Blake's Agitation: Criticism & the Emotions - Rilegato

Goldsmith, Steven

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1421408066 ISBN 13: 9781421408064

Casa editrice: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

Blake’s Agitation is a thorough and engaging reflection on the dynamic, forward-moving, and active nature of critical thought. Steven Goldsmith investigates the modern notion that there’s a fiery feeling in critical thought, a form of emotion that gives authentic criticism the potential to go beyond interpreting the world. By arousing this critical excitement in readers and practitioners, theoretical writing has the power to alter the course of history, even when the only evidence of its impact is the emotion it arouses. Goldsmith identifies William Blake as a paradigmatic example of a socially critical writer who is moved by enthusiasm and whose work, in turn, inspires enthusiasm in his readers. He traces the particular feeling of engaged, dynamic urgency that characterizes criticism as a mode of action in Blake’s own work, in Blake scholarship, and in recent theoretical writings that identify the heightened affect of critical thought with the potential for genuine historical change. Within each of these horizons, the critical thinker’s enthusiasm serves to substantiate his or her agency in the world, supplying immediate, embodied evidence that criticism is not one thought-form among many but an action of consequence, accessing or even enabling the conditions of new possibility necessary for historical transformation to occur. The resulting picture of the emotional agency of criticism opens up a new angle on Blake’s literary and visual legacy and offers a vivid interrogation of the practical potential of theoretical discourse.

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Recensione:

"A fresh and bracing assessment of the role of affect in some of the most important cultural criticism of the last century, by no means limited to the field of affect studies. I found myself productively provoked by the book’s arguments about the power we critics habitually attribute to critical reading and to literature’s appeal to a non-rational dimension of experience."

(Nicholas Williams, Indiana University)

"Goldsmith's subtle, complicated and counterintuitive study, flows out of what he calls a 'sustained interdisciplinary "surge" in the theoretical, historical and cognitive study of emotion.'"

(Simon Jarvis Times Literary Supplement)

"An imaginative, deeply learned, and passionately argued book. The thinking and writing are sustained throughout at exceptionally high levels... The book makes an original and important contribution to Blake studies."

(G.A. Rosso Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly)

"A major reading of Blake, a significant contribution to affect studies, and a provocative meditation on the state of the profession... Seeing critical reading s the interaction of agitation with slow time could offer a healing message for a divided profession, but there will always be those who are impatient to make a positive difference. Thanks to Steven Goldsmith's outstanding book, both sides can now find sustenance in the work of William Blake."

(David Simpson Modern Language Quarterly)

Descrizione del libro:

Since the Romantic period, the critical thinker's enthusiasm has served to substantiate his or her agency in the world.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1421408066
• ISBN 13: 9781421408064
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 406