after having been found semi-conscious and delirious in a gutter, from alcohol, heart failure, epilepsy, or a combination of these.
His posthumous reputation and influence have been great; he was much admired by Baudelaire who translated many of his work into French, and in Britain by Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and W. B. Yeats.
Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838)
Poe’s “Ligeia“: “gothic” or “psychological realism”?
unreliable narrator!
Structure of tale: Ligeia / death / Rowena / death / Ligeia (?)
title/name: Lady Ligeia bears the name of a Siren, and she manifests traits traditionally identified with the Sirens of classical antiquity. Singing in voices of ethereal beauty, and accompanying themselves on such delicately soul-stirring musical instruments as the lyre, Ligeia and her companions enchanted mariners and lured them to shipwreck and death.
Odysseus!
“In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanour, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder.” (83/156)
“And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” (84/158-9, -> Joseph Glanvill)
“It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby-coloured fluid.” (91/166)
“It might have been midnight…when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my reverie.––I felt that it came from the bed of ebony––the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious terror––but there was no repetition of the sound. … Many minutes elapsed before any circumstances occurred tending to throw light upon the mystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble, and barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within the cheeks, and along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid were I sat. … I could no longer doubt that we had been precipitate in our preparations––that Rowena still lived. … An hour thus elapsed when (could it be possible?) I was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. I listened––in extremity of horror. The sound came again––it was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse, I saw––distinctly saw––a tremor upon the lips. In a minute afterwards they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly teeth. … There was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon the cheek and throat; a perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame; there was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady lived…” (92-3/166-7)
“The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before. …arising from bed, tottering with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the thing enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the middle of the apartment. … There was a mad disorder in my thoughts––a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all––the fair-haired, blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine?… One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and disheveled hair; it was blacker than the raven wings of the midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. ‘Here then, at least,’ I shrieked aloud, ‘can I never––can I never be mistaken––these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes––of my lost love––of the lady––of the Lady Ligeia.’” (93-4/168-9)
1) What’s the role of repetition? Where do we find repetitions?
2) Is “Ligeia”, according to Poe’s definition, a short story?
Poe and German Idealism
Arthur Schopenhauer Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819)
Friedrich W. J. Schelling „Wollen ist Urseyn“ (1809)
Johann G. Fichte „Die Bestimmung des Menschen“ (1800)
Grundlage der gesamten
Wissenschaftslehre (1794/5)
Tzvetan Todorov
“In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world.” (25)
“The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty [ambiguity]. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.” (25)
Writers of the Fantastic
Friedrich Schiller The Ghost-Seer (1787-9)
E.T.A. Hoffmann The Golden Pot (1814)
Edgar Allan Poe “Ligeia” (1838)
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Henry James Turn of the Screw (1898)
Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
Poe’s Grotesques and Arabesques
In:
“Metzengerstein“ (1836) “Ligeia” (1838) “The Fall of the House of Usher“ (1839) “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1843) grotesques and arabesques constitute the theme underlying Poe’s meticulous descriptions of the ornamental decorations of the walls. ->Why Poe’s interest in ornamentation?
Ornamentation defines the arabesque as a design with plant-based, or, alternatively, completely abstract motifs, the elements of which can be infinitely repeated. Because the elements are abstract, they have no semantic value.
Since German romanticism the term “arabesque” has stood for the self-reflexivity and self-referentiality of the romantic literary text, for its deceiving twists and turns and reiterative structures as well as for its scepticism regarding verbal signs along with a renunciation of intentional communication.
Poe’s texts realize many of the stated characteristics of the arabesque: From the onlooker’s point of view and from a different perspective, the arabesques described in “Ligeia” for example, can produce differing meanings.
The detailed descriptions of the decorations on the walls and ceilings demonstrate the instability of meaning of the arabesque as well as its moments of playfulness, illusion and movement which stimulate the imagination:
“The ceiling of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimen of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-coloured fires.” (88/163)
“The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in pattern of a most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies––giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.” (89/163-4)
The elements of the grotesque, however, are auto-semantic and heterogeneous in themselves as well as in comparison with each other (mixed beings consisting of animated, plant-based and artificial elements); therefore they cannot be repeated.
In connection with literature “grotesque” signifies the depiction of monsters and ghosts and other uncanny, sinister, unnatural creatures and can be applied to many gothic tales.
Ornaments without meaning, grotesque and esp. arabesque ornaments, are to be preferred to well-known objects of any kind, precisely because they do so much to stimulate the imagination.
