Modernity, disenchantment, and the ironic imagination

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 137-149

  Saler, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249687418     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2004.0012     Document Type: Note

References (26)

1. "Welcome Faces in the Family Album," Sunday Times, 5 (15 July 2001): 9
2. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 155
3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 318
4. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 9
5. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1958)
6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), p. 169
7. Concepts that have a family resemblance to the "ironic imagination" have been adumbrated by Neil Harris as the "operational aesthetic," James Cook as "artful deception," and Joshua Landy as "Lucid Self-Delusion." See Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little Brown, 1973)
8. James Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing With Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)
9. Joshua Landy, The Cruel Gift: Lucid Self-Delusion in French Literature and German Philosophy, 1851-1914. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1997
10. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 206, 208
11. For the continuum between the immersion afforded by realism and the estranging effects of meta-fictions, see Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: California University Press, 1975)
12. H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume III: 1929-1931, ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1971), p. 140
13. It is true that the "romantic irony" expressed by Fichte and some other romantic writers in the early nineteenth century shared a similar concern for human finitude and contingency, but this was nevertheless cast within an overarching metaphysical framework. See Anne K. Mellors, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)
14. Peter Bailey, "The Victorian Middle Class and the Problem of Leisure," in Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 13-29
15. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities (Berkeley: California University Press, 1998)
16. Symbolist poets did not necessarily conceive of their art as anti-modern or opposed to the findings of contemporary science, but they were critical of positivism and did not accept the dominant rationalist worldview in the way that authors of the New Romance did. See Richard Candida Smith, Mallarme's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
17. For a discussion on how photography was used as evidence by the Victorians, see Jennifer Tucker, "Photography as Witness, Detective, and Imposter: Visual Representation in Victorian Science," in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 378-408
18. Peter Berresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 108
19. Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson, 1960), pp. 102, 116
20. Anonymous, "Modern Men," The Scots Observer (27 April 1889): 631-32
21. Ellis, p. 109
22. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Annotated Last World, annotated by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin (Indianapolis: Wessex Press, 1996), p. 252
23. For role-playing games, see Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
24. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), p. 45, n.2
25. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 2
26. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 53-54