The Poetics of Sentimentality (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sentimentality in Life & Literature
In his paper "In Defense of Sentimentality" in the book of the same name, Robert Solomon aims to rehabilitate the concept of sentimentality both in life and in literature, and to defend it against its many critics. He argues that the root sense of "sentimentality" is simply "an expression of and appeal to the tender emotions" and that the most common criticisms of sentimentality as a kind of emotional affectation, falsity, or self-indulgence fail. In this paper I argue that the critics are right to say that sentimentality in real life can be ethically problematic, but that Solomon is right to say that sentimental responses to sentimental literature are (usually) ethically harmless. It's true that sentimental literature is not usually "great literature." Its goal is usually pleasure rather than increasing our moral understanding, and partly for this reason it may not be as aesthetically valuable as the great realist novels of George Eliot, Henry James and company. On the other hand, Solomon is quite right to argue that sentimental novels serve an important ethical function in promoting what literary scholar Robyn Warhol calls the "effeminate" virtues of tenderness and compassion.
Sentimentality as an Ethical and Aesthetic Fault
Robert Solomon has defended that there is nothing wrong with sentimentality, and that it should be defined minimally as the " expression of and appeal to tender feelings ". Against Solomon's proposal, this paper defends a conception of sentimentality along the lines of the standard view, as a moral and aesthetic fault. I claim that sentimentality is a form of emotional self-deception linked to untrue expression. First, I defend that the sentimentalist fabricates certain feelings by expressing them; and second, that he is deceived about his own emotions.
“So Unlucky a Perspective”: The Critique of Moral Sentimentalism in The Man of Feeling
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2014
Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is commonly described as a typical sentimental novel, yet the work has many aspects that a straightforward sentimentalist interpretation cannot possibly account for. I argue in this paper that The Man of Feeling, far from being a straightforward sentimental novel, encapsulates a profound critique of both moral sentimentalism and the genre of sentimental fiction. This critical stance is established in the first instance, I claim, by the ironic distance to the sentimental material in the novel, which results from the complex, multilevel narrative structure, and is further reinforced by numerous satirical elements in the text. As I demonstrate, reading Mackenzie’s work as an antithesis of the sentimental novel that parodies the sentimentalist moral epistemology underlying this mode of fiction does a much better job at explaining several crucial aspects of the novel than the sentimentalist interpretation.
Ethics 116 (2006): 337-361., 2006
The paper raises a fundamental difficulty for neo-sentimentalist attempts to explain the meaning of evaluative terms in terms of the appropriateness of specific emotional responses. I first focus on the reference determination aspect of meaning. I argue that what we are ultimately interested in determining whether something is, say, dangerous or morally wrong is not whether a particular emotion (fear or guilt) is appropriate. This means that emotions and their appropriateness conditions should not play a central role in the determination of the reference of our central evaluative terms. I then turn to the second aspect of meaning, competence conditions. I argue that tying evaluative terms to emotions and their appropriateness conditions is not a necessary condition for competence with the meaning of our central evaluative terms.
War Poetry: Lamenting Through Wilfred Owen
International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology (IJRASET), 2022
This study provides a prismatic view of the First World War and the jarring piece of literature salvaged from the time, by the incandescent bard, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen. This study offers a close analysis of three of Owen's poignant poems; Dulce et Decorum Est, Strange Meeting, and Futility-with every aspect of literary technique, it deploys. It will contain annals of close and comprehensive verbatim analysis, which would help understand the aspects of war in its cognitive, affective, existential, and political stridency. This study has put much weight on the unsullied reasons that might have fanned the embers of the Great War, the emotional and moral compulsion of the combatants, and the tumultuous impact on the lives of the common people. Owen; through an impressive panoply of poetry, grieves the sheer wastage of life war brings about in its trail. The smarting lassitude and inanition at the war front and the unremitting helplessness of the people in ruins. He claims, that even though a country wins, it still loses.
Vignettes of Violence: Exploring Trauma in Selected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education
War is an inevitable occurrence in human civilization. Poetry is mankind"s confidant since its dawn. Epics of all the cultures predominantly praise the war heroes, and regards participation in war and ensuring eventual victory as the sine qua non of manhood. However, cataclysmic consequence of war is a premonition to the entire civilization. War not only imperils physical loss but forges a permanent sore in the psyche of an individual and/or community. World War I (1914-18) heralds a significant turn in the conception regarding war. The whole world gets terrified, experiencing the "needless butchery" of human life. This concern paves the path of a considerable bulk of anti-war poetry. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), perhaps the most celebrated poet of this group, exploits his first hand experience of the battle field as a testimony to depict the grotesque reality of war. To him war is analogous to despair and futility. His enterprise is directed not to a particular war but to any war which entices and/or forces young and promising souls to the front with a false assurance of return and redemption. The present paper seeks to re-read some of the often anthologized poems of Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Mental Case", "Insensibility" and "Strange Meeting", conceding his proclaimed attitude to war. The paper also offers symmetrical study between Owen the agonized soldier and Owen the anguished poet, insisting that the man who suffers and the mind which creates are hardly inseparable. Finally it argues that the poems" appeal is conditioned by Owen"s experience of the trauma of war, both as a poet and a soldier.
A talk given at Stevenson University, Maryland, November 2010, and, in different form, at the Longfellow Forum in Portland, Maine, November 2008.