Browsing by Subject "realism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Judicious Improbable as Critique: The Brontës’ Possible Fictions and Their Reception
    (2022-01) Crain, Samantha
    This dissertation examines how the Brontës augment natural fiction with Gothic and sometimes folklore in their novels and how these augmentations serve their critiques and affect the novels’ reception, through the formation of a judicious probable. Charlotte Brontë attempted to eschew other genres in favor of natural fiction in The Professor, using an ethos of fiction learned from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine but the book failed to secure a publisher. The first chapter explores the complexities of Brontë’s first-written novel and its reception as an unsatisfying precursor to her later works. Charlotte had learned her lesson with Jane Eyre, incorporating Gothic and folklore to craft the autobiography of a young governess consistently misread by authority figures as a changeling in a novel that asserts Jane’s right to depict her own experiences without external corroboration. The second chapter juxtaposes Charlotte’s evolving ethos with reviewers’ objections to its improbability and controversial subject matter. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights differently combines natural fiction with Gothic and folklore, centering the text on the unreliable accounts of two primary narrators whose loyalty to middle-class rationality cannot hold up in the regional world of the text. They demonstrate the necessity of an expanded view of the possible in their ideologically motivated readings of Cathy, Heathcliff, and Linton Heathcliff as changelings. The fragmentation of the text’s Gothic prevents the text from overstepping the possible and allows the novel’s primary characters to dramatize a proto-polyamorous love ethic and the author’s own mysticism. The third chapter posits links between the novel’s ethos and its vexed critical reception. Anne Brontë eschews folklore but employs a domestic Gothic alongside her natural fiction by enclosing her heroine’s diary account within the first-person narrative of the novel’s hero. Gilbert Markham initially demonstrates his incompleteness and then experiences Helen’s domestic Gothic alongside the reader and is emotionally educated thereby. Anne’s novel asserts not only Helen’s right to depict her own experiences but to use those experiences didactically to instruct others—both men and women. The final chapter marks how Anne’s decision to stay firmly within the mundane possible made her immediate reception if anything more caustic than those of her sisters’ preceding novels. In each of these novels, the Brontës judiciously employ the improbable in order to expand natural fiction, refusing to be relegated or dismissed. Their efforts were popular but often disputed by reviewers who found the improbability and coarseness of their novels undermined their claims to seriousness. This dissertation shows how the Brontës depiction of uncommon experiences by combining genres suggests how exclusionary probable fiction is and explores the implications of that exclusion by refusing to replicate it.
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    Making Sense of Hallucination
    (2019-10) Swanson, Link
    It can seem as if philosophy of perception has discussed hallucination almost more than perception itself. What is the difference between perception and hallucination? I argue that the concepts we normally associate with the term ‘hallucination’ are more useful for understanding what perception is than the concepts we normally associate with the term ‘perception’. Instead of claiming, as most theories do, that hallucination is a special type of (failed) perception, I instead argue that perception is a special type of (successful) hallucination. I introduce a concept called ‘S-hallucination’ and argue that it more accurately describes the process that we normally call perception. I defend this concept and situate it within classic debates in philosophy of perception.
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    Real and Ideal: The Realism of Jules Breton
    (2018-07) Acosta, Taylor
    Real and Ideal: The Realism of Jules Breton examines the artistic production of Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton (1827-1906) in relation to theories of realism, the historiography of Realism, and the discursive formation of the “peasant” in the visual culture and history of the nineteenth century. In his cultivation of the persona of the preeminent peintre paysan, and through his works which represented his vision of country life, Breton, perhaps more than any other French artist of the nineteenth century, was involved in an explicit negotiation of two fundamental concepts, which effectively constituted the terms of the “realist debate”: the “real” and the “ideal.” In negotiating past and present, rural and urban, the particular and the universal, notions of the real and the ideal, which perhaps began as nothing more than what Umberto Eco termed a “semiotic enclave,” became an entire discourse on truth, aesthetics, and social welfare in the artistic and critical output of the period dominated by Realism (1830-1885) and its subsequent historiography. Rather than reinforce this binary as it has appeared in much of the scholarship on Realism, this dissertation aims to restore a productive ambivalence to these terms and conceives of this perceived opposition as operatively valuable within the discourse of realism itself and as emblematic of its inherent tensions. By analyzing Breton’s paintings, poetry, and prose through an exploration of some primary concerns of Realism: truth, type, and the artist’s self, this dissertation proposes that the antagonism between the “real” and the “ideal” that has underscored so much of the historiography of Realism is rather more apparent than actual. It concludes that within this more capacious understanding of Realism, as at once antinomical and dialectic, Jules Breton emerges as its most typical practitioner.