Coleridge, for example, once praised Brissot, the French Girondin leader executed in 1793, as “rather a sublime visionary” than a shrewd, Machiavellian politician. The word “visionary” does not exactly mean the same thing to the Romantic writers themselves as to the critics in the second half of the twentieth century. Abrams, the early Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman, marked by the valorization of individual visions, transcendental imagination, and often, but not always, organic unity.3 Underneath the “received 2įor more discussion about Siebers’s use of the term, see the beginning of section 2 in my present essay.ģ I wish to clarify my usage of “visionary Romanticism” here. By “visionary” Romanticism I refer to the established Romantic scholarship consolidated roughly during the 1960s and early 1970s, primarily in North America, by such influential Romanticists as Northrop Frye, M. Let me first sketch an important line of development with respect to the ethics of criticism beginning with the so-called “visionary” stage of Anglo-American Romantic studies. The Contentious Business of Historicizing “Tintern Abbey” Having assessed the contributions of both New Historicism and ecocriticism to the ethics of criticism, in the later part of this paper I will explore the difficulties of “greening” Romanticism with reference to a concrete case regarding the politics of space in the Wye valley. After the New Historicism, as I will explain, much of Romantic bardolatry has been ruthlessly undermined, leading us to some sort of ethics of ambivalence and polyvalence, a critical embarrassment though not necessarily of a crippling kind.įor ecocritics, “Romantic ecology” is a timely alternative for breaking the Cold War “spell of antagonistic oppositionalism” (Kroeber 3), allowing us to shed the “crude old model of Left and Right” haunting the New Historicism (Bate, Romantic Ecology 3). To explore the continuing relevance of this debate to us today, I would like to reframe the polemics concerned in terms of what Tobin Siebers has called the “ethics of criticism.”2 Literary criticism, by nature, is “ethical” through and through, because whenever we make critical judgments on a text and its author, or weighing relative merits of rivaling interpretations, such notions as right or wrong, fairness, justice and responsibility are inevitably involved. He is saying our experience of nature has an actual effect on the way behave.The major theoretical approaches to this canonical work by Wordsworth from the mid1980s to 2000, with particular attention to the New Historicism and ecocriticism. On the best portion of a good man’s life, Wordsworth gives even more importance to the powers of nature when he says these experiences have an effect , She answered that she imagines the descent through the rough and tumbling waters again and again, living in her imagination every move, paddle stroke and turn she is going to make. A white water canoeist was interviewed yesterday morning and asked how she prepares for such a hazardous descent and how is she able to get the timing of her turns just right. Athletes have described how they use imagination to help them perform to the best of their ability. We are experiencing the Olympics at this moment. Athletes and sportspeople use this method too. Methods of meditation use memory and imagination in this way. We might describe these experiences as affecting us deeply or having a psychological influence or even providing a spiritual experience. He describes it as being “felt in the blood” and “along the heart. Memory, imagination, recalling good sensations, becomes a sort of force that Wordsworth can use.
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