Miscellaneous Reflections Research Articles

Critique and Its Explosions

Critique and Its Explosions Jeffrey Galbraith (bio) In The Limits of Critique, definition is liberating. Early in the book, Rita Felski frames her efforts to rescue scholarship from the constraints of skeptical interpretation by redefining her central term. If the tradition of critique that emerges from Kant and Marx has monopolized the norms of interpretation, Felski argues for "redescribing critique as a hermeneutics of suspicion."1 This act of redescription, she explains, "downgrades [critique's] specialness by linking it to a larger history of suspicious interpretation."2 For Felski, critique is best understood as an affective stance, a particular orientation to the world, with manifestations ranging from skepticism to paranoia. She opts to "redescribe rather than refute" critique in this way, on the assumption that mounting a critique of critique would merely intensify its normative grip. Redescribing the sense of the word, by contrast, provides an opportunity "to gaze at [critique] from several different angles, to capture something of the seductive shimmer and feel of a certain sensibility."3 Felski's move to destabilize is effective though not unfamiliar. The appeal to redescription recalls a common rhetorical strategy in the literature of Restoration and early eighteenth-century controversy, which wrangled over the meaning of hot-button words such as obedience and resistance.4 To understand what The Limits of Critique offers eighteenth-century scholars, it is worth exploring this point of connection with Felski's argument through a brief look at the verb to explode. To explode refers to the action of rejecting or exposing an argument. The term provides insight into the "moods and metaphors" of Restoration [End Page 303] and eighteenth-century controversy, while also presenting an opportunity to reflect on the specific power of critique.5 In The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England (1703), Bishop Benjamin Hoadly indicates how the term was used to signify critical rejection. Hoadly reminded readers who voiced criticism of the Act of Uniformity (1662) that some had favored such legislation before they opposed it. "There was a time," he wrote, "when such Arguments for a separate Ministry were rejected, and exploded by your selves."6 To explode an argument, as Hoadly's interlocutors had done, was to expose it as erroneous.7 The kind of rejection denoted by the verb could serve as shorthand for modernity, as in the English translation of Pierre Bayle's Miscellaneous Reflections Occasion'd by the Comet (1708). The translation's title page heralded the advance of critical reason with its claim to "explode Popular Superstitions."8 Usage of the verb to explode most often appeared, however, in claims that a belief or argument had already undergone rejection at some point in the past. The non-juror Charles Leslie used it in this way in a 1698 pamphlet against Deism: "tho' they have some Inroads among the Hotentots, and some other the Brutal part of Mankind," he remarked, "yet are [these arguments] still exploded, and Priests have and do prevail against them."9 As in this instance, such usage typically sounded a note of redescriptive triumph. Exploded, applied in the past tense, implied that the argument had been found to be an illusion, no longer possessed of any power to convince. Whereas the principal sense of explode associated critique with reason, an etymological sense of the word conjured a more hostile scene. This sense of "explode" drew its meaning from the Latin explōdere, which was associated with the disruptive practice of "hiss[ing] (a player) off the stage."10 The poet Abraham Cowley used this sense metaphorically in reference to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England: "If you ask me why they did not hisse, and explode him off the stage," Cowley wrote, "I can onely answer, that they durst not do so, because the Actor and the Door-keepers were too strong for the Company."11 In his play The Author's Farce (1730), Henry Fielding used the critical explosion of hissing to describe a scornful, undiscerning audience. In conversation with the playwright Luckless, the character Witmore refers to the hissing of the audience as a form of damnation: "I tell you the town is prejudiced against you and they will...

Vislumbres de Cabezón: algunas reflexiones y recepción novohispana de <em>Obras de Música</em>

Comentarios y reflexiones misceláneas relativos al músico de tecla y compositor Antonio de Cabezón, al tipo de órganos europeos y españoles prevalecientes en su momento, tocando la participación de su hijo Hernando en la compilación y edición final del libro Obras de música para tecla, arpa y vihuela, con lecturas acerca de algunas partes preliminares a dicho impreso. Se aborda la recepción del libro en el ámbito americano de la Nueva España en el propio siglo XVI, dentro de un contexto de distribución comercial y circulación cultural de impresos de música teórico-prácticos que alcanza temporalmente la primera mitad del siglo XVII, particularmente de obras de tipo instrumental.

Eliza Wharton’s Scraps of Writing: Dissipation and Fragmentation in The Coquette

THIS HUMBLE STONE, IN MEMORY OF ELIZA WHARTON, IS INSCRIBED BY HER WEEPING FRIENDS, TO WHOM SHE ENDEARED HERSELF BY UNCOMMON TENDERNESS AND AFFECTION. ENDOWED WITH SUPERIOR ACQUIREMENTS, SHE WAS STILL MORE DISTINGUISHED BY HUMILITY AND BENEVOLENCE. LET CANDOR THROW A VEIL OVER HER FRAILTIES, FOR GREAT WAS HER CHARITY TO OTHERS. SHE SUSTAINED THE LAST PAINFUL SCENE, FAR FROM EVERY FRIEND; AND EXHIBITED AN EXAMPLE OF CALM RESIGNATION. HER DEPARTURE WAS ON THE 25TH DAY OF JULY, A.D.--, IN THE 37TH YEAR OF HER AGE, AND THE TEARS OF STRANGERS WATERED HER GRAVE The engraved tombstone of Eliza Wharton offers readers of The Coquette a brief moral for her tale of gaiety and seduction. Reproduced in the last letter of Hannah Webster Foster's 1797 epistolary novel, the tombstone closes the narrative with a heavy-handed attempt by Eliza's friends to communicate a final lesson. This record of Eliza's life and death provides narrative, emotional, and instructive closure for one of the most affectively provocative records of seduction in the late eighteenth century. Eliza's friends emphasize her honorable character, the superior acquirements, and uncommon tenderness that distinguish her; the inscription provides a well-intentioned perspective, but the commemoration also makes Eliza's life legible according to commonplace didactic and sentimental conventions (169). (1) In contrast, near the end of her life Eliza moves herself out of the spotlight and communicates using fragments of writing that include partial letters, abbreviated messages, and miscellaneous reflections (162). After Reverend Boyer rejects Eliza's offer of love and Major Sanford successfully seduces her (a seduction concealed from Eliza's correspondents), she further conceals herself via her silence, her self-imposed social alienation, and her retreat from day-to-day interactions. Eliza's subsequent fragmented writings diverge from the sentimental discourse--exemplified by the description on the tombstone--that constructs her experiences as open and comprehensible. Throughout The Coquette, Foster explores how Eliza absents herself from a legible epistolary network as a result of her community's relentless persecution. Even though I begin the essay by presenting the inscription of Eliza's friends, I will attempt to give Eliza a burial that conforms to her own hidden and fragmented self-representations. It is not only Eliza's friends who injure her memory. By disregarding Foster's criticism of the totalizing perspective of the tombstone, literary critics continue to reenact the community's problematic interpretive methods in their scholarship. Two main trajectories govern criticism on The Coquette; one argues for the novel's insistence on female autonomy, while the other approach argues for Foster's codification of conservative gender relations. Both these approaches share the mistake of historical anachronism, since they seek to locate Eliza at the opening of a long, later history of gender relations and feminism. The former approach--taken by critics like Sharon M. Harris, Claire C. Pettengill, and C. Leiren Mower--lauds female self-mastery as the primary lesson of Eliza's downfall (Mower 336). (2) According to these critics, Eliza's withdrawal from social relations at the end of the novel functions as an emancipatory escape that transcendently looks from late eighteenth-century history to the larger ideology of feminism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Ironically, this approach to the novel threatens to replicate the constrictive gender ideologies that initially lead to Eliza's effacement as the plot progresses; by reading self-mastery into Eliza's absence, self-negation, and fragmentation, these critics affirm and impose their own version of the history of women's rights without looking at the way Foster depicts Eliza's response to the traumatic events of her life. Taking Eliza's withdrawal from the gaiety of her social and family life as a radical feminist claim, particularly without looking at the form of Eliza's protest, this sort of reading fails to take her story at face value. …

Rengenier C. Rittersma (Ed.), Luxury in the Low Countries. Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present. Brussel, Pharo/ASP Editions 2010 Rittersma Rengenier C. Luxury in the Low Countries. Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present. 2010 Pharo/ASP Editions Brussel € 20,–

Rengenier C. Rittersma (Ed.), Luxury in the Low Countries. Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present. Brussel, Pharo/ASP Editions 2010 Rittersma Rengenier C. Luxury in the Low Countries. Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present. 2010 Pharo/ASP Editions Brussel € 20,–

Rengenier C. Rittersma (ed.), Luxury in the Low Countries. Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present

TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis

Luxury in the Low Countries: Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present. Edited by Rengenier C. Rittersma. Afterword by, Maxine Berg. Brussels: Pharo/ASP Editions, 2010. Pp. 271. €20.00.

<i>Luxury in the Low Countries: Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present</i>. Edited by Rengenier C. Rittersma. Afterword by, Maxine Berg. Brussels: Pharo/ASP Editions, 2010. Pp. 271. €20.00.

Reading Shaftesbury's Pathologia: An Illustration and Defence of the Stoic Account of the Emotions

Summary The present article is an edition of the Pathologia (1706), a Latin manuscript on the passions by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). There are two parts, i) an introduction with commentary (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679795), and ii) an edition of the Latin text with an English translation (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679796) . The Pathologia treats of a series of topics concerning moral psychology, ethics and philology, presenting a reconstruction of the Stoic theory of the emotions that is closely modelled on Cicero and Diogenes Lærtius. It contains a most detailed typology of the passions and affections as well as an analysis of a series of psychological connections, for example between admiration and pride. On the basis of his reconstruction of Stoic moral psychology and ethics, Shaftesbury argues that in one of his phases, Horace should be interpreted as a Stoic rather than as an Epicurean. The translation and the commentary draw attention to the relations between the Pathologia and Shaftesbury's English writings, most importantly Miscellaneous Reflections and the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, which sheds light on several features of Shaftesbury's relation to Stoicism.

Pathologia, A Theory of the Passions

Summary The present article is an edition of the Pathologia (1706), a Latin manuscript on the passions by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). There are two parts, i) an introduction with commentary (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679795), and ii) an edition of the Latin text with an English translation (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679796) . The Pathologia treats of a series of topics concerning moral psychology, ethics and philology, presenting a reconstruction of the Stoic theory of the emotions that is closely modelled on Cicero and Diogenes Lærtius. It contains a most detailed typology of the passions and affections as well as an analysis of a series of psychological connections, for example between admiration and pride. On the basis of his reconstruction of Stoic moral psychology and ethics, Shaftesbury argues that in one of his phases, Horace should be interpreted as a Stoic rather than as an Epicurean. The translation and the commentary draw attention to the relations between the Pathologia and Shaftesbury's English writings, most importantly Miscellaneous Reflections and the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, which sheds light on several features of Shaftesbury's relation to Stoicism.

Ideals, ideology and the republican constitution: some miscellaneous reflections

Ideals, ideology and the republican constitution: some miscellaneous reflections

Anecdotage

The author offers miscellaneous reflections and memoiristic vignettes detailing his experiences with, and in, psychoanalysis and paints a troubling portrait of characteristic practices and assumptions. He also looks at the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis and asks about their relative success in helping us to understand ideas and behaviors central to our sense of being human. Finally, he examines the relevant issues from the perspective of a fiction writer tempted by all-too-convenient notions associated with the psychoanalytic tradition and formulates a cautionary procedure for resisting those notions.

Patient concerns posthaemorrhagic stroke: a study of the Internet narratives of patients with ruptured arteriovenous malformation

To identify and describe the experiences and concerns of a sample of young haemorrhagic stroke patients who experienced a ruptured arteriovenous malformation and determine whether there are gender differences. Patients with arteriovenous malformation haemorrhage tend to be young adults, but little is known about their experiences and concerns. Some research suggest that there is a need to take gender into account when investigating their experiences and concerns. A content analysis of a sample of narratives posted by survivors of an arteriovenous malformation haemorrhage on an Internet site, to determine the extent to which writers discuss similar concerns and experiences. The sample consists of 83 narratives. The author and a research assistant carefully considered the content of each narrative, created categories based upon this reading and then coded men and women's narratives separately, according to the topic discussed. Five main categories of topics were identified: 'symptoms', 'doctors and hospitals', 'rehabilitation and recovery', 'disabilities' and 'miscellaneous reflections'. The latter category contained the sub-categories 'arteriovenous malformation website', 'thanks', 'life now' and 'feelings'. Narratives varied greatly regarding how much each topic was addressed, but there were few gender differences. Overall, most attention was paid to discussing doctors and hospitals and most writers also paid significant attention to the importance of being able to share experiences with other survivors. For these narrators, the experience of being evaluated and treated for arteriovenous malformation haemorrhage is traumatic, leaves a lasting impact and men and women share similar concerns and experiences. Narrators show a need to talk about their experiences, especially with others who may share similar experiences. Knowing the concerns and perspectives of a sample of arteriovenous malformation patients may help nurses anticipate the concerns of their own haemorrhagic stroke patients and help improve patients' psychosocial well-being.

Objects of Speculation: Early Manuscripts on Women and Education by Judith Sargent (Stevens) Murray

Objects of Speculation:Early Manuscripts on Women and Education by Judith Sargent (Stevens) Murray Karen L. Schiff In the past few years, Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) finally has received overdue scholarly attention.1 She has gained respect as a writer who dared to publish during a time when it was rare for a woman to participate in the public sphere-especially as an intellectual-and who promoted women's rights and education when "only about half of American women could sign their names" (Cott 101).2 But Murray walked slowly along the path toward publishing. She knew that women of her time were consigned to the private sphere, so beginning in the 1770s she spent years writing in manuscript books at home. In 1782, after great hesitation, she anxiously allowed one work to be published. Precisely because of her anxiety, as well as her social context, some of her most witty and passionate writings about women's education have remained in manuscript form.3 The manuscripts that I am now bringing into print come from the early 1780s, when Judith Stevens, as was her married name at the time, was first negotiating the tensions between private sentiment and public expression. Selections come from the copybook she called The Repository, or Miscellaneous Reflections Formed Upon Various Occasions and Interspersed with Events Highly Interesting to the Writer.4 Stevens wrote in this book at least from 1777 through 1788, and its contents reveal an earnest valuing of education and a pervasive concern about women's rights. Entries are composed with a quick wit and a deft handling of language, and they are inscribed in an even, sloping hand. The three selections of manuscripts represent different registers of discourse: the more "public" her implied audience, the less bold her claims and word choices. "Bidding Adieu to the Town" is a saucy sketch of a private party in which Judith Stevens lambastes a doctor for his unwitting slights against female opinion. "Education" is a speech Stevens delivered at a public gathering; its staid, grand tone rivals many of today's Commencement speeches. The final selection, "'REVERENCETHYSELF,'" is a draft of the essay that is often erroneously cited as Judith Sargent Murray's first publication, "Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms" (1784).5 This manuscript represents Stevens's thoughts on young girls' education before a final, pre-publication editing process tempered her rhetoric. Public/Private Writing Throughout her career, Judith Sargent Murray's writings on women's rights and education were mediated by her awareness of the audience receiving her words. This is not to [End Page 213] say that she compromised her ideas, but rather that she chose her words and her argumentative strategies circumspectly. Presumably, as an intellectual who wanted her ideas to receive attention, she did not want her writings to inspire sufficient ill will in her readers to dissuade them from reading further. Also, in her historical moment, when "reputation was a woman's most prized possession" (Skemp 182), she wished to preserve her public image. Even as late as 1798, when she had established herself as a respectable writer, she notes in the preface to her essay collection The Gleaner, "I have penned every essay as cautiously as if I had been assured my reputation rested solely upon that single effort" (14). As noted, the goal of preserving her reputation arose mainly from a sense of social anxiety. For Murray, this goal also became tied to her later wish to become famous in future generations-by the end of the century, she was hungry for fame and was no longer shy about admitting it. Still, when she writes about her ambitions in the preface to The Gleaner, she registers a slight worry that she has "presumptuously" aimed too high. Ambition was not a commonly accepted goal for a woman. As Linda Kerber observes, "Ambition, energy, originality-laudable in men-were to be distrusted in women" (11). Stevens writes, "My desires are, I am free to own, aspiring- perhaps presumptuously so. I would be distinguished and respected by my contemporaries; I would be continued in grateful remembrance when...

Character, geometry and perspective: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury's Principles of garden design

Tis impossible we can advance the least in any relish or taste of outward symmetry and order, without acknowledging that the proportionate and regular state is the truly prosperous and natural in every subject. Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections, III, Ch. 2

Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

In an essay of several years ago' I tried to show that there is more continuity than has usually been thought between criticism of poetry written in England during late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and that written in latter half of seventeenth century. This continuity, I argued, was established by central assumption, shared by earlier and later critics, that poetry's main job was to function as a moral teacher and that best way it could do this was by furnishing sharp, sensuously vivid examples (or images or pictures). Such examples, it was thought, could influence our conduct more directly and efficiently than either bare precepts of moral philosopher or examples provided by historian, which, unlike poet's imagined or feigned examples, are tied to messy (because fallen) world of fact and can thus not manifest their full moral implications as clearly as can poet's examples. Nineteenth-century histories of English literature, as perpetuated in course offerings of university English departments, have taught us to think of earlier of these two periods (the Renaissance) as radically separate in virtually all ways from later (the Restoration); moreover, they have taught us to lump later one together with eighteenth century. There is, of course, much to be said in favor of this traditional grouping. But anyone who comes to eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics aware of tedious frequency with which terms precept and (or image) occur in Restoration as well as in Renaissance criticism, and of enormous importance, to Restoration as well as to Renaissance critics, of point that they were used to make, is astonished that in eighteenth century terms, and explanation of poetry's superiority as a moral teacher that they were used to provide, have quite suddenly vanished. is true that throughout eighteenth century (and even after) terms still tended to crop up in informal talk about literature and morals. Pope, in a famous letter that he published in 1737 and claimed (perhaps fraudulently) to have written to Arbuthnot three years earlier, remarks that the best Precepts, as well as best Laws, would prove of small use, if there were no Examples to inforce them. Pope then continues: General propositions are obscure, misty, and uncertain, compar'd with plain, full, and home examples: Precepts only apply to our Reason, which in most men is but weak: Examples are pictures, and strike Senses, nay raise Passions, and call in those (the strongest and most general of all motives) to aid of reformation.'2 But all other uses of terms that I can recall encountering after about 1700 are more casual not only than their Restoration uses but also than use Pope is making of them here. In Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury says of poets even of wanton sort: Their example is best of precepts, since they conceal nothing, are sincere, and speak their passion out aloud.'3 Fielding opens first chapter of Joseph Andrews by remarking: It is a