Pre-cinematic vision and the modern episteme of sympathy in George Eliot's Middlemarch

Title: Pre-cinematic vision and the modern episteme of sympathy in George Eliot's Middlemarch
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2020, vol. 46, iss. 1, pp. 133-152
Extent
133-152
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
The investment of George Eliot's narrative in characters impersonating the new epistemological concerns of philology (Casaubon) and biology (Lydgate), makes Dorothea's own peculiar vision-in-action guided by sympathy, which brings the novel to a close, despite the hesitant asides of the narrator about her uneven web, a contribution to the modern episteme, an engagement with the modern question of how to encompass the teeming multiplicity of modernity in one binding synthesis. This is done by emplotting the dichotomy fragmentation/unity that runs throughout the novel, and by incorporating many forms of visual representation that project an intuited sense of unity going past fragmentation. The aesthetic polarities explored in the novel are isomorphous with pre-cinematic spectacles: they both offer provisional, fragmented perspectives of parts, while demanding a new rearrangement of these parts on a higher plane. These spectacles, therefore, are not a symptom of a crisis in representation, but rather naturalize, through a long history of self-reflexivity harking back to the late Renaissance, the paradoxical nature of realism.
References
[1] Alpers, Svetlana (1983) The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. London and Chicago: John Murray and University of Chicago Press.

[2] Alpers, Svetlana (1983)a Interpretation without representation, or, the viewing of Las Meninas (1983) in Representations 1: 30–42.

[3] Armstrong, Isobel (1996) Transparency: towards a poetics of glass in the nineteenth-century. In: Spufford, Francis and Jenny Uglow (eds.) Cultural Babbage. Technology, Time and Invention. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 123–148.

[4] Armstrong, Isobel (2002) The microscope: mediations of the sub-visible world. In: Luckhurst, Roger and Josephine McDonagh (eds.) Transactions and Encounters. Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 30–54.

[5] Armstrong, Isobel (2008) Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830-1880. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

[6] Armstrong, Nancy (1999) Fiction in the Age of Photography: the Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[7] Beer, Gillian (2009) [1983]. Darwin's Plots. Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction//. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

[8] Buckley, J. H. (ed.) (1975) The Worlds of Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[9] Buzard, James (1993) The Beaten Track. European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 Oxford: Clarendon Press.

[10] Byerly, Alison (1997) Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

[11] Carroll, David (1992) George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations. A Reading of Her Novels. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press.

[12] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1923) Table Talk and Omniana. London, G Bell and Sons.

[13] Crary, Jonathan (1990) Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge, Mass and London, England: MIT Press.

[14] Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

[15] Eliot, George (1996) Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

[16] Eliot, George (1990) Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. Edited by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. London and New York: Penguin Books.

[17] Eliot, George The Lifted Veil. Project Gutemberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2165. Accessed February 2, 2018.

[18] Eliot, George (1932) The Mill on the Floss. Leipzig: Tauchnitz.

[19] Flint, Kate (2000) The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[20] Foucault, Michel (1994) [1966] The Order of Things. An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage.

[21] Green-Lewis, Jennifer (1996) Framing the Victorians. Photography and the Culture of Realism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

[22] Hardy, Barbara (1967) (ed.) Middlemarch. Critical Approaches to the Novel. London: Athlone Press.

[23] Hardy, Barbara (1982) Particularities. Readings in George Eliot. London: Peter Owen.

[24] Hillis Miller, J. (1974) Narrative and history. ELH 41(3), 444–474.

[25] Hillis Miller, J. (1975) Optic and semiotic in Middlemarch. In: Buckley, J. H. (ed.) (1975) The Worlds of Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 124–145.

[26] Hillis Miller, J. (2006) A Conclusion in which almost nothing is concluded'. In: Chase, Karen (ed.) Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 133–156.

[27] Hulme, Hilda M (1967) The language of the novel. Imagery. In: Hardy B. Middlemarch. Critical Approaches to the Novel. London: Athlone Press, 87–124.

[28] Jameson, Frederic (2013) The Antinomies of Realism. London and Brooklyn: Verso.

[29] Jones, D. J. (2011) Textualities, Pre-cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture 1670-1910. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

[30] Kennedy, Meegan (2010) Revising the Clinic. Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University.

[31] Lightman, Bernard (2009) Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

[32] Lothe, Jacob (2006) Narrative Vision in Middlemarch. The Novel Compared with the BBC Television Adaptation in Chase Karen (ed.) Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 177–199.

[33] Nekes, Werner (1986) Film Before Film. Documentary. Filmförderung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

[34] Novak, Daniel A. (2008) Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

[35] Panofsky, Erwin (1957) Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Meridian Books.

[36] Paxman, David (2003) Metaphor and knowledge in Middlemarch in Metaphor and Symbol 18(2), 107–123.

[37] Rabinbach, Anson (1992) [1990] The Human Motor. Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity//. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

[38] Reynolds, Joshua (1959) Discourses on Art. San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library.

[39] Shuttleworth, Sally (1984) George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press.

[40] Stump, Reva (1959) Movement and Vision in George Eliot's Novels. New York: Rissell & Russell.

[41] Witemeyer, Hugh (1979) George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

[42] Wormald, M. (1996) Microscopy and semiotic in Middlemarch. Nineteenth-Century Literature 50(4): 501–524. | DOI 10.2307/2933926