Academic literature on the topic '1709-1784 Criticism and interpretation'

As a man of letters with an exceptionally extensive and diverse output, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) has invited consideration from a variety of angles. The present study offers a 'reading' of Johnson as a framer of distinctions. His distinction-making activity is viewed as a capital feature of the oeuvre, characterizing it across almost its entire range, a very substantial body of evidence is adduced in support of this reading. Broken up by distinction-type, the mass of evidence sorts itself out into seventeen different categories themselves grouped under seven 'thematic' heads. The organization of the inquiry on taxonomic lines is intended both to throw into relief the multiform character of Johnson's distinction-making praxis (something not heretofore remarked) and also to provide a comprehensive, systematic and easily 'readable' account of it. That the evidence testifying to Johnson's distinction-making turned out to be so voluminous could not but occasion the thought that it might be an involuntary activity, a 'drive' grounded in the very 'set' of his psyche which comes in consequence to be viewed as in some sort 'formed for distinction-making'. This thought evolved into the thesis that the present study undertakes to defend, in doing which it becomes a psychocritical investigation inscribed within the theoretical frame of psychological stylistics whose aim is to make inferences and advance hypotheses about the build and workings of a mind from an analysis of the linguistic and stylistic data it generates.

This thesis identifies Diderot's criticism of idealism in his novels and stories concerning three aspects: metaphysics, morals and psychology. The conclusions of this study are the following: religions has, in Diderot's opinion, more negative than positive effects; myths and superstitions prevent the search for truth; fatalism cannot be accepted as a valid philosophic theory; traditional morals and its concept of virtue go against human nature and produce moral "idiotisms"; judicial system creates crimes where nature did not; "anti-natural" morals requires humans to adopt utopic ideal attitudes the effect of which is to mentally unbalance them and lead them to debauchery; the morals prescribed by idealism leads to social hypocrisy; human cannot keep irrevocable promises dictated by institutionalised idealism. Diderot, therefore, favours a new ethic based on real human behavior.

The Rococo period in the arts, flourishing mainly from about 1710 to about 1750, was stylistically unified, but nevertheless its tremendous productivity and appeal throughout Occidental culture has proven difficult to explain. Having no contemporary theoretical literature, the Rococo is commonly taken to have been a final and degenerate form of the Baroque era or an extravagance arising from the supposed careless frivolity of the elites, including the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Neither approach adequately accounts for Rococo style. Naming the Rococo raises profound issues for understanding the relations between conception and production in historical terms. Against the many difficulties that the term has involved in accounting for an immense but elusive cultural movement, this thesis argues that some of the chief philosophical conceptions of the period clarify the particular character and significance of Rococo production. Rococo production is here studied chiefly in decor, architecture, and the plastic arts. This thesis also makes an extended general argument for the value of intellectual history. Rococo style is a group of visual effects of which the central character is atectonicity. This is established by a synthesizing overview of Rococo ornamental motifs. Principal theorists of post-Cartesian thought have failed to see how these distinguish Rococo style from both Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The analysis addresses the historical narratives of Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, and others about Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The core historical claim of this thesis is that Rococo atectonic effects are visual forms of the anti-materialist, idealist ontology of George Berkeley and of the metaphysics and ontology in the early work of Giambattista Vico. Close readings of important passages from works of both philosophers published in 1710 develop the relationship between atectonics and idealist ontology. Both men rejected the Baroque hierarchical cosmology in favor of finitude as the key to human understanding. The readings center on the issue of causality, including Berkeley's views of the perfect contingency of the world and on Vico's theories of truth and ingenium. A reading of Diderot's critique of the Rococo, which led the reaction to it, shows that he recognized the power of idealist ontology in the Rococo cultural production. The larger force in the rejection of Rococo is the emergence of the sublime as a morally fearful feature of physical nature. Montesquieu's aesthetic work also shows the transition to a more rigidly determined view of existence, which was expressed but constrained in the little-recognized lattice motif in Rococo arts. The result of these readings is the influence during and after the Rococo period of the concept of continuous creation, in which the memory and imagination of the human subject relays God-given powers of creation into the production of culture. Continuous creation also suggested a human capability to animate material nature. Rococo style displays this as a pre-cinematic effects that represent the non-material, non-causal deep structure of reality.

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Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)
Esta tese tem por objetivo analisar o papel do narrador como estruturador do romance Jacques Le Fataliste de Denis Diderot (1713-1784). Apesar de ter sido escrito oitenta anos antes da eclosão do Realismo enquanto movimento estético, esse romance apresenta procedimentos literários que foram denominados, no século XIX, como sendo “realistas”. Dentre esses, destaca-se o referente ao narrador, responsável por estratégias ficcionais geradoras de uma ambigüidade entre ficção e história, provocando, no leitor, hesitação entre credibilidade e dúvida. Além disso, esse narrador apresenta uma abordagem subjetiva, que ora apenas narra os fatos, ora interfere no que é narrado, julgando as personagens e suas ações, ora se camufla na tentativa de aparentar distanciamento e neutralidade. Observa-se também de sua parte a realização de uma atividade metaficcional que evidencia um processo de escritura provocador para a sua época. As reflexões e críticas que a obra apresenta sobre a formação do gênero romance e sobre a própria escritura constituem uma experiência narrativa singular por se evidenciarem no interior do próprio romance. Dessa maneira, o narrador é o elemento que estrutura ou desestrutura a obra como um todo, gerando a coesão do texto, diante das várias histórias narradas e aos olhos do leitor. A sua análise determina, enfim, as características de um romance que se destaca dentre os publicados na França no século XVIII, constituindo-se num verdadeiro paradigma formal para os escritores seus sucedâneos, notadamente para os do século XIX, no mundo todo.
This thesis has as objective to analyze the narrator's role as the structurer of the novel Jacques Le Fataliste, by Denis Diderot (1713-1784). In spite of having been written eighty years before the Realism emerging as an aesthetic movement, this novel presents literary procedures that were denominated, in the XIX century, as being realists. Among them, it stands out the narrator, responsible for fictional strategies which generate an ambiguity between fiction and history, provoking, in the reader, hesitation between credibility and doubt. Besides, the narrator presents a subjective approach, that sometimes just narrates the facts, other times it interferes in what it is being narrated, judging the characters and their actions, and sometimes it camouflages in the attempt of looking distant and neutral. It is also observed, concerning the narrator, the accomplishment of a metaficcional activity that totally evidences a provoking writing process for its time. The reflections and critics it presents about the novel gender formation, and the writing itself, constitute a singular narrative experience by making itself evident inside the novel itself. In that way, the narrator is the element that structures or unstructures the work as a whole, generating the text cohesion, before the several narrated histories and to the reader's eyes. Its analysis determines, finally, the characteristics of a novel that stands out among all novels published in France in the XVIII century, establishing a true formal paradigm for its succedaneums writers, notedly for the ones from the XIX century, in the whole world.

Orientador: Alexandre Soares Carneiro
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
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Resumo: Este trabalho é um estudo sobre algumas das temáticas de La Religieuse (A Religiosa), de Diderot, baseado numa abordagem pictórica. Conceitos como o de anamorfose e o de naïveté na pintura, presentes na arte do século XVIII são usados nessa abordagem. A trajetória de Suzanne Simonin, protagonista do romance, expõe histeria, homossexualidade, melacolia e loucura através de três conventos, como conseqüências do corpo submetido a bloqueios em suas tendências naturais; parte disto é aqui desenvolvido. Além disso, abordo a questão do pathétique e da ilusão naquele romance, utilizados para cativar e comover o leitor como se ele estivesse num espetáculo teatral.
Abstract: This work is about La Religieuse (The Nun) of Diderot, based on a pictoral approach. Concepts like anamorphose and that of naïveté, both of them presents in the art the 18th century were used in such approach. The course of Suzanne Simonin, protagonist of the novel, exposes hysteria, homosexuality, melancholy and madness through tree convents as consequences of the submited body to obstructions in its natural tendencies; part of this is developed here. Besides that, I make an approach to the subject of pathétique and illusion in that novel, both used to captivate and move the reader as if he was at a theatrical spectacle.
Mestrado
Teoria e Critica Literaria
Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.