"Steel for the Mind": Samuel Johnson and Critical DiscourseUniversity of Delaware Press, 1994 - 251 pages "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. |
Contents
Introduction Between Theory and Practice | 3 |
Tradition and Critical Difference | 19 |
Author Work and Audience | 50 |
Presence and Representation | 76 |
Recollection Curiosity and the Theory of Affects | 104 |
The Dialectic of Original and Copy | 123 |
Redefining Genre | 152 |
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Common terms and phrases
Addison Adventurer allegory argues aspect of Johnson's biography blank verse canon character claim conception contemporary context copy Cowley Cowley's critical theory dialogic difference discourse distinction dramatic Dryden effect eighteenth-century critics essays fiction genius genre Hagstrum history painting Hudibras ideal presence ideas Idler illusion images imagination imitation Imlac's insists intention intertextuality John Johnson believes Johnson's argument Johnson's criticism Johnsonian Joseph Warton judgment Kames Keast kind language limits literary Lives Lycidas means ment metaphor metaphysical poets Milton mimesis mind mode monologic nature neoclassical neoclassicism never notion novelty object opposition original Paradise Lost particular passage pastoral Paul Fussell perception pleasure poem poet poetry Pope Pope's possibility praise Preface to Shakespeare present principles prose question Rambler Rasselas reader reading realm relation representation rhetorical Samuel Johnson seeks seen sense Shakespeare son's structure style sublime temporal theory thought tion tradition truth University Press verse words writings