"Steel for the Mind": Samuel Johnson and Critical DiscourseUniversity of Delaware Press, 1994 - 251 sider "Thus Hinnant examines the contention that Johnson was a dogmatic critic, seeking to demonstrate that Johnson's claim to interpretive authority does not rest upon either theoretical demonstration or common sense perception but is rather located within an intermediate area of dialogue and debate. He also tries to show that the apparent simplicity with which Johnson views the classical relation between author, text, and audience is deceptive. These terms were given wide currency in Meyer Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp, but the underlying relation Abrams posits takes for granted the unity and identity of the authorial and reading subjects. What is actually presented in Johnson's criticism, Hinnant contends, is a subject that is neither unified nor identical to itself. Later, Hinnant focuses on the relation for Johnson between the text and the external world. In contrast to the views of many eighteenth-century critics from Addison to Lord Kames, Johnson maintains that mimesis necessarily implies the absence of what it purports to represent and thus can never achieve what Kames calls "ideal presence."" "Hinnant devotes special attention to Johnson's interpretation of the classical doctrine that language is the dress of thought - to be amplified or compressed at the poet's will. That "words, being arbitrary, must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them" is a notion that Johnson accepts as an article of faith. Yet it is precisely because of this notion that it sometimes becomes difficult, in Johnson's reasoning, to disentangle sense from sign, since the two may be bound up in such a way that prohibits any easy distinction between them. Thus if Johnson shows a pre-modern concern with language as the dress of thought, it is because he sees language as the ground of thought, not because he sees thought as the ground and determining origin of language."--BOOK JACKET. |
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Side 87
... Discourses on Art . According to Reynolds Painting is not only not to be considered as an imitation , operating by deception , but that it is , and ought to be , in many points of view , and strictly speaking , no imitation at all of ...
... Discourses on Art . According to Reynolds Painting is not only not to be considered as an imitation , operating by deception , but that it is , and ought to be , in many points of view , and strictly speaking , no imitation at all of ...
Side 229
... Discourses on Art , ed . Robert R. Wark ( New Haven and London : Yale University Press , 1975 ) , pp . 238 and 232 . 14. David Hume , A Treatise on Human Nature , ed . Ernest G. Mossner ( Har- mondsworth : Penguin Books , 1969 ) , p ...
... Discourses on Art , ed . Robert R. Wark ( New Haven and London : Yale University Press , 1975 ) , pp . 238 and 232 . 14. David Hume , A Treatise on Human Nature , ed . Ernest G. Mossner ( Har- mondsworth : Penguin Books , 1969 ) , p ...
Side 230
... Discourses , XI : 200. On the relation between portraiture and inscrip- tion , see Jonathan Goldberg , " The Inscription of Character in Shakespeare , " in his Voice Terminal Echo : Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts ( New York ...
... Discourses , XI : 200. On the relation between portraiture and inscrip- tion , see Jonathan Goldberg , " The Inscription of Character in Shakespeare , " in his Voice Terminal Echo : Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts ( New York ...
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Tradition and Critical Difference | 19 |
Author Work and Audience | 50 |
Presence and Representation | 76 |
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"Steel for the Mind": Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse Charles H. Hinnant Begrenset visning - 1994 |
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