On Coffee-Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 150-166
Author(s):  
Denise Gigante
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Dreams And Visions ◽  
Periodical Essay ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Cigar Smoking

The Romantic essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt, in two essays saturated with nostalgia for a lost world of Enlightenment coffee-house sociability, registers a shift in the cultural place of the literary essay in the 1820s—the era of the cigar-smoking George IV—from an urban public sphere dominated by Mr Spectator and his pipe, to more suburban cubicles of domestic privacy. Through the medium of Hunt’s self-reflective essays on the English periodical essay tradition, this chapter reveals the fate of the literary periodical essay to be linked to a fading amateur culture of belles-lettres and ornamental arts. Hunt blames the early essayists for the result of the civilizing process: the cultivation of a taste for polite literature that has isolated readers and emptied Covent Garden of its intellectual life. The reveries, dreams, and visions of the literary essay made possible by the Orientalized cigar divan (Romantic successor to the coffee-house) reflect the complicated reality of London in an age of global imperialism.

Lounging on the Sofa with Leigh Hunt: A New Source for the Notes in Melville's Shakespeare Volume

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-115
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sanborn
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Implied Reader ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Periodical Essay

Abstract The argument of this essay is that several of the notes that Herman Melville wrote in the back leaves of one of his Shakespeare volumes——notes that have been an object of interest and speculation ever since their discovery in the 1930s——were responses to essays written by Leigh Hunt and collected in a volume called The Indicator. In all likelihood, Melville read these essays——along with a Quarterly Review essay by Francis Palgrave, which has previously been shown to be the source of other notes in the back of the Shakespeare volume——on the sofa of his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, shortly before or after the birth of his son Malcolm in February 1849. The discovery of the new source is important both as an aid in identifying when and where Melville took all of these notes and as an indication of how carefully Melville studied the British periodical essay before beginning Moby-Dick (1851). In the essays of writers like Hunt, he encountered a form that seemed as though it could stretch to accommodate his literary and philosophical ambitions without sacrificing the companionship of the implied reader. For at least two years, Melville would believe enough in the possibilities of that form to compose his miraculously sociable expressions of unresolvable hope and rage, to give voice to the seemingly ““wicked,”” and yet to feel, as he told Nathaniel Hawthorne, ““spotless as the lamb.””

Eccentric modernity? An Islamic perspective on the civilizing process and the public sphere

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Armando Salvatore
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Islamic Perspective ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
The Public Sphere

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia. The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process. While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context.

scholarly journals REPUBLIC OF BELLES-LETTRES. A COMMENTARY TO UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION OF THE TERMS FROM DAVID HUME’S “OF ESSAY-WRITING”

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
Taras Kononenko ◽  
◽  
Halyna Ilina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Specific Experience ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Republic

The article is a commentary to philosophical terms of David Hume’s “Of Essay Writing”, that became necessary in working on its Ukrainian translation. “Of Essay Writing” is an essay on conversation that was published in English in 1742 in the first edition of “Essays, Moral and Political” by D. Hume. The commentary focuses on two concepts that are important for understanding the content and cultural and historical context of an essay. First, the concept of “Republic of Letters” is considered. This Renaissance metaphor was in active use in the XV-XVIII centuries and described the conversational community of European intellectuals, formed by correspondent networks. In the age of Enlightenment, an alternative to correspondence was conversation in the newly formed public sphere of communication, concentrated in salons, clubs and other common social spaces. In his essay, D. Hume contrasts the concept of "Republic of Letters" with the concept of “Empire of Conversation”, emphasizing the difference between the worlds of “learned” and “conversible”, where “learned” use correspondence and “conversible” participate in public conversation. Secondly, this commentary examines the concept of "Belles Lettres" - a term of Renaissance origin, the part of humanists educational project “bonnae litterae”, which revealed the role of “studia humanitatis” (humanities) in shaping the aesthetics of writing (including letter writing). David Hume associate "Belles Lettres" with the concept of “taste”, which is a central category of his empiricist aesthetics. According to Hume, the taste comes from specific experience, the components of which are the humanities. At the same time, “Belles Lettres” requires the experience of conversation, and essay-writing is a means, which D. Hume proposes to use to spread the achievements of the “Republic of Letters” in the community of the “Empire of Conversation”.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 224-228
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Taïeb
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Public Executions ◽  
Historical Moment

This concluding chapter summarizes the key points of the book. The year 1939, when executions moved behind prison walls and thus definitively exited the public stage, marked the beginning of remote governance, a new stage in the transformation of the public sphere: power no longer had to manifest itself directly, but could instead use various media platforms to assert itself. The disappearance of public executions also signaled the advent of the civilizing process, which sought to conceal anything that might provoke anxiety or negative emotions. The criticism levied at, and the final disappearance of, public executions illustrates a historical moment when a technology of power was gradually modified, eliminated, and concealed thanks to the efforts of the elites as well as, most likely, to the efforts of executionary spectators, because the emotions that executions unleashed were in contradiction with society's desire to reject violence. The elimination of publicity did not resolve the problem of violence in the Republic nor immediately solve the issue of the death penalty, which would drag on for another four decades, but it did demonstrate that people were no longer willing to tolerate a certain kind of state violence. It also revealed a phase in the evolution of the psychological landscape in which self-control came to be determined by the authorities and their instruments.

Two Notes on Immunities: Digest 27, 1, 6, 10 and 11

1971 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 52-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Nutton
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Appreciable Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Belles Lettres

The movement that commonly goes under the name of the Second Sophistic extends far beyond mere literary affectation. It is as much a social phenomenon to be understood within the context of the Roman Empire of the second and early third centuries as a cultural development basing itself upon the models of an earlier Greece. Evidence drawn only from orations and belles-lettres does not suffice to do justice to all its complexities, and recent authors have rightly adduced inscriptional and legal references to supply both background and explanation. Among them Professor Bowersock has discussed with clarity and percipience the immunities granted to sophists and men of learning by successive emperors in the second century, and has attempted to relate these grants to the social and intellectual life of the time. His account of their development is unexceptionable: the lavish immunities given by Hadrian were curtailed by Antoninus Pius, and the modifications of later emperors brought no appreciable change.

THE OTHER FRONTIERS OF ARAB NATIONALISM: IBADIS, BERBERS, AND THE ARABIST-SALAFI PRESS IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amal N. Ghazal
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Proper Analysis

The historiography of Arab nationalism has tended to concentrate on the secular press from the Mashriq, especially the Cairo–Beirut axis, at the expense of the religious nationalist press and the non-Mashriqi one. There is often an assumption that reliance on the secular press from the Mashriq alone can provide a clear picture of Arab intellectual life and that a proper analysis of that thought can be confined to a few intellectual centers in the eastern Arab world. Although there has never been an explicit claim that such a focus is the end of the story, there have not been enough attempts to look beyond the Cairo–Beirut axis and beyond its secular press organs in search of a broader story of the depth and breadth of Arab nationalism. This article addresses this imbalance by examining an Arabist-Salafi press network that operated between Algeria, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and Egypt and involved members of two sectarian communities, Sunnis and Ibadis. This Arabist-Salafi press network created a public sphere of intellectual engagement in which Salafism and nationalism were interwoven, producing a nationalist discourse transgressing post World War I borders of identity and linking the three layers of nationalism—the territorial, the Pan-Arab, and the Pan-Islamic—together. These layers not only intersected but also legitimized one another.

Brutalization and the Civilizing Process: An Ongoing Debate Between Mosse and Elias

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942090915
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Benadusi
Keyword(s):  
Life Experience ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Apparent Contrast ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The Great War

The objective of this article is to compare the concept of brutalization, analyzed by George Mosse, with the civilizing process, described by Norbert Elias. The intellectual life of these German-Jewish scholars will be reconstructed through the study of their relationships and their similar life experience. In this way, I’ll try to demonstrate that the apparent contrast between their different points of view is much more nuanced. Civilization and brutalization were not opposed processes that excluded one another. Therefore, a clearer understanding of the Great War can be best achieved through a combined reading of these two interconnected processes; and it is only by examining their interaction that we can understand the postwar period and the rise of Fascism and Nazism more fully.

The Literary Criticism of George Eliot

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (5) ◽  
pp. 952-961 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Stang
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Ludwig Feuerbach ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Critical Writings ◽  
Liberal Thought

This essay is an attempt to present some of the most important aspects of the aesthetic underlying George Eliot's novels and to give some account of her little known critical writings. She was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. She was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the translator of David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and as the subeditor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. She was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855–57. In these essays and reviews, all published before her first novel, almost all her important ideas about art are stated explicitly, and although many of these ideas are later developed and amplified in her novels and letters, they remain essentially the same. Her later statements of the same theme are often fuller and richer than those found in her periodical writing, but they are rarely inconsistent with each other. Her essays and reviews, together with Gordon Haight's edition of the letters and statements in the novels themselves, furnish an invaluable source from which her creed as a novelist may be derived.

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