The Death of General Wolfe
Benjamin West
1770
Oil on canvas, 152,6 x 214,5 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
http://thumbsnap.com/v/hYQnE7aJ.jpg
Above...a link to the Benjamin West painting; I hope it works. I agree with Bill Levine on this remark--but would love to hear more from the group as a whole on the notions of "intertextuality" and "depth"--since they are relevant to all of BP's remarks about the classical inheritance in the Augustan period.
Bill,
I really enjoyed this post, but there's so much to discuss in it, I can only take on one issue at a time.
This passage of Bill's I found key:
Does a new, secularized sign-system (nature as a mechanistic process, e.g.) ever completely supplant its metaphysical predecessor or does it still depend on rewriting or re-allegorizing a continuous cultural heritage preserved in classical and Judeo-Christian texts, albeit approached “scientifically”?
This seems a more accurate way to articulate Thomson's relation to the past than a relatively flat Deus Absconditus narrative of wholesale secularization.
I agree with Matt that Raymond Williams' categories of dominant, emergent, and residual would work better to describe this kind of "survival" by reconstruction, but even better, I think, would be Mark Salber Phillips' notion of "reframing" via Society and Sentiment, where innovation does not take place through unambiguous novelty, "but through a repositioning that responds to changing contexts and needs" (13). In an example that might answer Bill's query, Phillips goes on to say that "Reconfigurations of this kind may well be the result of a desire to accommodate new discoveries (e.g., the expanded geographical and ethnographical knowledge of the eighteenth century), but at a more profound level they are also a reflection of the hermeneutics of historical interpretation as it shapes our conversation with history and tradition. In the process, familiar but subordinated notions may acquire a new centrality, thereby taking on new meaning and seriousness in relation to other concerns."
Bill, do you think Phillips' passage is pertinent to your example of the African materials?
DM
I was also hoping you could fill out the comments on Wordsworth's rather flat role in this narrative. How does poetic diction fit into this picture, esp. in regards to Milton?
Best wishes,
DM
Commenting by HaloScan
