The French Genre of Reverie - 4445 Words

Introduction It is irony rather than paradox that the French genre of rà ªverie should have been born of the rationalist 18th century, the sià ¨cle des lumià ¨res, which saw the emergence of scientific rationalism as the supreme authority in philosophy. Yet that was the period during which was also born what with hindsight we have decided to call pre-Romanticism, a movement connected with the cultivation of tenderness, the expression of feeling, and concern with the nonlogical, irrational forms of human experience, including rà ªves or dreams. The connection between the French Romantic movement and pre-Romanticism is actually tenuous, but continuity is apparent in the increasing interest in mental states, of which the rà ªverie represents one type, existing outside the sphere of strict logic and relaxing the enforcement of strict rational control. As a mental event, the rà ªverie, to which the English daydream is merely an approximation, represents only a moderated relaxation of rational control, such as used to be cultivated chiefly by imaginative artists and their followers in developing their sensitivity to nature and beauty, in search of aesthetic stimulus or satisfaction. Our inadequate vocabulary for dealing with such phenomena nonetheless allows us to distinguish the realm of imagination, in which the rà ªverie explores with some degree of realism the meaning of emotional experience, together with any possible alternative forms which it might take, from the realm of mereShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of Chesterton And His Literary Masterpiece1794 Words   |  8 Pages1936, but it doesn’t matter. To those who know him and are passionate readers of his works, his wisdom lives on. To those like me who simply stumbled upon him, he lives again. In our hearts, his wisdom is timeless. Versatility of topic, address, genre, device, whatever more there is in the heaven and earth of mind and spirit brought to letters–such is the hallmark and mandate of Chesterton. He can be straightforward and for right, crisp and to the point, or witty, with a certain malice aforethoughtRead MoreThe Question of Ideology in Amitav Ghoshs the Hungry Tide5019 Words   |  21 Pagesto define ‘ideology’ that has become a key concept in Marxist criticism of literature and other arts, though it was not much discussed by Marx and Engels after The German Ideology which they wrote jointly in 1845-’46. Marx inherited the term from French philosophers of the late eighteenth century who used it to designate the study of the way that all general concepts develop from sense-perceptions. In Marxist criticism it is claimed that Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology – thatRead MoreAnalysis the Use of Stream of Consciousness in Mrs Dalloway8784 Words   |  36 Pagessuicide at home by throwing himself out of window in escape of being sent to one of Sir William’s homes. The two lines join together when Sir William Bradshaw tells Clarissa, in the midst of her party, of Septimus’s death, which inspires her vivid reverie of life and death at the end. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf not only depicts the English society after the first World War, which, although recovering from the tragedies of battle, death, and loss, lacks the calming influence of consistency and connection