| Popis: |
This chapter traces an intellectual history of Associationism from Newton to the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on these thinkers’ philosophy of language. Associationist linguistics, the chapter argues through Müller, Locke, and Hume, is fundamentally materialist. This linguistics then offers a way to conceptualise interpretive literary hermeneutics as an ethical problem that divorces language from lived experience. To demonstrate this argument, the chapter turns to Casaubon (Middlemarch) and Wendover (Robert Elsmere), to argue that the “disembodied” scholar is a movement against popular readers who use feeling rather than rational interpretation. Associationists Hartley, Stewart, and Bain make these claims more explicitly in their work; for these Associationists, language is best understood through feeling. The idea that fiction is best read through feelings culminates in the literary criticism of David Masson and Charles Dickens through a close reading of Masson’s review of David Copperfield and Dickens’s preface to Oliver Twist. |
