I was reading "The Road Not Taken" by David Orr and at several instances I wanted to shake Mr Orr by the lapels and shout "the concept you are describing is a probability distribution!"
(It was a very good book, TBC, otherwise I would not have bothered yelling at it.)
On the one hand, literary critics should really know about the Kolmogorov Axioms; but on the other hand, many statisticians could stand to learn a thing or two about negative capability.
The Trilling line on Austen is the one that stays — irony as a method of comprehension rather than a matter of tone. That distinction matters for fiction as much as for criticism. The novels that last are the ones that defer judgment the same way Oliver describes Trilling deferring it — not out of indifference but because the contradictions are doing the actual work. Once you resolve them into a position, the novel becomes an argument, and arguments date. Austen never dates because she never tells you what to conclude about her characters. She shows you everything and lets the discomfort stand. That's what "by no means detached" really means — you can be fully inside the mess without pretending to have sorted it out.
One note on Arnold. Even if his writing is difficult, he cannot be tossed out, if only because by way of George Woodberry and then John Erskine at Columbia University, Arnold is in a way responsible for Trilling.
Woodberry brought Arnold’s appreciation for the common reader to Columbia, and Erskine realized it in the form of the General Honors course, a proto Great Books seminar that supposed anyone could benefit from reading the classics (Mortimer Adler was an early student).
It was in that course that an undergraduate Trilling met with this liberal approach to criticism, and it was from Erskine that he took the essay title “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.” Erskine would credit Arnold regularly.
Lastly, to your point, here is Woodberry writing about Arnold’s professed impartiality:
“Few critics have been really less “disinterested,” few have kept their eyes less steadily “upon the object”: but that fact does not lessen the value of his precepts of disinterestedness and objectivity; nor is it necessary, in becoming “a child of light,” to join in spirit the unhappy “remnant” of the academy, or to drink too deep of that honeyed satisfaction, with which he fills his readers, of being on his side. As a critic, Arnold succeeds if his main purpose does not fail, and that was to reinforce the party of ideas, of culture, of the children of light; to impart, not moral vigor, but openness and reasonableness of mind”
In the Victorian age of rampant industrialisation & materialism great thinkers, Arnold in particular, continually asserted the value of culture and the arts. Drawing on Swift's metaphor of the nectar-collecting and wax-producing bee, he coined the phrase 'sweetness and light': 'sweetness' (being the flowering of literature and the arts / beauty) and 'light' (representing the candle / moral and intellectual clarity). Perhaps, tragically, those fruitful concepts have become so degraded as to be unrecognisable…even to scholars ?
I like a critic who can think broadly about the nature of criticism.
An open mind is a magnificent achievement, a magical power. Even if only for moments at a time.
I know I always say this, but this really really sounds like Bayesian statistics.
I don’t think that’s so off base honestly
I was reading "The Road Not Taken" by David Orr and at several instances I wanted to shake Mr Orr by the lapels and shout "the concept you are describing is a probability distribution!"
(It was a very good book, TBC, otherwise I would not have bothered yelling at it.)
critics prefer to talk about ambiguity and negative capability but yeah
On the one hand, literary critics should really know about the Kolmogorov Axioms; but on the other hand, many statisticians could stand to learn a thing or two about negative capability.
Excellent! Thanks.
The Trilling line on Austen is the one that stays — irony as a method of comprehension rather than a matter of tone. That distinction matters for fiction as much as for criticism. The novels that last are the ones that defer judgment the same way Oliver describes Trilling deferring it — not out of indifference but because the contradictions are doing the actual work. Once you resolve them into a position, the novel becomes an argument, and arguments date. Austen never dates because she never tells you what to conclude about her characters. She shows you everything and lets the discomfort stand. That's what "by no means detached" really means — you can be fully inside the mess without pretending to have sorted it out.
‘Does anyone know what “sweetness and light” means? ‘. Yes.
can you tell me
Thank you for this.
One note on Arnold. Even if his writing is difficult, he cannot be tossed out, if only because by way of George Woodberry and then John Erskine at Columbia University, Arnold is in a way responsible for Trilling.
Woodberry brought Arnold’s appreciation for the common reader to Columbia, and Erskine realized it in the form of the General Honors course, a proto Great Books seminar that supposed anyone could benefit from reading the classics (Mortimer Adler was an early student).
It was in that course that an undergraduate Trilling met with this liberal approach to criticism, and it was from Erskine that he took the essay title “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.” Erskine would credit Arnold regularly.
Lastly, to your point, here is Woodberry writing about Arnold’s professed impartiality:
“Few critics have been really less “disinterested,” few have kept their eyes less steadily “upon the object”: but that fact does not lessen the value of his precepts of disinterestedness and objectivity; nor is it necessary, in becoming “a child of light,” to join in spirit the unhappy “remnant” of the academy, or to drink too deep of that honeyed satisfaction, with which he fills his readers, of being on his side. As a critic, Arnold succeeds if his main purpose does not fail, and that was to reinforce the party of ideas, of culture, of the children of light; to impart, not moral vigor, but openness and reasonableness of mind”
In the Victorian age of rampant industrialisation & materialism great thinkers, Arnold in particular, continually asserted the value of culture and the arts. Drawing on Swift's metaphor of the nectar-collecting and wax-producing bee, he coined the phrase 'sweetness and light': 'sweetness' (being the flowering of literature and the arts / beauty) and 'light' (representing the candle / moral and intellectual clarity). Perhaps, tragically, those fruitful concepts have become so degraded as to be unrecognisable…even to scholars ?
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