MDMD 18th Century Madness & Gothic

[jbor]

It's interesting that you mention Ruskin. Along with the pre-Raphaelites,
Ruskin craved that time before the High Renaissance, when arts and crafts,
as well as religion and social organisation, were unsullied by "modernity"
as it was then emerging (industrialisation, the factory system,
urbanisation, colonial imperialism etc), and the decadence which had come of
"progress". The medieval was revered as a "purer" age. This ties in with
Romanticism, as well as the Luddites, the Gothic Revival and the Gothic
Novel, which are all very prominent in Pynchon's texts.

For some, including Ruskin and the historians and philologists of the c.
19th, looking back it seemed as though there were and are waves of revolt
and counter-revolt, Neo-Classicism and Romanticism, Apollonian and
Dionysian, whatever. I suspect that the truth of it is a little more
complex, that both strands have persevered side by side, and that quite a
bit of (conscious and/or unconscious) cross-fertilisation was going on in
many instances.

best



on 7/11/01 3:05 AM, David Morris at fqmorris at hotmail.com wrote:

> http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0236.html
> 
> In the mid-nineteenth century interest in the Illuminated Manuscript was
> revived by John Ruskin. Ruskin saw the ornately decorated pre-print books
> produced by monastic scribes as examples of the Gothic, an aesthetic Ruskin
> championed as providing the artistic fulfilment lost in the age of mass
> production. The medieval mode of production, Ruskin argued, provided the
> artisan with an opportunity for individual expression; the artisan
> contributed not simply his labour power, but his expertise and aesthetic
> sensibility. As a result, the Gothic represented a kind of high water mark
> in artistic production.
> 
> Like Blake, Ruskin felt the illuminated book was a means to political and
> spiritual reform, a way of breaking with the capitalist mode of production
> which took the means of artistic production out of the hands of the
> individual and placed it in the hands of the factory owner:
> 
> It is with a view [...] to the re-opening of this great field of human
> intelligence, long entirely closed, that I am striving to [...] revive the
> art of illumination, properly so called; not the art of miniature-painting
> in books, or on vellum [...] but of making writing, simple writing,
> beautiful to the eye, by investing it with the great chord of colour, blue,
> purple, scarlet, white and gold, and in that chord of colour, permitting the
> continual play of the fancy of the writer in every species of grotesque
> imagination [...]. (96)
> 
> 
>> From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>> 
>> Terrance wrote:
>>> The term "Gothic" has three main connotations: barbarous, like the
>> Gothic tribes of the Middle Ages—which is what the Renaissance meant by the
>> word; medieval, with all the associations of castles, knights in armor, and
>> chivalry; and the supernatural, with the associations of the fearful, the
>> unknown, and the mysterious.
>>> On the TV program I heard that the word gothic was used in the
>> derogatory to describe certain architecture during the 17th and 18th
>> century--the Goths being the Germanic tribes that invaded Rome.
>> 
>> That would be Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic architecture, such as the Houses
>> of Parliament, and much colonial architecture here, and it also
>> incorporates landscape design: hahas, follies, mazes, fake ruins etc. Faked
>> Gothic, in other words. An offshoot of Romanticism and "the Sublime".
> 
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