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Cargando... The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment.por Amanda Anderson
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Combining analysis of Victorian literature and culture with forceful theoretical argument, The Powers of Distance examines the progressive potential of those forms of cultivated detachment associated with Enlightenment and modern thought. Amanda Anderson explores a range of practices in nineteenth-century British culture, including methods of objectivity in social science, practices of omniscience in artistic realism, and the complex forms of affiliation in Victorian cosmopolitanism. Anderson demonstrates that many writers--including George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde--thoughtfully address the challenging moral questions that attend stances of detachment. In so doing, she offers a revisionist account of Victorian culture and a tempered defense of detachment as an ongoing practice and aspiration. The Powers of Distance illuminates its historical object of study and provides a powerful example for its theoretical argument, showing that an ideal of critical detachment underlies the ironic modes of modernism and postmodernism as well as the tradition of Enlightenment thought and critical theory. Its broad understanding of detachment and cultivated distance, together with its focused historical analysis, will appeal to theorists and critics across the humanities, particularly those working in literary and cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonialism. Original in scope and thesis, this book constitutes a major contribution to literary history and contemporary theory. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)820.9Literature English English literature in more than one form History, description, critical appraisal of works in more than one formClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: No hay valoraciones.¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
Anderson makes a couple good critical moves that make this book very worthwhile. One is that she takes the authors she studies and turn their concepts back on themselves, pointing out that though Dickens may lambast certain forms of detachment in his novels, his novels are just as detached in ways that have more in common more than they differ.
Secondly, she's not afraid to advance a position: The Powers of Distance doesn't just analyze detachment, it attempts to reclaim the practice from the bad reputation that (she argues) it has unjustly received in modern critical circles. (I largely agree with her on this point.) She points out that modern critics love irony, which is another form of detachment of course, but also that irony is cheap: you can critique one thing without having to embrace another. Stop being afraid of commitment! Detachment is acceptable, and the fact that it occasionally or even always fails doesn't stop aspiring to it from being worthwhile.