Bodies in Late Romanticism: Two Perspectives (original) (raw)
Related papers
Death as Surprise in 18th and 19th Centuries Romanticism
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2012
One of the major themes of discussion in the art and especially the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries was the problem of death. In the beginning this seemed to be the case mostly because of the natural processes related to death as a transforming event of the human body and mind. However, towards the end of the 18th century and well into the 19 century, a certain shift took place from the common and normal perspective on death to a rather accessorized and scientific literary approach. Our attempt is to notice and make the necessary connections between the concepts of nature (both the human nature and the external-physical nature) and the innovative technologies recently implemented in the society of the time, with reference to the new accidental and commercial facets of death as destruction of nature especially in the work of the American Romantics R. W. Emerson and H. D. Thoreau. Aware that they are highly spoken of in view of their transcendentalism as a particular philoso...
2014
The Soul in British Romanticism provides a history of the modern concept of the human and the nascence of the human sciences during the long eighteenth century as well as a theory of Romantic poetry. The book investigates the forms and functions of the human soul from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century: during the Enlightenment, the traditional notion of an immortal and immaterial soul was replaced by immanent concepts such as vitalism, the nervous system and the brain. In the course of this development, the key faculties associated with the soul – transcendence, immortality and imagination – were increasingly negotiated in poetry. Thus, the transformation of the soul, leading to a fundamentally new and different understanding of what it is to be human, also created a new conception of the medium of literature. Romantic poetry tries to recapture the lost qualities of the human soul in and through the creative imagination whichbecomes the essence of poetry and a warranty of art’s transcendence and immortality. On the other hand, this triggers a reflection on the immanent and material basis of poetry because, paradoxically, the constant reference to transcendence in immanence ultimately leads to a profound reflection on language, texture and on the materiality of the medium of poetry. Through this medial self-reflexivity, Romantic poetry becomes the first form of modern literature.
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world – mechanistic materialism and vitalism – in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. This edited collection includes essays by Ruth Mack, Jonathan Kramnick, David Alvarez, Sara Landreth, Sarah Ellenzweig, Kate E. Tunstall, Joanna Stalnaker and Vivasvan Soni.
THE LIVED BODY IN HEIDEGGER, MERLEAU-PONTY AND DERRIDA
Master in Philosophy Thesis, Louisiana State University, Bâton-Rouge, the United States, 2015
My MA thesis delves into notions of the "lived body" (Leib) in three main thinkers of the 20th century continental philosophy. All of the three provide distinct accounts, as opposed to the mind-body dualism, though with limitations. Heidegger describes Dasein as being bodily instead of having a body, which to dissolve the body-object into the ecstatic temporal structure of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, through its projection as the “there” that orients always into the future that always comes back to its situatedness and facticity. Heidegger distances Dasein’s bodily nature (Leiblichkeit) from Husserl’s Body Proper (Leib) of the transcendental Ego by emphasizing the co-determination between the lived body and the world in the “there”, not “I-here”. But the asymmetrical relation between Dasein in the world and the lived body in its loss-of-the-world needs further clarification—in the face of Dasein’s shared corporeality (Körperlichkeit) with animals, the world-poor. Given this aporia between the corporeal and the lived bodies (Leibkörperlichkeit), Merleau-Ponty’s account of the lived body (le corps) acknowledges this duality in human bodily experience, and questions the Cartesian cogito precisely based on the pre-personal existence of the body as the background preceding and destabilizing the subject’s intentional act. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the pre-personal body, later developed into the ontology of flesh, further dissolves subjectivity into a general, anonymous and incarnated Being. However, his project of hyper-reflection, though aware of its own cognitive limits, faces challenges as a philosophy that starts from the hand of the man. This intuitionism is an age-old problem of Western philosophy, so claims Derrida, who insists upon the aporia: touch is possible only by not touching. He demonstrates the auto-hetero-affection discloses the untouchable other constitutively haunting the Body Proper, exemplified by the event of Nancy’s heart transplant and the Nancean vocabulary “the technē of bodies”. However, this also predicts the limit that deconstruction never touches, exceeds or invades—a new language of deconstruction departs from, but stays in contact with a metaphysical desire for touch, and thus always already live in the aporia of touch.
2013
‘Discovering the Human’ investigates the emergence of the modern human sciences and their impact on literature, art and other media in the 18th and 19th centuries. Up until the 1830s, science and culture were part of a joint endeavour to discover and explore the secret of life. The question ‘What is life?’ unites science and the arts during the Ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, and at the end of the Romantic period, a shift of focus from the human as an organic whole to the specialized disciplines signals the dawning of modernity. The emphasis of the edited collection is threefold: the first part sheds light on the human in art and science in the Age of Enlightenment, the second part is concerned with the transitions taking place at the turn of the 19th century. The chapters forming the third part investigate the impact of different media on the concept of the human in science, literature and film.
Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition contextualises its display of plastinated bodies within the Renaissance tradition of écorché (or flayed body) art - surrounding its figures with screen-prints of early modern anatomical illustrations, labels bearing explanatory medical information, and quotations about the body and mortality from religious and philosophical sources. This paper argues that the early modern écorché figure informs not only the iconography, but also the kind of anatomical knowledge - the anatomised vision of the body - that Body Worlds reproduces. While images of early modern anatomical art serve to foreground the declared educational aim of the show, primarily by contextualising it within a long history of public anatomy, they also reveal that for von Hagens, as for the Renaissance anatomists before him, the anatomical significance of the body is to be found by removing its skin and exposing its interior. Such images do not simply reveal the inside of the body, this article demonstrates, but rather represent the invention of a specifically modern concept of bodily interiority, one intricately connected to a wider reconceptualisation of the body as individual and self-contained.
After the Lived Body (Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 49, 4, p. 445-468)
There is no question more urgent for phenomenology than the question of "one's own body" [corps propre], as it has come to be called since Husserl. But neither is there a question that has been more neglected by contemporary phenomenologists. At first sight, this claim seems incongruous given the nearly exponential production in the literature around this topic for more than thirty years, as much in the history of philosophy as in various efforts to cross the phenomenological perspective with contributions from cognitive sciences. The trouble is that this ample literature does not pose any of the preliminary questions relevant to adopting the concept of one's own body or lived-body (Leib) in phenomenology; for the most part, it takes this concept as self-evident and limits itself to considering the ways in which the concept of the lived-body may "fertilize" more positive scientific approaches. The legitimacy of the concept of Leib itself and of its legacy within the phenomenological tradition is never questioned as such.
Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State
Osiris, 2002
A group of works written in the mid-seventeenth-century Netherlands shows many defenders of commerce and republicanism embracing some of the most unsettling tenets of the new and experimental philosophy. Their political arguments were based on a view consonant with Cartesianism, in which the body and its passions for the most part dominate reason, instead of the prevailing idea that reason could and should dominate the passions and through them the body. These arguments were in turn related to some of the new claims about the body that flowed from recent anatomical investigations, in a time and place comfortable with materialism. If ever there were a group of political theorists who grounded their views on contemporary science, this is it: Johann de Witt, the brothers De la Court, and Spinoza. They believed that the new philosophy showed it was unnatural and impoverishing to have a powerful head of state, natural and materially progressive to allow the self-interested pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, Ed. with David Hillman
Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. How and why did 16th and 17th century medical, religious, and literary texts portray the body part by part, rather than as an entity? And what does this view of the human body tell us about society's view of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenges our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The book presents work by: Nancy Vickers on corporeal fragments; Peter Stallybrass on the foot; Marjorie Garber on joints; Stephen Greenblatt on bodily marking and mutilation; Gail Kern Paster on the nervous system; Michael Schoenfeldt on the belly; Jeffrey Masten on the anus; Katherine Park on the clitoris; Kathryn Schwartz on the breast; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky on the eye; Katherine Rowe on the hands; Scott Stevens on the heart and brain; Carla Mazzio on the tongue; and David Hillman on the entrails.An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates, the symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. This book was awarded The English Association Beatrice White Book Prize in 1999.