Bad Behavior: Samuel Johnson and Modern Cultural AuthorityBucknell University Press, 1998 - 202 pages "Bad Behavior is concerned with the reasons so many readers and critics of Johnson have been led to regularly subsume into the monumental precedent of Johnson the sage, the material conditions of modern authority expressed by self-reflections of Johnson the hack." "Dr. Wechselblatt argues that Johnson's double self-construction as at once high-cultural sage and popular hack dramatizes tensions between learned and commercial cultures in the emerging public sphere of contemporary civil society. As Johnson was acutely aware, the great paradox of cultural criticism is that it depends for its authority on the very culture it criticizes. For this reason, it is particularly useful to read Johnson through his critics - to re-configure, from the directions criticism has taken, criticism's own conditions of possibility." "Bad Behavior investigates the critical reduction of Johnson's discourse to its maxims, and the relation of this critical practice to the peculiarly modern identification felt by fans toward celebrities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
Contents
| 21 | |
Style and the Man | 53 |
The Trials of Authorship | 75 |
Johnson as Man of Letters | 117 |
Conclusion | 161 |
Notes | 172 |
| 190 | |
| 199 | |
Other editions - View all
Bad Behavior: Samuel Johnson and Modern Cultural Authority Martin Wechselblatt No preview available - 1998 |
Common terms and phrases
actually anecdote aphoristic discourse argue authorship Bertrand Bronson Boswell Boswell's Cambridge Catherine Gallagher century claims countervailing critics cultural authority David Hume death desire difference Dunciad effect eighteenth Eighteenth-Century Studies emergence English Enlightenment essay experience failure fantasy figure George Birkbeck hack Hester Lynch Piozzi Hester Thrale human Hume identity idleness Idler imagine indeterminacy instance J. G. A. Pocock John Johnson's authority Johnsonian Langton Levett literary marketplace literary production literature Locke Locke's maxim meaning merely mind mode modern moral nature notion origin Oxford passage Paul Fussell periodical poem political Pope position practice precisely present public sphere Rambler 146 Rasselas readers reading relation remarks representation rhetorical sage Samuel Johnson satire seems sense social value society solipsism speak structure suggests Swift's madness temporal theory thought Thrale tion tomb of memory transformation trial Trowbridge University Press vacuity Vanity W. J. Bate W. K. Wimsatt writing York
Popular passages
Page 28 - He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Let us go to the next best:—there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of