Aestheticism and Decadence reading Wk 7
Dear All,
I look forward to meeting you this week and beginning our ‘Poetry and Painting’ segment of the Aestheticism course.
The Tennyson texts are easy to get hold of; there is an online copy of Arnold’s 1853 Preface at http://www.telelib.com/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/Poems/preface.html
Best wishes and see you on Thursday,
Vicky
Tonight! (Monday 9th Nov): George Eliot and the Classics
Tonight is the annual Dabis lecture at 6pm in the Windsor Auditorium Main Lecture Theatre. Dr Margaret Reynolds (QMW) will speak on ‘George Eliot and the Classics.’ Reynolds is always interesting, and good value, and admittance is free: why not go along? [AR]
Hard Times 2: Preston Lock Out
A pendant to my earlier Hard Times post, I’ve just found (online) this lovely cache of three hand-drawn and coloured contemporary cartoons of the Preston Lock Out. They’re owned by the Lancashire Evening Post, and this is what their website says about them:
One of five [er, actually three] cartoons produced during a strike by cotton workers in Preston, Lancashire in 1853 and 1854. The strike resulted in a lock-out by the employers and Irish workers were brought in to break the strike by the larger mill owners. These workers, who appear to be mostly women and children, are caricatured as lazy and ignorant with Irish accents. After the strike was settled, they were sent back to Ireland.
These people, ’scabs’ in modern parlance, were called ‘knobsticks’ in the idiom of the day. You may not be able to make out the writing below, but if you click on this link [pdf] you can have a detailed look at big enlargements of all the cartoons.
This, the legend at the foot of the image tells us, is ‘THE WARPING AND WINDING ROOM HANOVER ST MILL’ The chap on the left in the top-hat is called ‘THE MASTER’ and he says: ‘I am quizzing you, my beauties’. The fellow in green is ‘THE OVERLOOKER’, and is saying (presumably to the little boy in red who’s shinned up the loom): ‘I say you young devil come down you are sure to be kilt’. And the red-haired woman is saying: ‘Sure a now the devils skure to yes Mike come down wid yes’.
Here’s another, sadly in black and white (you can see the full colour version at the pdf link mentioned above):
You can see he’s pulling stick-figure workers out of a container labelled ‘a box full of new knobsticks’. Fascinating stuff. Incidentally, I’m not aware of any critical work on this (this fairly well-known article, ‘Dickens, Gaskell and the Preston Strike’, doesn’t mention it, for instance): it might make a nice topic, or at least a nice angle, for a Hard Times essay …) [AR]
Hard Times
Tomorrow’s novel class (the last before reading week) is on Hard Times, of which novel it is probably fair to say: CD’s contemporaries thought little of it, though Leavis and later critics have loved it! To quote Grahame Smith:
Even in the general climate of disappointment generated by the later, so-called ‘dark’ novels, Hard Times stands out in the meagre response it elicited from Victorian reviewers and in the lack of serious consdieration it had received until the middle of the twentieth-century. It was admired by a great contemporary, John Ruskin, and found a passionate advocate in George Bernard Shaw at a later stage, but it had to wait until 1948 for a full-scale rehabilitation, although of a qualified kind, by F R Leavis in The Great Tradition. Leavis praise the novel for the absence of those very qualities which to many readers have seemed most Dickensian: that is, richness of detail, comic exuberance and an apparently cavalier attitude to the more rigorous aspects of literary form. … Leavis’s revaluation paved the way for later appreciations which have grasped that the intense seriousness of the novel’s critique of its social world is not, in fact, incompatible with the linguistic energy and comic verve that seem so central to Dickens’s achievement. There is exuberance here, too, and although its brevity precludes the large-scale structural complexity of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, the brilliance of Hard Times’s pared-down language is hardly less impressive in its wit and variety.
Here are a few links that you might find useful, in terms of getting a handle on the novel: you’re not required to read them before class, but they might help. Utilitarianism is usually seen as an important context for Hard Times; as is Industrialism. Dickens claimed he conceived and started writing the novel before the Preston Lock-out, but it’s good to have a sense of what that example of loggerheads industrial relations entailed. Some interesting articles:
That last one picks up on what we were saying in last week’s core course class about metaphor and metonomy … [AR]
David Copperfield and Fairy Stories
Just, briefly, to draw your attention to a brief post on Dickens and Fairy Tales occasioned by a stimulating seminar discussion on that very topic with the undergraduate third-year ‘Dickens Special Option’ crowd. I’ve just posted it at The Valve. [AR]
Victorian Zombies
I think we can file this post under ’shameless self-publicity’: but I’m just shameless enough to go along with that. I Am Scrooge, a mash-up Christmas Carol and Zombie novel, is in the shops now. You could buy a copy if you liked. I wouldn’t mind.
What’s that? You want to know what the reviews say? Well, I’ll tell you: ‘Imagine a historical Shaun of the Dead written with as many bad zombie puns as you can think of – if you’ve got a long memory, add that it’s been written by the I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again team – and you’ve got an idea of the tone … Given that Roberts is a professor of 19th Century literature, it’s hardly surprising that there are multiple references to different stories, some well-known, others obscure … Ranks alongside Blackadder’s Christmas Carol as a great comic take on Dickens.’ [AR]
BL ‘Victorian Values’ event, 20th Nov
Dear MA students,
The British Library is holding a fun night of Victoriana on the evening of the 20th November.
http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event95861.html
Admission (£7.50) includes the chance to view their Points Of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs exhibition, which includes some materials that Hannah Lewis-Bill, one of last year’s Victorian MA students, worked on as part of her internship at the BL.
Thanks to Hannah for drawing this event to our attention.
All best,
Vicky
On being in love with Steerforth from David Copperfield
Did you know that eminent contemporary philosophy Martha Nussbaum has fallen in love (‘rushing into the eager volatility of desire’) with Steerforth, from David Copperfield? No? Then read this essay, ‘Steerforth’s Arm: Love in the Moral Point of View’ from her celebrated collection Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). [If the link doesn't work for you, either type 'Steerforth's Arm' into the 'search this book' box on the left hand side of the page, or else scroll down and click on the 'contents' page at the bottom]. [AR]
Bleak House I
This coming Thursday we all step inside the Bleak House.
Hopefully you’ve all read the novel, but for the purposes of seminar discussion I’d like to start out by concentrating on just the first chapter, and in particular on Dickens’s famous descriptions of London mud and London fog.
Now one of the things I’d like to talk about is the function of metaphor and metonomy in the novel. We’ll go over what these terms mean, and the ways in which they’re useful in reading Bleak House, in the seminar; but if you’re a little rusty on what those two rhetorical devices entail, here’s a brief summary:
Metaphor and metonomy are both modes of saying something by saying something else; but metaphor is a mode of displacement (‘Achilles is a lion’), where a point of similarity (they’re both really brave and fierce) links what are otherwise quite different terms; and metonymy is a mode of association, or contiguity (‘the pen is mightier than the sword’; where the pen stands for ‘writing’ because it is a part of the larger whole). Synecdoche (‘two hundred head of cattle’; ‘a parish of a thousand souls’) is a kind of metonomy. So, to put another way: if you say ‘pen’ to mean ‘writing’ as a whole, it’s clear enough what the logic of the connection is … ‘pen’ has an obvious relationship to ‘writing’. But if you say ‘Achilles is a lion’ you’re linking two very different things — because in almost every respect Achilles is not in the least like a lion (he doesn’t have four legs; he’s not covered in fur; he doesn’t have a tail, etc). The one point of comparison, ‘bravery’, is set against all the dissimilarities. That’s how metaphor works, by a sort of creative dislocation. Here’s another example: Craig Raine, in poetic, metaphoric mode, talks about ‘the onion, memory’. But in what ways is memory like an onion? Mostly we’re struck by the ways memory is not like an onion. Nevertheless, the crucial point of similarity (memory is like an onion because … it makes you cry) is given added heft and point by the dislocating function of the metaphor as a whole.
Hmm. Hope that’s at least partly clear.
What I’m particularly interested in, in terms of reading Dickens, is Roman Jakobson’s particular take on these two rhetorical terms: Richard Bradford’s Routledge introduction to Jakobson is a good place to start on this (you can start reading some of it [on metaphor and metonomy and 'The Poetic Function'] at Google books). For a briefer version here’s Columbia.edu’s summary:
The message construction is based on two simultaneous operations*:
- Combination (horizontal) – constructing syntactic links; contexture.
Relation through contiguity, juxtaposition.
METONYMY – implying time, cause and effect, a chain of successive events- Selection (vertical) – choosing among equivalent options.
Relation on basis of similarity, substitution, equivalence or contrast; synonym / antonym.
METAPHOR – implying space, a-temporal connection, simultaneity.In poetry – the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection (metaphor) is used as the major means of constructing a sequence (combination; metonym).
This projection, according to Jacobson, is the defining characteristic of poetry, and it expresses itself in rhyme, meter, symmetries, repetitions, motifs.
The dominant mode in the poetic is therefore that of metaphor. Whereas in Prose – the metonym prevails, the chain of events, the plot, successive actions, a sequence of occurrences**.
*The terms METONYMY and METAPHOR are not used as figures of speech but rather as pervasive forces organizing language.
**The opposition is not an absolute one, but rather a mark of a tendency.
I’m interested in the way the novel balances these two approaches, the prosy-connective and the poetic-transcendent, to talk about society, about secrecy, about connection and about disconnection.
Don’t worry if this looks a little dense, written out here. We’ll go into it in greater detail on Thursday. [AR]
Dorrit’s circulations, Gothic economics
Next week’s Dorrit class (on the novel course) will be about ‘circulation’, the circumlocution office not least. With that in mind, I wanted to flag up Gail Turley Houston’s relatively new monograph, From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge Univ. Press 2007), a very interesting account of the cultural and ‘Gothic’ economics of Bagehot, Marx, Dickens, Stephenson and Stoker, with others along the way. Much of the book is free to read on Google books: enough, anyway, to get a flavour of her argument. The chapter on Dorrit (‘”The Whole Duty of Man”: Circulating Circulation in Dickens’s Little Dorrit‘) is a particularly fascinating attempt to read the novel via the discourses of capital fluidity and banking. It doesn’t sound fascinating, I accept, when I put it like that; but it is. At least, it gave me a new perspective on the book when I read it. Plus, isn’t this just the coolest cover? I am envious:
(You’re not required to read this for next week’s class, by the way; but you may find it interesting) [AR]
