The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel
09 Feb 2009-
About: The article was published on 2009-02-09. It has received 315 citations till now.
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01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: In this paper, a discussion preceded and followed by discussions of poetry is carried out, where the authors argue that poetry is the form of art closest to bare language (i.e., language without accompanying sense media), which is best able to exploit its possible range of social, cultural and structural connections.
Abstract: ion or bareness, its proximity to mere letters on a page that enables it to communicate with a maximal degree of openness. This productive bareness comes out in Kant’s discussion of logical and aesthetic attributes, a discussion preceded and followed by discussions of poetry. While Kant does not use these precise terms, his description of the difference between these two types of attributes suggests that logical attributes have a denotational relation to their concepts, whereas aesthetic attributes, as expressions of a concept’s “implications” and “kinship with other concepts” (183) follow lines of connotation, metaphor and metonymy. As the form of art closest to bare language (i.e., language without accompanying sense media), poetry is best able to exploit its possible range of social, cultural and structural – as well as merely contingent or incidental – connections. While a painting of an eagle entails certain forms of determination by virtue of its visual medium (being fixed in its particular appearance), the word “eagle” might take on any number of connotative meanings or implications depending on situational variables. Kant envisions poetry, the art in which the power “of aesthetic ideas can manifest itself to full extent” (183), as being best able to make good on this structural openness – as acting on us in such a way that we follow a given presentation, concept or word out along its explicitlyand implicitly-connected range of conceptual and sensory content (its “wealth of undeveloped material” (185)) as far as possible. This vision need not be limited to poetry, as presumably it should be able to hold for any form of literature that engages in this kind of speculative use of language. 47 The Roman instances Kant offers as aesthetic attributes in discussing poetry suggest that these attributes encompass both relations of substitution and association. 60 If poetry exploits the connective potentiality of language to the ends of producing a maximal communication of experience between human subjects, then the question remains as to where this experience originates. As Kant endorses the idea of the geniusartist, we might posit some manner of sender-receiver model, in which this figure uses his exceptional sensibility to arrive at some refined experience, and then uses his skill to obviate the resistance of his medium and communicate this experience in as complete a form as possible to his audience. Aesthetic experience, in this account, would properly be experience belonging to the artist, as we identify works of art by the artists that fashioned them (e.g., Van Gogh’s The Starry Night). Two points work against this. The first is that Kant describes the genius’s creation or composition, which remains inexplicable in terms of concrete purposes, but not any particular experience preceding this process. If anything, it would make more sense to situate aesthetic experience around the encounter with the art (or natural) object, as Kant spends a great deal of time sorting out issues around this site. The second point working against a personalist or artist-centered model of aesthetic experience is the role that nature plays in fine art. In discussing genius and fine art, Kant repeatedly depicts nature as a force or agent preceding and overruling any intention on the part of the artist or any determinate rule for composition or creation. Nature not only endows the artist with genius or confers artistic skill or sensibility, but also “gives the rule to art” – i.e., it generates the mode of singular purposiveness proper to beautiful or fine art. Far from an earlier model of a regular mechanical system, nature here serves to indicate limitations to rational 48 Recall that the “rule” given by nature is neither determinate, articulated, nor conceptual. 61 description and scientific explanation. Nature acts in art in such a way that it cannot be anticipated or “brought about by any compliance with rules, whether of science or of mechanical imitation” (186), nor can we (re)construct any determinate set of rules or precepts to describe and contain the work of art once produced. In contrast to the sublime, which makes use of a presentation of nature in the direction of reason and maintains subjective enclosure, “for the beautiful in nature we must seek a basis outside ourselves” (100). In an experience of the beautiful, whether in an encounter with a natural object or in an object of fine art nature has shaped through genius, nature is a name of an emergence, something unanticipated that escapes our conceptualization, that exists outside of us and yet activates something in us, setting our minds and bodies into unaccustomed and vital relations and motions. As a judgment of the beautiful (which is more like an experience, sensation or intuition than anything determined by rules, logic or schemata) takes place prior to any conceptualization, nature in the beautiful acts on us before we have had a chance to think, perceive and understand as fully individualized, autonomous, intentional and rational beings, before we have had a change to rig the familiar stage settings of ourselves and our surroundings. I suspect it is only by taking these features of communicability and an emergent nature together with Kant’s structural model of an experience of the beautiful that we can adequately account for his enigmatic claim the liking for the beautiful “carries with it 49 The most relevant passage here being: “Genius itself cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products, and it is rather as nature that it gives the rule” (175). Kant does not state that the philosopher or critic is in any better epistemic position than the genius on this issue, and his commentary on the genesis of art products suggests that they are in much the same position. Section 47 spends a good deal of time contrasting production and education in the arts and the sciences, stressing the (apparent) incommensurability of the two. 62 directly a feeling of life’s being furthered” (98). This furtherance, like the furtherance of “the culture of our mental powers” by fine art, is related to the self-sustaining activity of the beautiful. Early in the Critique, this appears as a form of purposiveness or causality that, without an external purpose, acts to keep our attention on a given beautiful presentation and to keep “the cognitive powers engaged without any further aim ... We linger in the contemplation of the beautiful, because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces itself” (68). Reproduction here suggests a biological rather than a mechanical model, as the beautiful takes on a life of its own within us and a new entity (or event) emerges, rather than another copy being made. Later, Kant speaks of Geist as imparting to the mental powers “a purposive momentum ... a play which is such that it sustains itself on its own and even strengthens the powers for such play” (182). As we know, this is a play that activates and enlivens our mental faculties without allowing any given faculty to dominate, a play that becomes self-sustaining and capable of augmenting our capacities in this free and purposive activity. There is no concrete and determinate purpose we have before us in an experience of the beautiful, and yet in such an experience we feel ourselves acted upon and answering with a sense of force and motive, thinking and feeling in unaccustomed ways and desiring to follow these thoughts and feelings. It is notable that Kant does not specify whose life is felt being furthered in our liking for the beautiful. Presumably, we ourselves feel enlivened in having our understanding, imagination and reason called into an indeterminate and unlimited mode of action. At the same time, in our liking for the beautiful we feel ourselves in the midst of a sense and experience we share and which connects us intimately to other humans in a
10 citations
Book•
30 Sep 2015TL;DR: Weinstein this article examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place and argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future.
Abstract: In Time, Tense, and American Literature, Cindy Weinstein examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place. This book argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future. Taking 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' as her point of departure, Weinstein shows how Poe's way of representing time involves careening tenses, missing chronometers and inoperable watches, thus establishing a vocabulary of time that is at once anticipated in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and further articulated in works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser and Edward P. Jones. Each chapter examines the often strange narrative fabric of these novels and presents an opportunity to understand how especially complicated historical moments, from the founding of the new nation to the psychic consequences of the Civil War, find contextual expression through a literary uncertainty about time.
9 citations
08 Nov 2016
TL;DR: In the late eighteenth century, European novelists discovered youth. Writers like Goethe, Austen and Scott developed a new genre, the Bildungsroman, in which young, enthusiastic protagonists explore...
Abstract: In the late eighteenth century, European novelists discovered youth. Writers like Goethe, Austen and Scott developed a new genre, the Bildungsroman, in which young, enthusiastic protagonists explor...
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Cites background from "The one vs. the many : minor charac..."
...The term comes from Alex Woloch, who argues that character systems are determined by how they allocate ‘character space’ among the actors in the narrative.(20) For Woloch, a character’s inner qualities are less important than the space they occupy and...
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Book•
30 Jul 2014
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TL;DR: The triumph of the Darwinian theory of evolution was by no means a foregone conclusion on the first publication of The Origin of Species (1859) the scientific community was not immediately convincing as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The triumph of the Darwinian theory of evolution was by no means a foregone conclusion. On the first publication of The Origin of Species (1859) the scientific community was not immediately convinc...
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