Larry F Norman
Biographic Data
| ID | 5627022 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Larry F Norman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Larry F |
| FAMILY NAME | Norman |
| SIGNATURE | NORMAN L F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Allégorie, fiction et sublime dans la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes
Le rapport trouble entre fiction et allégorie est un des enjeux cruciaux de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Les défenseurs des modernes (Fontenelle, Perrault, Houdar de la Motte) développent une critique rationaliste de l’allégorie et de sa prétendue obscurité, où le poème épique (et notamment l’ Iliade d’Homère) devient la cible privilégiée. En réponse, les partisans des anciens, et particulièrement Boileau, abandonnent largement une dé…
The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
Asserting Modernity
It is a commonplace in literary history to say that the moderns of today will quickly become the ancients of tomorrow. Such is time's work. But Chénier's remark reminds us of perhaps a more interesting, and inverse, truth: today's “Ancients” (that is, defenders of the ancients) may tomorrow seem a bit too “Modern,” too deeply tied to their own present moment and its codes and customs. According to Chénier's logic, Boileau would only acquire the a…
Philosophy's Turn
In his 1687 reply to Perrault's Modern manifesto, Longepierre makes many concessions. Indeed, he concedes the advantage to modernity in all domains except one: the arts of language. When the Discours turns to the delicate subject of the current king's standing in comparison to the great ages of antiquity, Longepierre prudently avoids belittling as inferior the modern writers whom Louis XIV himself has patronized, and who represent his personal st…
Introduction Experiencing Antiquity
Morality & Sociability
In the view of the Moderns, the indecency of the pagan gods exposes more than the purely intellectual and spiritual errors arising from the ancients' misapprehension of divine nature. The scandal of paganism also reveals, as Fontenelle remarked, the day-to-day moral crudeness of the humans who created those illusory gods as mirrors of their own savage nature. The pagans had the gods they deserved. This chapter turns then from gods to humans—or ra…
Antiquity without Authority
Boileau's attitudes toward antiquity, as contradictory as they may at times be, reaffirm his essential point regarding the foreign nature of the past: it is to be treated either (or alternately) as a respected interlocutor in a civil dialogue between distinct ages, or as something of an awe-inspiring creature from a distant land. In either case, Boileau is certainly not appealing to a sense of unbroken continuity with that past, and much less to …
The Ineffable Effect
The key to the Ancients' defiant response to the new rationalist aesthetics is to be found in Boileau's translation of the then largely neglected Greek treatise, On the Sublime. The translation, which included a highly original critical preface to the work, returns us to that crucial year in the prologue to the quarrel, 1674. As the polemics over Euripides' Alcestis were pitting Perrault against Racine, Boileau entered the fray by publishing the …
The Ancients Respond
In order to justify the most shocking features of antiquity, its defenders frequently adopted a form of relativism, or of cultural pluralism. This chapter explores the broader implications of the historical sensibility they embraced. Ancient apologists argued that the only true way to appreciate ancient literature is to appreciate cultural difference. To topple the tyranny of decorum, the Ancients did not hesitate to question the solidity of the …
Splintered Paths of Progress
The two models of historical change examined in this chapter, complex in and of themselves, often diverged—and sometimes annulled each other. Furthermore, the two parties, Ancient and Modern, often gave very different values to such paradigms of time that resulted. Contending visions of historical evolution thus flourished. Which human endeavors were subject to the accumulation of knowledge, which to the rationalist rupture with past learning? At…
Modernity & Monarchy
The rebellious idealization of ancient liberties was perhaps most famously captured by a page in the Confessions in which Rousseau credited his “indomptable” “esprit libre et républicain” to his early and enthusiastic reading of the classics: “ever contemplating Rome and Athens; living, so to speak, with their great men, [...] I believed myself Greek or Roman; I believed myself the character whose life I read.” Whether or not the French revolutio…
Conclusion After the Quarrel
Voltaire sums up the guiding principles developed by the French defenders of the ancients: the necessity of reading the original work with sensitivity to the materiality of its native language; the preference for the imperfect “genius of invention” over the mechanical operations of “mere reason and exactitude”; the celebration of sublime inspiration operating “without art, without rules”; and, finally, the emblematic image of poetry not as philos…
The Pagan Menace
In many ways the quarrel can be seen as another battle in the long struggle between Christian and pagan cultures—or, at least, pagan culture as digested and transmitted by Renaissance humanists. It is certainly true that few causes so clearly united the Moderns as their shared animosity toward Greco-Roman polytheism, to which they opposed a rationalist form of Christianity. Of course, the union of Cartesian reason and Christian faith was not alwa…
Why the Scandal?
When the ancient past, once so intimately bound to the present, becomes fundamentally alien, it can then, as with any such estrangement, arouse longing, repulsion, or cool indifference. The last option, however, has limited viability at a moment when the separation is so raw that it inevitably provokes passion. The time of the quarrel was such a moment. The Renaissance identification with an idealized antiquity (partly undermined though it was by…
Whose Ancients & Moderns?
From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries—at the heart of what is called the French neoclassical age—poets, critics, and philosophers radically rethought how history shapes literature. Key to this rethinking was a new, and often disturbing, understanding of the cultures of antiquity that had been considered the foundation for later modern achievements. It is one of history's ironies that the modern period characterized as “classi…
The Shock of the Ancient
cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrati…
The Shock of the Ancient
Molière as satirist
Historiciser le sublime, ou le classicisme entre modernité et antiquité
Le monastère de Port-Royal est évoqué avec une régularité et une insistance surprenantes dans le roman français de 1657 à 2006. L’enquête recense la façon dont il figure dans les textes, à titre de référence purement occasionnelle ou de sujet, par le biais de descriptions spontanées ou d’évocations livresques, qui ramènent alors toutes au Port-Royal de Sainte-Beuve. L’étude de l’image que le genre romanesque donne du monastère permet ensuite de r…
Molière as satirist
Miroirs dans les logis, miroirs chez les marchands, Miroirs aux poches des galands, Miroirs aux ceintures des femmes . . . [Mirrors in the houses, mirrors in the shops, Mirrors in the pockets of the fops, Mirrors on the belts of the ladies . . . ] La Fontaine, ‘L’Homme et son image’, Fables I, xi In rewriting the myth of Narcissus, La Fontaine reminds us that nothing was so hard to avoid in seventeenth-century France as were mirrors. It is a stat…
Molière as satirist
Miroirs dans les logis, miroirs chez les marchands, Miroirs aux poches des galands, Miroirs aux ceintures des femmes . . . [Mirrors in the houses, mirrors in the shops, Mirrors in the pockets of the fops, Mirrors on the belts of the ladies . . . ] La Fontaine, ‘L’Homme et son image’, Fables I, xi In rewriting the myth of Narcissus, La Fontaine reminds us that nothing was so hard to avoid in seventeenth-century France as were mirrors. It is a stat…
Historiciser le sublime, ou le classicisme entre modernité et antiquité
Le monastère de Port-Royal est évoqué avec une régularité et une insistance surprenantes dans le roman français de 1657 à 2006. L’enquête recense la façon dont il figure dans les textes, à titre de référence purement occasionnelle ou de sujet, par le biais de descriptions spontanées ou d’évocations livresques, qui ramènent alors toutes au Port-Royal de Sainte-Beuve. L’étude de l’image que le genre romanesque donne du monastère permet ensuite de r…
Molière as satirist
Asserting Modernity
It is a commonplace in literary history to say that the moderns of today will quickly become the ancients of tomorrow. Such is time's work. But Chénier's remark reminds us of perhaps a more interesting, and inverse, truth: today's “Ancients” (that is, defenders of the ancients) may tomorrow seem a bit too “Modern,” too deeply tied to their own present moment and its codes and customs. According to Chénier's logic, Boileau would only acquire the a…
Philosophy's Turn
In his 1687 reply to Perrault's Modern manifesto, Longepierre makes many concessions. Indeed, he concedes the advantage to modernity in all domains except one: the arts of language. When the Discours turns to the delicate subject of the current king's standing in comparison to the great ages of antiquity, Longepierre prudently avoids belittling as inferior the modern writers whom Louis XIV himself has patronized, and who represent his personal st…
Introduction Experiencing Antiquity
Morality & Sociability
In the view of the Moderns, the indecency of the pagan gods exposes more than the purely intellectual and spiritual errors arising from the ancients' misapprehension of divine nature. The scandal of paganism also reveals, as Fontenelle remarked, the day-to-day moral crudeness of the humans who created those illusory gods as mirrors of their own savage nature. The pagans had the gods they deserved. This chapter turns then from gods to humans—or ra…
Antiquity without Authority
Boileau's attitudes toward antiquity, as contradictory as they may at times be, reaffirm his essential point regarding the foreign nature of the past: it is to be treated either (or alternately) as a respected interlocutor in a civil dialogue between distinct ages, or as something of an awe-inspiring creature from a distant land. In either case, Boileau is certainly not appealing to a sense of unbroken continuity with that past, and much less to …
The Ineffable Effect
The key to the Ancients' defiant response to the new rationalist aesthetics is to be found in Boileau's translation of the then largely neglected Greek treatise, On the Sublime. The translation, which included a highly original critical preface to the work, returns us to that crucial year in the prologue to the quarrel, 1674. As the polemics over Euripides' Alcestis were pitting Perrault against Racine, Boileau entered the fray by publishing the …
The Ancients Respond
In order to justify the most shocking features of antiquity, its defenders frequently adopted a form of relativism, or of cultural pluralism. This chapter explores the broader implications of the historical sensibility they embraced. Ancient apologists argued that the only true way to appreciate ancient literature is to appreciate cultural difference. To topple the tyranny of decorum, the Ancients did not hesitate to question the solidity of the …
Splintered Paths of Progress
The two models of historical change examined in this chapter, complex in and of themselves, often diverged—and sometimes annulled each other. Furthermore, the two parties, Ancient and Modern, often gave very different values to such paradigms of time that resulted. Contending visions of historical evolution thus flourished. Which human endeavors were subject to the accumulation of knowledge, which to the rationalist rupture with past learning? At…
Modernity & Monarchy
The rebellious idealization of ancient liberties was perhaps most famously captured by a page in the Confessions in which Rousseau credited his “indomptable” “esprit libre et républicain” to his early and enthusiastic reading of the classics: “ever contemplating Rome and Athens; living, so to speak, with their great men, [...] I believed myself Greek or Roman; I believed myself the character whose life I read.” Whether or not the French revolutio…
Conclusion After the Quarrel
Voltaire sums up the guiding principles developed by the French defenders of the ancients: the necessity of reading the original work with sensitivity to the materiality of its native language; the preference for the imperfect “genius of invention” over the mechanical operations of “mere reason and exactitude”; the celebration of sublime inspiration operating “without art, without rules”; and, finally, the emblematic image of poetry not as philos…
The Pagan Menace
In many ways the quarrel can be seen as another battle in the long struggle between Christian and pagan cultures—or, at least, pagan culture as digested and transmitted by Renaissance humanists. It is certainly true that few causes so clearly united the Moderns as their shared animosity toward Greco-Roman polytheism, to which they opposed a rationalist form of Christianity. Of course, the union of Cartesian reason and Christian faith was not alwa…
Why the Scandal?
When the ancient past, once so intimately bound to the present, becomes fundamentally alien, it can then, as with any such estrangement, arouse longing, repulsion, or cool indifference. The last option, however, has limited viability at a moment when the separation is so raw that it inevitably provokes passion. The time of the quarrel was such a moment. The Renaissance identification with an idealized antiquity (partly undermined though it was by…
Whose Ancients & Moderns?
From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries—at the heart of what is called the French neoclassical age—poets, critics, and philosophers radically rethought how history shapes literature. Key to this rethinking was a new, and often disturbing, understanding of the cultures of antiquity that had been considered the foundation for later modern achievements. It is one of history's ironies that the modern period characterized as “classi…
The Shock of the Ancient
cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrati…
The Shock of the Ancient
The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
Allégorie, fiction et sublime dans la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes
Le rapport trouble entre fiction et allégorie est un des enjeux cruciaux de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Les défenseurs des modernes (Fontenelle, Perrault, Houdar de la Motte) développent une critique rationaliste de l’allégorie et de sa prétendue obscurité, où le poème épique (et notamment l’ Iliade d’Homère) devient la cible privilégiée. En réponse, les partisans des anciens, et particulièrement Boileau, abandonnent largement une dé…
Philosophy (12 works) · Art (11 works) · History (9 works) · Historical and Literary Studies (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Historical and Literary Analyses (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Ancient history (5 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (5 works) · French Literature and Criticism (5 works)