Figures of memory : from the muses to eighteenth-century British aesthetics / Zsolt Komáromy.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Komáromy, Zsolt.

Series:

• Transits (Bucknell University)
• Transits: literature, thought, & culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Criticism--Great Britain--History--18th century.
• Criticism.
• Great Britain.
• History.
• English literature--18th century--History and criticism--Theory, etc.
• English literature.
• Memory in literature.
• Imagination in literature.
• Memory (Philosophy).
• Imagination (Philosophy).
• Aesthetics, British--18th century.
• Aesthetics, British.

Physical Description:

viii, 225 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Lewisburg [Pa.] : Bucknell University Press ; Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Pub. Group, [2011]

Summary:

This book effects a rapprochement between memory studies and eighteenth-century aesthetics with the aim of modifying received views on the role and fate of memory in the history of criticism. It argues that the philosophical problems characterizing conceptualizations of memory unsettle its opposition to the imagination and explain its relation to literary discourse. Moving from the Muses through Plato and Descartes to works by Pope, Addison, Gerard, and Kames, the book traces these problems through various "figures" representing notions of memory and claims that eighteenth-century critical thought exploited a constructive sense of memory for accounts of the notion of the imagination. Komaromy thus argues for the persistence of the literary relevance of memory even in a poetics of the imagination, offering a new perspective on the changing relation of memory and imagination at a point in the history of criticism that has determined the critical assessment of these concepts.

Contents:

• Part 1 On Notions of Memory
• 1 Memory/Imagination: The Representational Model 41
• 2 Conceptual Cruxes: Plato and the Aporia of Memory 63
• i "Ridiculous Birdcages or Waxen Slabs": Figures of Representational Memory 65
• ii Plato and the Muses: Self-Validating Memory 72
• iii The Function of Cruxes: Memory Validating the Imagination 78
• 3 Mnemonic Practice: The Constructive Model 89
• i Mnemonic Discourse 91
• ii Constructive Memory 104
• Part 2 Figures of Memory in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics
• 4 Mixing Traces 117
• i Descartes and Memory's Fluid Motions 124
• ii Pope's Melting Wax 140
• 5 Mnemonic Imagination 155
• i Violent Spirits: Addison's Cartesian Concerns 157
• ii Analogous Exertions: Gerard and Associationism as a Figure of Memory 166
• Memory and Imagination in the Theory of Association 170
• Memory as the Model of Imagination in Gerard's Essay on Genius 178
• iii Using the Legacy of the Muses: Karnes and Vivacity as a Figure of Memory 186
• The "Vivacity" of Memory and Imagination 186
• The "Complete Idea of Memory" in Karnes's Elements of Criticism 193
• iv Conclusion 202.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

• 9781611480443
• 1611480442
• 9781611480450
• 1611480450

OCLC:

698328020