CAT 1: Media SeductionsMedia Influence and the Age of Sensibility

Elizabeth Loshhttp://losh.ucsd.edu

Today’s Thesis

The Age of Sensibility introduced some new ideas about media influence and imagined the progression of human mental development, our encounters with painful and pleasant stimuli, the role of the emotions in private and public life, and the agency of audiences in new ways.

Reading with Time and Place in Mind

School of Athens, Greece 450 BCE – 325 BCEThe Age of Sensibility in England 1750-1820Pre-Civil War United States 1845-1860U.S. Occupation of the Philippines 1899-1913The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939Weimar and Nazi Germany 1919-1933 and 1933-1945World War II: The U.S. at War with JapanThe McCarthy Era in the United States 1947-1957Urban England: A Clockwork Orange 1962 and 1971The Post-9/11 World of digital media

Learning the Conventions of theGenre of the Encyclopedia Entry

The Language of Reference WorksWhat to Avoid

• Personal Opinion – “I think . . . ” “Carr fails to . . .” • Speculation – “The author’s purpose was . . .” “Carr

is influenced by” • Justification – “It is clear that . . .” “It is obvious that”• Generalization – “Throughout our history . . .”

“In our society . . .” “Many people are well aware that . . .”

• Inferences – “Carr seems to believe . . .” “The author appears to think . . .”

18th Century Neuroscience

John Hunter, Pourfour du Petit, and other pioneers

Theories of Bioelectricity

Luigi Galvani

Enlightenment Connection/DetachmentThe Age of Sensibility

“The period of English literature which covers roughly the second half of the eighteenth century is one which has always suffered from not having a clear historical or functional label applied to it. I call it here the age of sensibility, which is not intended to be anything but a label. This period has the ‘Augustan’ age on one side of it and the ‘Romantic’ movement on the other, and it is usually approached transitionally, as a period of reaction against Pope and anticipation of Wordsworth.”

How is Sensibility Defined?Adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary:

• The ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences

• Sensitivity to material that might offend or shock

• Sensitivity to sensory stimuli

Origin: late Middle English (denoting the power of sensation) from Latin sensibilitas “that can be perceived by the senses”)

Theories of Sensibility

Why will the word “feelings” appear fifty times in Austen’s book?

“the common feelings of common life” not “the refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions which the first separation of a heroine from her family ought always to excite” (14)

“Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” (164)

Sensibility in Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey 12)

“She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient.”

The Exercise of EmotionEdmund Burke 1729-1797

Member of Parliament – Whig PartySupported the American Revolution

but opposed the French RevolutionIrish statesman, author, orator, and

political theoristCombined philosophy and a theory

of psychology in On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756)

The beautiful pleases the senses.The sublime overwhelms them.

The Sublime vs. The Beautiful

The Sublime vs. The Beautiful

“How Pain Can Be a Cause of Delight”Burke’s “On the Sublime”

“Now, as a due exercise is essential to the coarse muscular parts of the constitution, and that without this rousing they would become languid and diseased, the very same rule holds with regard to those finer parts we have mentioned; to have them in proper order, they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree.”

Burke’s “Exercise Necessary for the Finer Organs”

“In all these cases, if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome encumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime.”

Not Everyone Agreed with BurkeJohn Falconer

A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (1788)

Love usually “neither assumes the violence of anger, nor sinks into the depression of grief” but it isn’t always “temperate”

The Exercise of RationalitySamuel Johnson 1709-1784

poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographerdevout Anglican and committed Tory

“He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word 'nicest,' as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.”

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Attacking The Unities

• Unity of Time• Unity of Place• Unity of Action

Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”How Fiction Presents Itself as Fact

“The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.”

Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”

“The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium.”

Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”

“Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Cæsar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in extacy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage a field.”

Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”

“The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. They came to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some action, and an action must be in some place; but the different actions that complete a story may be in places very remote from each other; and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre?”

Do Audiences Always Know?

Orson Welles, War of the Worlds

Brett Martin on Crying on Planes

Review

PlatoAristotle

JohnsonBurke

Vividness and Interactivity

A New Media Form!

The Novel!

How Did Reading Change?

Reading at Risk (2004) and The Dumbest Generation (2008)

Evils of Adultery and Prostitution (1792)

“Many young girls, from morning to night, hang over this pestiferous reading, to the neglect of industry, health, proper exercise, and to the ruin both of body and of soul. ...The increase of novels will help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom.”

Introducing Jane Austen1775-1817

The daughter of an Anglican rectorPart of a family that profited from woolen

manufacturing and naval service Largely home-schooledFamily life revolved around reading and private

theatricalsReceived her only proposal of marriage in 1802Published four novels during her lifetime