Lyrikzeitung & Poetry News
Das Archiv der Lyriknachrichten | Seit 2001 | News that stays news
19. Loving Literature
In “Loving Literature: A Cultural History,” Deidre Shauna Lynch, a professor of English at Harvard, shows us that it wasn’t always this way. For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes—over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850—that reading became a “private and passional” activity, as opposed to a “rational, civic-minded” one.
To grasp this “rational” approach to reading, Lynch asks you to transport yourself back to a time when, in place of today’s literary culture, what scholars call “rhetorical” culture reigned. In the mid-seventeen-hundreds, a typical anthology of poetry—for example, “The British Muse,” published in 1738—was more like Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” than the Norton Anthology. The poems were organized by topic (“Absence,” “Adversity,” “Adultery”); the point wasn’t to appreciate and cherish them but to harness their eloquence in order to impress people. / Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
One Comment on “19. Loving Literature”
Hinterlasse einen Kommentar
Neueste Kommentare
Im Netz seit 1.1.2001
|
|
|
Lyrikzeitung & Poetry News 
iwi passt was ich heute (und bei zukofsky, bottom: on shakespeare komplett (=centennial iii/iv), p144: bacon, advancement of learning 2,iv, 1f.) als allererstes gelesen hab:
„poesy is a part of learning in measure of words … doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined … the use of [poesy] hath been to give a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things … and therefore [poesy] was ever thought to have … divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind“,
was ich zitiere, weil bacon „desires of the mind“ erwähnt, was wiederum ich zwar nicht wirklich adäquat auslegen kann, aber (in nicht ganz unpolemischer absicht fehl)lese als hinweis, dass der affect-cognition-split meist nicht wirklich taugt : …
LikeLike