Bad Behavior: Samuel Johnson and Modern Cultural Authority"Bad Behavior is concerned with the reasons so many readers and critics of Johnson have been led to regularly subsume into the monumental precedent of Johnson the sage, the material conditions of modern authority expressed by self-reflections of Johnson the hack." "Dr. Wechselblatt argues that Johnson's double self-construction as at once high-cultural sage and popular hack dramatizes tensions between learned and commercial cultures in the emerging public sphere of contemporary civil society. As Johnson was acutely aware, the great paradox of cultural criticism is that it depends for its authority on the very culture it criticizes. For this reason, it is particularly useful to read Johnson through his critics - to re-configure, from the directions criticism has taken, criticism's own conditions of possibility." "Bad Behavior investigates the critical reduction of Johnson's discourse to its maxims, and the relation of this critical practice to the peculiarly modern identification felt by fans toward celebrities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
Contents
| 21 | |
Style and the Man | 53 |
The Trials of Authorship | 75 |
Johnson as Man of Letters | 117 |
Conclusion | 161 |
Notes | 172 |
Bibliography | 190 |
Index | 199 |
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Bad Behavior: Samuel Johnson and Modern Cultural Authority Martin Wechselblatt No preview available - 1998 |
Common terms and phrases
actually anecdote aphoristic discourse argue authorship Bertrand Bronson Boswell Boswell's Cambridge Catherine Gallagher century claims countervailing critics cultural authority David Hume death desire difference Dunciad effect eighteenth Eighteenth-Century Studies emergence English Enlightenment essay experience failure fantasy figure George Birkbeck hack Hester Lynch Piozzi Hester Thrale human Hume identity idleness Idler imagine indeterminacy instance J. G. A. Pocock John Johnson's authority Johnsonian Langton Levett literary marketplace literary production literature Locke Locke's maxim meaning merely mind mode modern moral nature notion origin Oxford passage Paul Fussell periodical poem political Pope position practice precisely present public sphere Rambler 146 Rasselas readers reading relation remarks representation rhetorical sage Samuel Johnson satire seems sense social value society solipsism speak structure suggests Swift's madness temporal theory thought Thrale tion tomb of memory transformation trial Trowbridge University Press vacuity Vanity W. J. Bate W. K. Wimsatt writing York
Popular passages
Page 115 - The march begins in military state, And nations on his eye suspended wait; Stern famine guards the solitary coast, And winter barricades the realms of frost; He comes, not want and cold his course delay;— Hide, blushing glory, hide Pultowa's day: The vanquished hero leaves his broken bands, And show his miseries in distant lands
Page 50 - Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas prince of Abyssinia.
Page 63 - the children, of our youth, often die before us: And our minds represent to us those tombs, to which we are approaching; where though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.
Page 48 - One day, as he was sitting on a bank, he feigned to himself an orphan virgin robbed of her little portion by a treacherous lover, and crying after him for restitution and redress. So strongly was the image impressed upon his mind, that he started up in the maid's defense, and run
Page 91 - These papers of the day, the Ephemerae of learning, have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes. If it is necessary for every man to be more acquainted with his contemporaries than with past generations, and to rather know the events which may immediately affect his fortune or
Page 68 - But where are such critics to be found? By what marks are they to be known? How distinguish them from pretenders? These questions are embarrassing; and seem to throw us back into the same uncertainty, from which, during the course of this essay, we have endeavored to extricate ourselves.
Page 28 - He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Let us go to the next best:—there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of
Page 132 - The whole nation was at that time on fire with faction. The Whigs applauded every line in which liberty was mentioned as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories echoed every clap to show that the satire was unfelt.
Page 124 - left the name, at which the world grew pale, / To point a moral or adorn a tale.
Page 80 - so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing: and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse. When these wonder-working sounds sink into sense and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what shall we discover?