An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema by James Chandler

Abstract

James Chandler. An Archeology of Sympathy: Sentimental Mode Literature and Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xxii+430. $45. While we already have some fine pieces of scholarship on how Shaftesburian and arose the literature and philosophy of eighteenth-century England and flowed into writing of the Romantic era, James Chandler's highly eloquent and absorbing new study surpasses nearly all of them precision of description and historical and scope. On the one hand, it provides undergraduates and advanced scholars with unusually clear connections and distinctions between sensibility, sentimental, and (as well as their watered-down derivative, sentimentality). It defines sympathy quite sharply as an attitude, stance, or (this last of which is mode), best dramatized by the face-to-face encounter, which one mentality adopts or identifies with another and thereby modifies passion into [widely humane] sentiment by way of a virtual circulation of outward feeling across other minds and eventually many minds (xvii). Chandler thereby establishes this process as one deep principle of intelligibility in what has become the modern aesthetic and ethical structuring of experience (330), finding it most thoroughly articulated before the 1780s by Laurence Sterne, albeit a way that is shown to build powerfully on Adam Smith, Samuel Richardson, and Latitudinarian religiosity. On the other hand, this book argues better than any other that the scheme of features and practices essential to this mode (13) has ultimately had a long and widely-disseminated life. It has extended itself and its principal elements, Chandler reveals, Western cinema from the 1910s to the 1990s, indeed at the very center of classic Hollywood filmmaking--especially the pictures of Frank Capra the 1920--40s, analyzed here across his whole career--and also the fiction of Charles Dickens, a long-acknowledged influence on Capra, as well as Romantic and Modernist authors from Blake and Wordsworth to Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, most of whom have been dissociated from sentimental by prominent critics until now. All of these exemplars are layered archeologically for us so that extensions of the the twentieth century become rooted more conclusively than ever intersubjective fields established by eighteenth-century writers (12). This book even dares, after defining its key notions and briefly referencing eighteenth-century examples, to move early into the films of Capra and Capra's debt to D. W. Griffith, alongside their agreements and disagreements with the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, to establish how the essentials of face-to-face sympathy are achieved shot/ reverse-shot filmmaking and the themes and practices brought together with it (42-43). It then turns backwards to analyze anticipations of these techniques Sterne and Dickens before forwarding us to their reappearance Romanticism and Modernism. This succession, from the visually verbal to the verbally visual, proves remarkably effective showing how recursive a quite particular set of procedures and attitudes has proven to be. overall result is a major study immensely valuable not just for the analysis of literature and film but for the cross-disciplinary effort now well under way, particularly since Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), to renew our understanding of some primary cultural ingredients of modernity as they carry over from century to century and from one medium to another. benefits of this Archeology for students and their professors are many indeed. Chandler's close readings of scenes, for example, from Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and Griffith's 1909 film of Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth (compared, of course, to Dickens's text), are unparalleled their clarity and their exemplification of key sentimental-mode techniques such as visual mutuality, triangulated spectatorship, dispersed subjectivity, as well as rhetorical tropes such as hypallage (exchange of cause for effect or vice-versa) and syllepsis (ambiguous slippage between the literal and the figurative). …