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Singular Appearance: Tracking Character in the Nineteenth Century.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Singular Appearance: Tracking Character in the Nineteenth Century./
Author:	Kellar, Ruth.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2021,
Description:	198 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-11, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International82-11A.
Subject:	Comparative literature. -
Online resource:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=28497343
ISBN:	9798738622885

Singular Appearance: Tracking Character in the Nineteenth Century.
Kellar, Ruth.

Singular Appearance: Tracking Character in the Nineteenth Century. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2021 - 198 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-11, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2021.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

This project examines a strand in nineteenth-century writing that presents literary character at the intersection between individual difference and social appearance. I focus in this project on literary characters who are neither wholly interior, as Romantic characters are often said to be, nor wholly external, as eighteenth-century and Victorian characters are sometimes seen to be. This binary misses a crucial aspect of writing about nineteenth-century character. The characters I study negotiate the difference between interiority and external appearance by becoming distinct in the process of being perceived: their uniqueness becomes visible as they enter into another's line of sight. So fashioned, these characters demonstrate how the "types" we associate with appearance, and the "particularity" we associate with interiority, are not necessarily opposed. Instead, they challenge this epistemological binary by existing as particular configurations of typical categories that shift in response to how they are seen.Thinking about nineteenth-century characters in these terms supposes that individuals become singular precisely because they enter a circuit of mutual perceptibility. Building upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt, I argue that this circuit is made possible by the "public space of appearance": the culmination of those categories that condition shared perception. According to Arendt, someone's individuality-too different, or distinct, to be comprehended otherwise-only appears when it is recast through narrative, or when particularity is translated through shared categories. I further argue that each individual's perception takes these public categories, breaks them up, and reassembles them as a distinct way of seeing the world. Moreover, this partial viewpoint manages to catch a view of reality that is true on account of this partiality: our singularity frames others so that they, too, appear as singular. In other words, our unique perspectives condition the uniqueness of others. As I read these literary characters, then, they suggest how we as humans can, and should, bring to light each other's distinctness.These characters challenge our normative modes of thinking about the relationship between identity, appearance, and reality. By inhabiting viewpoints that reassemble type, they reconstitute the public horizons-the assemblies of shared categories-that condition their own appearance. I trace this phenomenological work back to Blake, whose mythical individuals become each other's worlds, or new ways of seeing. I demonstrate, however, that singular appearance emerges with full force in the wake of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and specifically in light of the claim that rhetoric and public discussion undergird both personal and political character. My argument then turns to Dickens, whose characters distill most clearly how distinct personality emerges as perceived appearance. The implications of this project are twofold. First, the literary persons I track erode the binary divisions between "particular" and "type," "flat" and "round," "internal" and "external" that have governed theories of "character." Second, such characterization shows how categories of judgment need not transcend individual difference or its perception. Instead, these perceiving subjects challenge us with radical appearances and perspectives that grant the necessity of singularity to sustaining a common but multidimensional world. Chapter 1, "Idiosyncratic Character," examines how the characters in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend present "thick" appearances. Rethinking the way in which he is identified as an inheritor of Romanticism, I begin with Dickens because this elision of surface and depth supplies a blueprint for the characterization at the heart of this project. Described as "observers," his characters embody idiosyncratic points-of-view that, because they are shaped by a recognition of social types, paradoxically model a naive impressionability to the singularity of others. Taking in how they are seen as a part of this perception, they present features whose construction from an external perspective renders them utterly distinct: the public magnification of type as particular.Chapter 2, "Rhetorical Character," explores how Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet reconfigures "character" as perceived difference. Innovating upon a distinctly Scottish concern with the formative relationship between language and sociopolitical character, while departing from contemporaneous accounts of the relationship between judgment and sympathy, the novel's protagonists ground evaluation in opposition by construing the other's point-of-view through combative rhetoric. Their consequent failure to depict each other in a comprehensive manner generates an excess of language that outstrips intent and liberates appearance from normative narratives. Thus painting character in vivid moments of extreme detail, Redgauntlet redefines "judgment" as the delineation rather than subsumption of particularity.Chapter 3, "Dramatic Character," studies how Blake's characters perceive and shape singularity. In the mutual performance of each other's action, Los and Urizen articulate bodily surface in a sequence of frames that renders their features both recognizable and particular, overlarge and minute. In performing the other, each character also captures the viewpoint from which he himself is being seen; this dialogic space of dramatic reconstruction casts Los and Urizen not simply as distinct appearances, but as entire new worlds: horizons that continue to shape each other's perception. The phenomenological work that these characters take up thus rethinks Blake's investment in creative "vision" as the seeing and extension of another's seeing.Chapter 4, "Communal Character," argues that Robert Burns's lyric voice instantiates a distance of perspective that, paradoxically, brings phenomena into focus. Attending to the typifying events of his specific community-the occurrences that accompany daily work like ploughing, for example-Burns collapses the axes of social time and space to a point. Rather than scrutinizing appearances as present entities, his speakers are impressed upon by moments that assemble, in unique configurations, the associations that accumulate along the framework of communal tradition. Burns thus continues the characterization studied here by turning it sideways: rather than rearranging typical categories in new pictures, he distills singularity at the level of social narratives.Epilogue: Turning briefly to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that the mutual perception at play in nineteenth-century character proposes a social phenomenology. If to perceive, as Merleau-Ponty argues, is always to be perceived, then these characters demonstrate, first, how social categories of knowledge undergird, rather than mask, appearance, and second, how such perception redraws the horizons bounding actuality. To study this phenomenological aesthetics is to further understand, then, how combatively delineating each other's differences can contribute to the production of sociopolitical formations that recognize and protect singularity as such.

ISBN: 9798738622885Subjects--Topical Terms:

570001
Comparative literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Nineteenth-century characters

Singular Appearance: Tracking Character in the Nineteenth Century.
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300 $a 198 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-11, Section: A.
500 $a Advisor: Kelley, Theresa M.;Ortiz-Robles, Mario.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2021.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
520 $a This project examines a strand in nineteenth-century writing that presents literary character at the intersection between individual difference and social appearance. I focus in this project on literary characters who are neither wholly interior, as Romantic characters are often said to be, nor wholly external, as eighteenth-century and Victorian characters are sometimes seen to be. This binary misses a crucial aspect of writing about nineteenth-century character. The characters I study negotiate the difference between interiority and external appearance by becoming distinct in the process of being perceived: their uniqueness becomes visible as they enter into another's line of sight. So fashioned, these characters demonstrate how the "types" we associate with appearance, and the "particularity" we associate with interiority, are not necessarily opposed. Instead, they challenge this epistemological binary by existing as particular configurations of typical categories that shift in response to how they are seen.Thinking about nineteenth-century characters in these terms supposes that individuals become singular precisely because they enter a circuit of mutual perceptibility. Building upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt, I argue that this circuit is made possible by the "public space of appearance": the culmination of those categories that condition shared perception. According to Arendt, someone's individuality-too different, or distinct, to be comprehended otherwise-only appears when it is recast through narrative, or when particularity is translated through shared categories. I further argue that each individual's perception takes these public categories, breaks them up, and reassembles them as a distinct way of seeing the world. Moreover, this partial viewpoint manages to catch a view of reality that is true on account of this partiality: our singularity frames others so that they, too, appear as singular. In other words, our unique perspectives condition the uniqueness of others. As I read these literary characters, then, they suggest how we as humans can, and should, bring to light each other's distinctness.These characters challenge our normative modes of thinking about the relationship between identity, appearance, and reality. By inhabiting viewpoints that reassemble type, they reconstitute the public horizons-the assemblies of shared categories-that condition their own appearance. I trace this phenomenological work back to Blake, whose mythical individuals become each other's worlds, or new ways of seeing. I demonstrate, however, that singular appearance emerges with full force in the wake of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and specifically in light of the claim that rhetoric and public discussion undergird both personal and political character. My argument then turns to Dickens, whose characters distill most clearly how distinct personality emerges as perceived appearance. The implications of this project are twofold. First, the literary persons I track erode the binary divisions between "particular" and "type," "flat" and "round," "internal" and "external" that have governed theories of "character." Second, such characterization shows how categories of judgment need not transcend individual difference or its perception. Instead, these perceiving subjects challenge us with radical appearances and perspectives that grant the necessity of singularity to sustaining a common but multidimensional world. Chapter 1, "Idiosyncratic Character," examines how the characters in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend present "thick" appearances. Rethinking the way in which he is identified as an inheritor of Romanticism, I begin with Dickens because this elision of surface and depth supplies a blueprint for the characterization at the heart of this project. Described as "observers," his characters embody idiosyncratic points-of-view that, because they are shaped by a recognition of social types, paradoxically model a naive impressionability to the singularity of others. Taking in how they are seen as a part of this perception, they present features whose construction from an external perspective renders them utterly distinct: the public magnification of type as particular.Chapter 2, "Rhetorical Character," explores how Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet reconfigures "character" as perceived difference. Innovating upon a distinctly Scottish concern with the formative relationship between language and sociopolitical character, while departing from contemporaneous accounts of the relationship between judgment and sympathy, the novel's protagonists ground evaluation in opposition by construing the other's point-of-view through combative rhetoric. Their consequent failure to depict each other in a comprehensive manner generates an excess of language that outstrips intent and liberates appearance from normative narratives. Thus painting character in vivid moments of extreme detail, Redgauntlet redefines "judgment" as the delineation rather than subsumption of particularity.Chapter 3, "Dramatic Character," studies how Blake's characters perceive and shape singularity. In the mutual performance of each other's action, Los and Urizen articulate bodily surface in a sequence of frames that renders their features both recognizable and particular, overlarge and minute. In performing the other, each character also captures the viewpoint from which he himself is being seen; this dialogic space of dramatic reconstruction casts Los and Urizen not simply as distinct appearances, but as entire new worlds: horizons that continue to shape each other's perception. The phenomenological work that these characters take up thus rethinks Blake's investment in creative "vision" as the seeing and extension of another's seeing.Chapter 4, "Communal Character," argues that Robert Burns's lyric voice instantiates a distance of perspective that, paradoxically, brings phenomena into focus. Attending to the typifying events of his specific community-the occurrences that accompany daily work like ploughing, for example-Burns collapses the axes of social time and space to a point. Rather than scrutinizing appearances as present entities, his speakers are impressed upon by moments that assemble, in unique configurations, the associations that accumulate along the framework of communal tradition. Burns thus continues the characterization studied here by turning it sideways: rather than rearranging typical categories in new pictures, he distills singularity at the level of social narratives.Epilogue: Turning briefly to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that the mutual perception at play in nineteenth-century character proposes a social phenomenology. If to perceive, as Merleau-Ponty argues, is always to be perceived, then these characters demonstrate, first, how social categories of knowledge undergird, rather than mask, appearance, and second, how such perception redraws the horizons bounding actuality. To study this phenomenological aesthetics is to further understand, then, how combatively delineating each other's differences can contribute to the production of sociopolitical formations that recognize and protect singularity as such.
590 $a School code: 0262.
650 4 $a Comparative literature. $3 570001
650 4 $a British & Irish literature. $3 3284317
653 $a Nineteenth-century characters
653 $a Romantic characters
653 $a Arendt, Hannah
653 $a Sociopolitical formations
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690 $a 0295
710 2 $a The University of Wisconsin - Madison. $b English. $3 2049862
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