No description available.

Discusses the contrasts apparent in the Victorian era British writers Carlyle and Macaulay with reference to history, biography, and literary criticism.

No description available.

本研究有兩目的：第一，打破卡萊爾為智者預言家，與《衣服哲學》為美學整體之迷思；第二，重探卡萊爾在《衣服哲學》中呈現科學∕宗教與物質∕精神二元對立之迷思。 在傳統的研究中，卡萊爾一向代表智者預言家，反對科學與物質；而《衣服哲學》則代表美學整體，忠實地傳達卡萊爾的宗教與精神哲學。然而在過去的研究中，有兩個迷思逐漸固化，而需再次檢驗。首先，卡萊爾為預言哲學家之說誤將卡萊爾視為超越主義之起源，而美學整體之說則誤認《衣服哲學》為一完整美學領域，內涵特定中心與主旨。其次，過去學者一致認同的科學∕宗教與物質∕精神二元敵對之說，也令人質疑，因為根據在二十一世紀初之科學宗教歷史的新研究，直至十九世紀末，包括卡萊爾在創作其《衣服哲學》期間（1830-31），科學與宗教之間並非互有惡意的敵對關係，而是複雜而互惠的交互關係。 本論文包括四個章節，第一章旨在重探卡萊爾具有「作者神格」及《衣服哲學》內含美學整體之說，試圖破除卡萊爾為意義與文類創造者之迷思，以及質疑《衣服哲學》能忠實呈現其「作者父親」之智慧賢能，並代表現代聖經之假說。以傅科之考古的歷史學研究為基礎，本研究將呈現《衣服哲學》為一論述博物館，陳列英國於1820與1830年間，關於科學物質方面的思想，並探討交錯於此觀念下各類論述的演變、交錯、與興衰。 第二章則探討卡萊爾在「科學火炬」中所內涵的宗教意義。透過二十一世紀科學宗教歷史的新研究，以科學宗教的互為生產關係為基礎，本研究發現科學之於卡萊爾並非宗教信仰之破壞者，反而是服務宗教的神聖工具，其「火炬」功能，不僅能挖掘外在的物質世界，也能深掘內在的精神宇宙。《衣服哲學》於是並非旨於批判「科學火炬」，而在宣揚其教化功能，宣導科學的善用，並期以科學之火達到復興心靈及內在改革之目的。卡萊爾的真正批判標的，於是並非「科學火炬」本身，而是「科學火炬」的所處之境，也就是，世人的心靈因受實用主義與機械主義的支配，而造成對科學火炬之誤用。 根據卡萊爾同時期的自然神學，以精神∕物質及可見∕不可見之間互為生產的相互關係為基礎，第三章旨於重新檢驗卡萊爾的「自然超自然主義」。物質之於卡萊爾，實非無用而該摒棄之物，而是開啟精神之門的必要之鑰，因為精神與物質實為神的一體兩面，互惠與相互對應。實體之物，與無形之精神則同等重要。卡萊爾於是從未呼籲停用物質，拋棄衣物，他實則建議讀者應當張開其內心之眼，穿越物質之限制，真實看達上帝之真理。由外至裡，由實體至無形，此認知，才是真正對於神的「一體兩面」的完整認識。 第四章，根據卡萊爾的個人經驗、1820與1830年間科學家一職的發展、以及威維爾的科學與科學家哲學，本研究將重新定義戴歐吉尼斯‧托服思卓空為一早期理想科學家的原型，也就是孤獨地在黑暗中流浪與沈思的智者。此科學之智者一方面道德與精神崇高，一方面又篤信哲學與宗教；他對於科學的致力研究，旨在對抗機械主義與實用主義對當代文化精神的鯨吞蠶食。「戴歐吉尼斯‧托服思卓空」之名，於是不應簡單地只代表著「生於上帝之魔鬼污糞」。透過對於當代的理想科學家形象之探討，此名所深含之隱喻於是展現：上帝之真理，深藏於自然物質世界之所有情境，甚至是任何不起眼之角落；只有透過沈思的智者科學家，深悟其宗教的使命，才有辦法開啟上帝之真理。 卡萊爾於《衣服哲學》中以嘲諷口吻所批評之對象，並非科學與物質，而是卡萊爾對世人的失望，因為世人不再相信看不見的內在精神事物，反而任由其腦、心、與手受控於機械主義與實用主義。卡萊爾於是期待改革，期許沈思的科學哲人手持神聖的科學火炬，引領世人進行改革，復興傳統的信仰、道德、與精神。透過文本與社會文化的互文閱讀，本論文於是呈現，收藏在《衣服哲學》論述博物館之內，關於宗教∕科學、精神∕物質、與哲學人∕科學人等思想之交會、矛盾、相融、及衍生。 / There are two purposes of this study. First, to dispel the myth that regards Thomas Carlyle as a sage or prophet and Sartor as an aesthetic unity, and, second, to debunk the myth that assumes a conflict between science and religion, matter and spirit, as well as between philosophers and scientists in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Carlyle was traditionally supposed to be a “sage-prophet” who rejects science and matter, and Sartor was regarded as an aesthetic unity to transmit the Carlylean philosophy of religion and spirit. The two myths have been consolidated in many social, cultural, and literary studies and need reexamination. This dissertation comprises four chapters. The first chapter deals with the demystification of Carlyle as an “Author-God” to generate new meanings and create a new genre. It also questions Sartor as an “aesthetic unity” to reflect the author’s sagacity and to stand for a modern bible. To be interpreted through Michael Foucault’s archaeological study, Sartor will be demonstrated as a discursive museum to exhibit the transitions and vicissitudes of thoughts in reference to science, matter, and scientists. Chapter Two treats the religious significance of Carlyle’s “Torch of Science.” Through the theory of a mutually productive relationship between science and religion, this chapter will reveal the sacredness in the “Torch of Science.” Not a destroyer of faith, the “Torch of Science” serves as a religious vehicle to explore the exterior/material world and the interior/spiritual universe. Instead of criticizing the “Torch,” Carlyle encourages the proper use of science and expects spiritual reform from the “Torch.” The main target of Carlyle’s prod thus is not the “Torch of Science” per se but its status quo, i.e., the abuse of science dominated by utilitarianism and mechanism. In Chapter Three, based on his contemporary natural theology, the philosophy of “Natural Supernaturalism” will be analyzed as Carlyle’s belief in the mutually productive interrelations between spirit and matter as well as the visible and invisible. Never thinking matter as “litter,” Carlyle deems the spiritual and the material as two sides of wholeness, corresponding to and supporting each other. Never questioning man’s use of matter, Carlyle advises his reader to open their inner eye with faith, to penetrate the material form with fantasy, and to see God’s truth in the “whole.” In Chapter Four, with the references to Carlyle’s personal experiences, “science” as a vocation in the 1820s and 1830s, and the philosophy of science and the scientist advocated by William Whewell, “Diogenes Teufelsdrockh” will be reanalyzed and reinterpreted as an ideal proto-scientist wandering and pondering solitarily in the dark. Moral, spiritual, religious, and philosophical, the scientific thinker purports to defeat the furtive invasions of mechanism and utilitarianism. Not simply “God-born Devil’s dung,” “Diogenes Teufelsdrockh” encapsulates the gist of Carlyle’s clothes philosophy: a wise speculative scientist searching for the truth of God hidden in every corner of the natural world. Instead of criticizing science and matter, Carlyle in fact laments that man no longer trusts the invisible and the interior but has all his head, heart, and hand contaminated by mechanism and utilitarianism. For spiritual and moral reform, Carlyle places his hope on the scientist holding a Torch. Through the intertextual reading of Sartor, this study shows the interplay, conflict, conciliation, and evolution of the thoughts in reference to Carlyle’s contemporary concepts of science and religion, matter and spirit, as well as scientists and philosophers.

This essay investigates the prospect of Romantic Irony’s potential resurgence in contemporary poetics and discusses its relevance and likeness with metamodernism. The internet has by now not only seeped into, but fully permeated, the process of literary production and distribution. The effect of this has been the birth of a new kind of poetic discourse which can broadly be called metamodernism, The New Sincerity or Alt-lit. This movement is characterized by its self-reflexive metacommentary, fragmentary nature and an oscillation between of irony and sincerity. Vermeulen and Akker, among others, have hinted at metamodernism’s relation to Romanticism, but research into the specifics of its tendency towards Romantic Irony is scarce. By viewing the writings of Steve Roggenbuck (a central figure in the new poetic movement), alongside the philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel, I propose a comparative framework for discussion of sincerity, irony and the instrumentalization of contemporary metamodernist writing. I demonstrate that Roggenbuck’s writing displays narratological, tropological and thematic tendencies commonly associated with both Romantic Irony and metamodernism. Apart from broader structural comparison, I attempt a comparative analysis between Roggenbuck’s poetry (2010-2015) and Thomas Carlyle’s novel “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834) in order to provide a visualisation of the rhetorical and narratological strategies of Romantic Irony. I aim to frame Romantic Irony as a sensibility, or mode of discourse - rather than a strict system of thought - which may still be at work today. In extension, the sensibilities of Romantic Irony may shed further light into the philosophical potential of the seemingly incomprehensible and contradictory tendencies of metamodernism. By ironicizing its poetic form, literary ambition and desire for sincerity in a post-postmodern era, Roggenbuck’s poetry celebrates ambiguity and literary failure, ultimately framing irony as a constructive and potentially democratic operation.

This dissertation examines representations of deep time in nineteenth-century British novels in order to argue that these texts help carve a path for our contemporary definitions of deep time and the Anthropocene. Examining fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, I suggest that these novels participate in the secularization of deep time by transforming the concept of vast spiritual time that had been in use earlier in the nineteenth century into a scientifically-informed model that anticipates our current understandings of deep time. While the concept of geological time emerged in the late-eighteenth century and became widely recognized in the nineteenth, the phrase “deep time” originates in nineteenth-century literature when Thomas Carlyle first used it in a non-scientific context. By studying a wide range of fiction, I demonstrate how nineteenth-century authors employed innovative narrative strategies to convey these potentially inconceivable timescales in non-numerical terms, and thereby make them more accessible to human comprehension. I also challenge conventional distinctions between literary realism and popular romance in the period by analyzing the complementary ways in which both genres of fiction engage with vast temporal scales in their narratives. I develop my argument by examining how these novels use a model of what I call “folding time” to incorporate remote time periods into their texts. Departing from the novel’s linear narrative structure to bring distant historical moments into direct contact with one another, folding time situates human activity in relation to vast pre-and-post-human periods and in doing so acknowledges an age of humans within deep time; in this sense, these novels articulate an early concept of the Anthropocene. By including deep time in the novel’s traditionally individual and familial framework, these authors simultaneously expand the novel’s temporal scope and humanize vast scientific timescales. Further, as these novels illustrate characters’ psychological responses to overwhelming scientific timescales, they reposition deep time in relation to private temporal experience. This study employs an interdisciplinary approach to acknowledge the mutually reciprocal relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century, and draws on temporality studies, history of science theory, and literary criticism to situate its argument in relation to current critical discussions. I also consider the work of scientists such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and William Thomson in order to contextualize my novels’ scientific references. By studying nineteenth-century British novels in relation to scientific temporalities, this dissertation recovers an overlooked component of the history of deep time that has had significant and lasting cultural influence given the enduring popularity and wide readership of these texts.

Throughout the years the study of literary relationships has been a highly active form of research. There seems to be a perpetual interest in this field, with its matter of determining influences and comparing relationships and ideas. Certainly this is a logical interest. For on the assumption that literature is a search for truth, in what better way may we find that truth than through s study of the works of the world’s writers, searching for sources of their thoughts, and sharpening those thoughts through comparison and contest. Those Carlyle and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the authors under consideration here, have often been the subjects for this method of literary criticism. Much of this work has been done with the emphasis on influences, Indeed the influence of Goethe on Carlyle is now as widely recognized as any other like literary kinship, more so than most, perhaps, as the very vocal Scotchman was never one to hide his likes and dislikes in this world of man. The aspect of influence, however, is at best of an indirect importance to this thesis. The interest here is centered rather in the second kind of relationship, one in which ideas are dealt with irrespective of sources of origins. In general, this study is to be a comparison of some of the ideas of Carlyle and Goethe. More specifically, the problem is to discover just how the ideas of these two men are alike and how they vary, to what extent there is variation, and to find, if any, a common basis for the thinking of both authors. This research, in turn, will lead to the primary purpose of this thesis, that is, to see into the nature of Hebraism and Hellenism through the two works. Sartor Resartus and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.

No description available.

No description available.

Persistent Pasts: Historical Palimpsests in Nineteenth-Century Prose traces Victorian historical discourse with specific attention to the works of Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot and their relation to historicism in earlier works by Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg. I argue that the Victorian response to the tense relation between the materialist Enlightenment and the idealist rhetoric of Romanticism marks a decidedly ethical turn in Victorian historical discourse. The writers introduce the dialectic of enlightened empiricism and romantic idealism to invoke the historical imagination as an ethical response to the call of the past. I read the dialectic and its invitation to ethics through the figure of the palimpsest. Drawing upon theoretical work on the palimpsest from Carlyle and de Quincey through Gérard Genette and Sarah Dillon, I analyze ways in which the materialist and idealist discourses interrupt each other and persist in one another. Central to my argument are concepts drawn from Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, and Frank Ankersmit that challenge and / or affirm historical materiality.