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Confessions General
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| Criticism | Pictures | Links Introduction What do you associate with Romanticism? Review time Romanticism
Is an autobiography necessarily "true"? Why or why not? Does it show a "real" life or ______? Comment on dangers of romanticism From David Kirby’s essay “What Is a Critic?” Terms to know bourgeois adjective & noun M16 French. A. (1) M16 Of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling, the bourgeois (see sense B below); middle-class; conventionally respectable and unimaginative, humdrum; selfishly materialistic; capitalistic, reactionary. B. noun plural same. (1) L17 Originally, a (French) citizen or freeman of a city or burgh, as distinct from a peasant or a gentleman. Now, any member of the middle class. (2) L19 In Communist or socialist writing: a capitalist, an exploiter of the proletariat. derogatory. (3) M20 A socially or aesthetically conventional person, a philistine. derogatory. "bourgeois adjective & noun." The Oxford Essential Dictionary of Foreign Terms in English. Ed. Jennifer Speake. Berkley Books, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 30 September 2010 Gothic: generally, fiction that revels in gloomy and mysterious settings (often castles and with other medieval props), strange, often supernatural occurrences, and dangerous circumstances for the protagonist. And of course, there is the beautiful maiden in perilous circumstances. See Robert Harris's page on Gothic Literature for an excellent (and brief) overview of this genre . . . which predates and is related to romanticism. Noble savage. Term popularized in the 18th century denoting the uncorrupted man of nature as opposed to the degenerate man of civilization. Although the notion of the noble savage was idealized and propagated during the age of English Romanticism, its origins have been traced to the Middle Ages, when the conception of a Golden Age anticipates the formation of the pristine and virtuous ‘natural man’. This ‘natural man’ was initially associated with the Caribs in the Americas, but as the notion expanded, the inclusion of American Indians, South Sea Islanders, and Blacks came to signify the generalization of the non‐white, colonizable ‘savage’. One of the earliest travellers to glorify the primitive man was Christopher Columbus. His association of the Caribbean islands with a terrestrial paradise simultaneously fashioned their inhabitants as Edenic creatures, unfettered by the lures of materialism, progress, and civilization. Similarly, Sir Walter Ralegh's Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596), which relates the untainted existence of various tribes along the Orinoco River, typifies the noble savage as decidedly antithetical to the Western man, whose sophistication and accumulation of scholastic learning has made him a subject of tyranny and degradation. When travel accounts became popular in the 18th century, the notion of the noble savage became more entrenched. Jean‐Jacques Rousseau was the most influential 18th‐century writer to propound the notion of the noble savage in works such as his Discourse on the Origin and Basic Inequality Among Men (1754) and Émile; or, On Education (1762). Writers disillusioned with the consequences of progress created characters that displayed qualities such as physical sturdiness, generosity, innocence, sexual prowess, fearlessness, and a strong engagement with nature. One such character in English literature is Man Friday from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). Certain poets of the Romantic movement, namely William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were also affected by this 18th‐century sentimentalism, and favoured the noble savage as a figure whose primitive virtues needed to be exalted in the face of rapid modernization and colonization. Southey, for instance, criticized English decorum through the character Omai, a Tahitian noble savage, in his poem "To John May, June 29, 1824." The depiction of the black man as noble savage was often made for humanitarian and anti‐slavery purposes. Instead of identifying with nature, the black slave was placed against the black savage, prior to his enslavement. Typical examples of this trait are James Montgomery's poems "The Ocean" (1805) and "The West Indies" (1809), in which Africa is depicted as idyllic and Africans as peace‐loving, joyous people before the invasion of the colonizers. The anti‐slavery campaigner William Roscoe also represented the pre‐slave African as gentle and pleasure‐loving in his poem The Wrongs of Africa (1778). Bibliography Daybydeen, David and Shivani Sivagurunathan. "Noble savage." The Oxford Companion to Black British History. Eds. David Dabydeen, John Gilmore, and Cecily Jones. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 27 September 2010. pastoral In literature, work portraying rural life in an idealized manner, especially to contrast its supposed innocence with the corruption of the city or royal court. In classical times, Theocritus and Virgil wrote pastoral poems. The form was revived during the Renaissance by such poets as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenser. Milton and Shelley were noted for their pastoral elegies, and poets such as Wordsworth and Frost have been referred to as pastoral poets because their work has a characteristically rural setting. "pastoral." World Encyclopedia. Philip's, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 30 September 2010. Romanticism: A sweeping but
indispensable modern term applied to the profound shift in Western
attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much of European
culture in the first half of the 19th century, and that has shaped most
subsequent developments in literature—even those reacting against it.
In its most coherent early form, as it emerged in the 1790s in Germany
and Britain, and in the 1820s in France and elsewhere, it is known as
the Romantic Movement or Romantic
Revival. Its chief emphasis was upon freedom of individual
self‐expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality became the new
standards in literature, replacing the decorous imitation of classical
models favoured by 18th‐century neoclassicism
. Rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment
as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics
turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and to the
boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration. Increasingly
independent of the declining system of aristocratic patronage, they saw
themselves as free spirits expressing their own imaginative truths;
several found admirers ready to hero‐worship the artist as a genius or
prophet. The restrained balance valued in 18th‐century culture was
abandoned in favour of emotional intensity, often taken to extremes of
rapture, nostalgia (for childhood or the past), horror, melancholy, or
sentimentality. Some—but not all—Romantic writers cultivated the appeal
of the exotic, the bizarre, or the macabre; almost all showed a new
interest in the irrational realms of dream and delirium or of folk
superstition and legend. The creative imagination occupied the centre
of Romantic views of art, which replaced the ‘mechanical’ rules of
conventional form with an ‘organic’ principle of natural growth and
free development. "Romanticism." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 30 September 2010. Questions to mull over as you interpret the story I'll be adding to and correcting these page numbers over the weekend. These questions will give you an idea of what you should focus on.
"For a man who spent so much of his life feeling bitter, disillusioned, and disappointed, he had an amazing capacity for self-justification and faith in his own virtue" (Hall). "Guéhenno postulates that for a man such as Rousseau, children were, like illness, 'mere physical accidents . . . ; "the work of nature"; whereas his ideas were his and his alone'" (Hall). "When others spoke of wondrous advancements in material wealth, learning, and science, Rousseau argued that freedom comes from divesting oneself of such encumbrances. People work for what they do not really need, and the desire for more turns them into slaves" (Hall) "Starobinski claims that Rousseau believed that man became evil without willing evil (just as he believed that his heart could remain pure although he performed an evil act) because he struggled with nature and attempted to "overcome adversity through labor." Evil was not Christian sin but "alienation: loss of identity, living for the opinion of others, wanting more than simple recognition. Its source is external and its essence is passion for the external." Man, amoral by nature and in a natural state, must ultimately struggle with his fellows over division of property, and, hence, a government is created to keep order. However, the social contract thus formed is evil, because it is based on inequality. The rich man, with advantages gained by deception, convinces others to accept a contract that consolidates his advantages. It institutionalizes inequality by establishing dominant property rights for the rich, and it is unjust because it springs from deception and not the spontaneous will of the entire society" (Hall).
Links Excerpt on reasoning from Delanceyplace.com. Works Cited Hall, Joy H. "Jean-Jacques Rousseau." Writers of the French Enlightenment II. Ed. Samia I. Spencer. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 314. Literature Resource Center Web. 30 Sept. 2010. Melzer, Arthur M. "Rousseau and the Problem of Bourgeois Society." The American Political Science Review 74:4 (Dec. 1980): 1018-1033. Jstor. Web. 9 Sept. 2010. © 2010 David Bordelon
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