The burdens of perfection : on ethics and reading in nineteenth-century British literature
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書誌事項
The burdens of perfection : on ethics and reading in nineteenth-century British literature
Cornell University Press, 2008
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注記
Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-250) and index
内容説明・目次
内容説明
"In some moods, or for some people, the desire to improve can seem so natural as to be banal. The impulse drives forward so much in our culture that it can color our thoughts and shape our actions without being much noticed. But in other moods, or for other people, this strenuous desire becomes all too noticeable, and its demands crushing. It can then drive a sleepless attention to ourselves, a desolate evaluation of what we have been and what we are."-from The Burdens of Perfection
Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its costs, as we have lost the concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished nineteenth-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, and to that degree makes less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period, or from other periods.
Such are the intuitions that drive The Burdens of Perfection, a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.
目次
Preface
Resisting, Conspiring, Completing: An Introduction
Improvement and Moral Perfectionism
Moral Perfectionism in the Winter of 1866-67
Historical Sources
Implicative and Conclusive Criticism
Part I. The Narrative of Improvement
1. Skepticism and Perfectionism I: Mechanization and Desire
Standing Before Camelot
Skepticism as Ungoverned Desire: Browning's Duke
Skepticism as Mechanization: Carlyle and Mill
Mr. Dombey Rides Death
2. Skepticism and Perfectionism II: Weakness of Will
Victorian Akrasia
Perspective and Commitment
Hard Times and Akrasia
Daniel Deronda and Second-Person Relations
Orchestrating Perspectives
Mark Tapley's Nausea
Interlude: Critical Free Indirect Discourse
3. Reading Thoughts: Casuistry and Transfiguration
Casuistry and the Novel
The Theater of Casuistry: Dramatic Monologues
Exemplary Criticism
Part II. The Moral Psychology of Improvement
4. Perfectly Helpless
The Reticulation of Constraint
Sigmund Freud and Richard Simpson
5. Responsiveness, Knowingness, and John Henry Newman
"An Evil Crust Is on Them"
The Violence of Our Denials
Watching and Imitation
Close Reading
6. The Knowledge of Shame
Skepticism and Shame
Three Scenes of Shame
Edith Dombey's Shame
Shame and Being Known
Shame and Great Expectations
Shame and Narration
7. On Lives Unled
Nailed to Ourselves
Environments for the Optative
The Jamesian Optative
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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