Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
3 - Justifying Anachronism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
Summary
By way of beginning, it is worth considering whether content-based interpretations should concern themselves with historical context at all. If one is interested in the ideas in a text, why does it matter where they come from, or even whether they are really there? With apologies to J. Hoberman and Noël Carroll, we might call this a history of ideas version of the Plan 9 from Outer Space problem. Carroll writes:
Plan 9 from Outer Space is a cheap, slapdash attempt to make a feature film for very little, and in cutting corners to save money it violates – in outlandish ways – many of the decorums of Hollywood filmmaking that later avant-gardists also seek to affront. So insofar as the work of contemporary avant-gardists is aesthetically valued for its transgressiveness, why not appreciate Plan 9 from Outer Space under an analogous interpretation? Call it ‘unintentional modernism’, but it is modernism none the less and appreciable as such.
How should one regard it when a text is accidentally genius, so to speak? Presentist critics are, as they say frequently, uninterested in history for its own sake. So if there is a surprising connection between a text from the past and something we care about, why does it matter how authors came to write the books they did? If some readers find the content of a text interesting and insightful insofar as it speaks to some problem they are thinking about, then it seems at least prima facie questionable to insist on the work's historical context, even if (let us suppose) the connection between the issue the reader is thinking about and the work of art is insubstantial and arbitrary, disappearing once the fuller context is taken into account.
This is a deep problem that does not admit of an easy solution, and variations on the problem have occurred in a variety of fields. Correspondingly my argument here proceeds accretively, connecting up different versions of the Plan 9 problem to elaborate a clearer way of thinking about the competing intuitions at work in it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Ideas in Victorian LiteratureLiterary Content as Artistic Experience, pp. 108 - 139Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020