Abbott spares no detail in capturing the disbelief and incredulity the square feels when his worldview is challenged. He believed that the rules of his world were fixed and could be fully expressed through exercising the mind and the senses, his full mathematical comprehension of Flatland. The sphere explodes the squareâs certainty and security in the reliability of his empirical understanding of his surroundings. He proves the existence of another dimension, a plane of reality the square had not seen or comprehended previously. The thought experiment that engendered this episode is easy to visualize and describe. Abbott feigned a more limited perspective and then demonstrated the jolt that comes with the revelation of the worldâs true nature. The schoolteacherâs lesson cuts to the heart of modernism: our experience of reality is ignorant of the many invisible and unknowable forces that shape the world. The true purpose of art and philosophy is to give us access to those other worlds. Yet this late nineteenth-century insistence on the primacy of the intangible and ephemeral would cause fear and anxiety that peaked at crisis levels by the turn of the century.You are living on a Plane. What you style Flatland is the vast level surface of what I may call a fluid, on, or in, the top of which you and your countrymen move about, without rising above it or falling below it.I am not a plane Figure, but a Solid. You call me a Circle; but in reality I am not a Circle, but an infinite number of Circles, of size varying from a Point to a Circle of thirteen inches in diameter, one placed on the top of the other. When I cut through your plane as I am now doing, I make in your plane a section which you, very rightly, call a Circle. For even a Sphere â which is my proper name in my own country â if he manifests himself at all to an inhabitant of Flatland â must needs manifest himself as a Circle. [âŠ]The diminished brightness of your eye indicates incredulity. But now prepare to receive proof positive of the truth of my assertions. You cannot indeed see more than one of my sections, or Circles, at a time; for you have no power to raise your eye out of the plane of Flatland; but you can at least see that, as I rise in Space, so my sections become smaller. See now, I will rise; and the effect upon your eye will be that my Circle will become smaller and smaller till it dwindles to a point and finally vanishes.There was no ârisingâ that I could see; but he diminished and finally vanished. I winked once or twice to make sure that I was not dreaming. But it was no dream. For from the depths of nowhere came forth a hollow voice â close to my heart it seemed â âAm I quite gone? Are you convinced now? Well, now I will gradually return to Flatland and you shall see my section become larger and larger.âEvery reader in Spaceland will easily understand that my mysterious Guest was speaking the language of truth and even of simplicity. But to me, proficient though I was in Flatland Mathematics, it was by no means a simple matter. The rough diagram given above will make it clear to any Spaceland child that the Sphere, ascending in the three positions indicated there, must needs have manifested himself to me, or to any Flatlander, as a Circle, at first of full size, then small, and at last very small indeed, approaching to a Point. But to me, although I saw the facts before me, the causes were as dark as ever. All that I could comprehend was, that the Circle had made himself smaller and vanished, and that he had now reappeared and was rapidly making himself larger.When he regained his original size, he heaved a deep sigh; for he perceived by my silence that I had altogether failed to comprehend him. And indeed I was now inclining to the belief that he must be no Circle at all, but some extremely clever juggler; or else that the old wivesâ tales were true, and that after all there were such people as Enchanters and Magicians.1
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Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture
Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s
Jonathan Stone
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Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture
Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s
Jonathan Stone
Ă propos de ce livre
Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s rewrites the story of early modernist literature and culture by drawing out the tensions underlying its simultaneous engagement with Decadence and Symbolism, the unsustainable combination of this world and the other. With a broadly framed literary and cultural approach, Jonathan Stone examines a shift in perspective that explodes the notion of reality and showcases the uneasy relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of the surrounding world. Modernism quenches a growing fascination with the ephemeral and that which cannot be seen while also doubling down on the significance of the material world and finding profound meaning in the physical and the corporeal. Decadence and Symbolism complement the broader historical trajectory of the fin de siĂšcle by affirming the novelty of a modernist mindset and offering an alternative to the empirical and positivistic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Stone seeks to recreate a significant historical and cultural moment in the development of modernity, a moment that embraces the concept of Decadence while repurposing its aesthetic and social import to help navigate the fundamental changes that accompanied the dawn of the twentieth century.
Foire aux questions
Informations
1. Introduction: Visible and Invisible Modernity
Table des matiĂšres
- Cover
- Front Matter
- 1. Introduction: Visible and Invisible Modernity
- 2. Decadent Style with a Symbolist Worldview: Palimpsest, Mise en abyme, and the Perils of Profound Superficiality
- 3. Decadent Metaphysics
- 4. The Danger of Seeing Too Much: Fin-de-siĂšcle Ethics and Aesthetics in Oscar Wildeâs Salome
- 5. Meaningfulness and Superficiality: Joseph Conradâs Surface Truths
- 6. When Metaphor Throttles Metonymy: The Perils of Misreading in Georges Rodenbachâs Bruges-la-Morte
- 7. Conclusion: Fin-de-siÚcle Endings and Beginnings
- Back Matter