Lynch 2015 - Revision history

Wtrettien at 16:05, 4 February 2022

2022-02-04T16:05:19Z

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	represents an essential part of its displacement from the realm of		represents an essential part of its displacement from the realm of
	public discourse into that of private feeling." (139)		public discourse into that of private feeling." (139)

			women made cut/paste anthologies, men extraillustrated

			Dyce-Hoe Shakespeare

			"What affiliated the extra-illustrated
			book with
			the lady’s album filled with copied-out
			beauties from published authors was
			their makers’ shared insistence on conceiving of the books they bought or
			borrowed as remaining open to revision and as spurring their own acts of
			authorship." (140)

			"Extra-illustration
			depends on a kind of close reading, after all:
			like a philologist, the extra-illustrator
			weighs every word. The copying out of
			extracts into one’s album, appropriative to be sure, also enhances intimacy
			with the copied text." (141)

			"It is possible to view those albums of extracts as documenting, by extension,
			just how often nineteenth-century
			readers understood themselves as
			taking authors’ parts—not
			doing battle against authors, as per Lamb’s description
			of importunate ladies besieging and storming, but instead taking
			authors’ sides and doing them service. The manuscript commonplace book
			of the nineteenth-century
			Scotswoman Eliza Graeme, for instance, pointedly
			amasses anecdotes from publishing history that exemplify booksellers’
			stinginess in their dealings with authors." (141)

Wtrettien at 16:24, 3 February 2022

2022-02-03T16:24:07Z

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	are incomplete without a consideration of literature’s personalization		are incomplete without a consideration of literature’s personalization
	and the practices and institutions of reading by which it was supported" (12)		and the practices and institutions of reading by which it was supported" (12)

			== 3. Wedded to books ==

			"One defining artifact of this era’s culture of literary appreciation was
			the homemade manuscript anthology—a
			compilation of original poetry and
			prose mixed with hand-copied
			extracts from published sources sometimes
			augmented with clippings from newspapers and periodicals; amateur watercolor
			landscapes (sometimes souvenirs of travels); imaginary portraits of
			characters from novels or poems (especially Walter Scott’s); pastel pictures
			on rice paper achieving a tremendous level of zoological/botanical accuracy
			of sea shells, butterflies, and/or flowers; various other specimens of fashionable
			feminine accomplishments, decoupage and flower and fern pressing
			included; locks of hair; memorial cards paying homage to the recently deceased.
			This mixed-media
			medley, put between covers, formed a book that
			was often known as an “album,” the rubric that the era’s vendors of ornately
			bound blank books favored. Some compilers, however, dignified and
			customized their books with titles of their own coining—for
			example, “The
			Poetical Farrago,” “Memorials of Friendship,” “Medley, or Scrapbook,” “The
			Leisure Hours Amusement of a Young Lady,” “Cabinet of Music, Poetry, and
			Drawing." (137)

			"The reason to include this pastime, highly popular by the third and
			fourth decades of the nineteenth century, within the account of the literary
			affections offered by this chapter is that through it hundreds of female
			votaries of taste gained access to some of the enjoyments catered to within
			the bibliomaniac’s library—the
			pleasures connected with accumulation and
			appropriation, for instance, with a creativity detached from the exigencies
			of originality. The amateur anthologist scales down the book collection to
			fit within the confines of a single bijou volume. Like the book collector, she
			brings into being a space whose allure lies in its balancing between exclusivity
			and sharing, concealment and display. The shelves that present the
			books to the visitor’s eye are crucial to the book collection, but the books arrayed
			upon them are closed and preserve their secrets. The blank books sold
			to would-be
			compilers of albums sometimes came with locks." (138)

			"Where the rare-book
			collector, as we saw, shows off his virtuoso ability
			to reach into odd corners of the print world and obtain copies of the
			books that can be treated as though they were handwritten originals, the
			lady assembling her album likewise displays her ability to reformulate print
			culture’s accustomed ordering of the relations of the mass produced and
			the individuated. In the pages of her paper cabinet, the printed poem that
			a certain author once wrote is turned back into manuscript again. The conversion
			represents an essential part of its displacement from the realm of
			public discourse into that of private feeling." (139)

Wtrettien at 19:49, 1 February 2022

2022-02-01T19:49:41Z

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	writers of genius who (as geniuses, a breed apart) occupied an		writers of genius who (as geniuses, a breed apart) occupied an
	aesthetic realm positioned at a distance from worldly conflicts." (9)		aesthetic realm positioned at a distance from worldly conflicts." (9)

			"the canon has mediated the relationships that define home" (11)

			"many accounts we have of the professionalization of literary study and criticism
			are incomplete without a consideration of literature’s personalization
			and the practices and institutions of reading by which it was supported" (12)

Wtrettien: Created page with "Deidre Lynch, ''Loving Literature: A Cultural History'', U Chicago Press, 2015. "I aim to suggest why self-reflection on our ways of knowing will not suffice when we seek to..."

2022-01-30T22:33:26Z

Created page with "Deidre Lynch, ''Loving Literature: A Cultural History'', U Chicago Press, 2015. "I aim to suggest why self-reflection on our ways of knowing will not suffice when we seek to..."

New page

Deidre Lynch, ''Loving Literature: A Cultural History'', U Chicago Press, 2015.

"I aim to suggest why self-reflection
on
our ways of knowing will not suffice when we seek to assess English professors’
characteristic mode of practicing humanist study: I aim to honor,
instead, the central role that affective labor—our
ways of feeling, then, as
well as knowing—has
been assigned within English studies, and I aim to
consider how through our cooperation with that assignment we have come
to inhabit a profession that is paradoxically beholden to statements of personal
connection." (1)

odd intimacy of the professional study of English literature

"Collectively these chapters aim to outline
how since its late eighteenth-century/
early nineteenth-century
reinvention,
also the inaugural moment of its disciplinization, “English literature” has
always been something more than an object of study, even for the architects
of that disciplinization. It has also been implicated in its audiences’ libidinal
dramas and in their understandings of their families and their erotic
histories—hence
English studies’ eccentric relation to the norms of publicness
and impersonality that seem to govern other knowledge-producing
occupations." (5)

"My emphasis falls instead on how the rearrangements
of the discursive field that produce a new idea of literature for the
later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also represent a watershed
in the history of the emotions and intimate life. To an extent that previous
work on the historicity of literature fails to acknowledge, the foundational
texts of criticism, aesthetic theory, and literary history and biography that
were generated during these decades were inflected by the imperatives of a
long era of sensibility." (6)

shift from literature in general to imaginative works demanding attention/love

"Literature so defined emerges, as Trevor Ross’s 1998 history of canonicity
outlined, when an earlier “rhetorical culture” in which texts had served
as instruments of social power, and old texts had been valued only as a
backdrop to ongoing cultural production, began to give way to a cultural
arrangement centered on “appreciation”: on the close, historically sensitive
but tasteful reading of “classics,” or on a devoted engagement with contemporary
writers of genius who (as geniuses, a breed apart) occupied an
aesthetic realm positioned at a distance from worldly conflicts." (9)