Jandy's Meanderings - Latest Comments in Voltaire on Homer

Re: Voltaire on Homer

Tineke — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 01:14:15 -0000

That's awesome. Music to listen to while reading your blog.

Re: Voltaire on Homer

Jandy — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:57:48 -0000

Tineke, yeah, I got stifled by only having one sidebar. And you have to press play on the music thing in the corner (or double-click one of the tracks). I hate sites that start playing music as soon as it loads, so I didn't want to force that on other people. ;)

Re: Voltaire on Homer

Tineke — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 03:32:14 -0000

Unrelated. But, OoooO. Your layout changed. Is that music thing in the corner meant to be playing music? Because I can't hear anything. :(

Re: Voltaire on Homer

Jandy — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:42:04 -0000

Well, it's not just a question of technology (I mean, books of perfectly acceptable poetry took advantage of the printing press, too), but one of content--the earliest (English-language) novels came along with the burgeoning Romantic movement (think Gothic novels), and the literary establishment of the time was still firmly neoclassical. There were no novels in ancient Greece, so therefore they must be some upstart sort of bastard form, thus they were inherently inferior to the high art of epic and tragic poetry.

There was also the moral concern, as Dabney argues (like here; thanks for suggesting I search for that, it's interesting! And sort of funny, though he obviously didn't think it was...), which I guess stemmed, again, from the Romantic influence which tended toward horrific and titillating narratives and sentimentality rather than edifying morality. The morality issue is important to neoclassicists like Voltaire really only from a position of manners and social acceptability. Voltaire, after all, epitome of the athiest. (Reading further in the Dabney piece, he sounds like a consummate neoclassicist, just with a more religious bent than usual.)

Your comparison to television is a really good one, though I suspect it's a high art/low art distinction more than a technological one (except insofar as technological advances helped make low art easier to produce, just at it did high art). I guess I just see technology as a means rather than a cause.

Re: Voltaire on Homer

Mark Horne — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:02:52 -0000

I think you might be able to find somewhere on the web the Southern Presbyterian R. L. Dabney writing tracts against novels.

I think novels, as technological innovations (printing press, cheaper bookbinding, maybe) were viewed much the same way some Christians later reated to television.