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This paper seeks to elaborate on the less discussed connection between Eliot’s poetics and Cubist aesthetics in terms of Bergson’s theory of durée. The idea of ‘a new compound’ is a theme common to Eliot’s poetic theory and Cubist aesthetics. The poet’s ability to fuse disparate elements into a new whole is a thread running through the fabric of Eliot’s poetics: his idea of tradition, of unified sensibility, of impersonal theory of poetry, and so forth. One can find that underlying Eliot’s notion of moulding a new compound is Bergson’s conception of durée as the inter-penetration of diverse inner states. Bergson’s theory of durée enables Cubist painters to have a new view of reality and thereby create the ‘multiple viewpoints’ technique—which brings to Cubist canvases ‘the Fourth Dimension’—to fashion new wholes.

Throughout "La Préface de Cromwell" (1827), Victor Hugo treats the sublime and the grotesque as different realms without seriously expounding upon their distinction. In examining the major treatises of the sublime, however, one will find that the grotesque actually resides inside the sublime in terms of evoking violent emotions, especially terror. This essay, then, aims to bring into relief the essential similarities between the grotesque and the sublime, thereby drawing attention to the role of the grotesque in the construction of artistic or aesthetic modernity.

This paper seeks to explain how music can be sad and how music is different from poetry and from painting in terms of one’s experience of sadness in an artwork. Expression theorists like John Dewey believe that music is expressive of emotions because it stems from the spontaneous overflow of the artist’s inner turmoil. That is, music, per se, has the power to make the listener, say, sad. On the other hand, projection theorists like Stephen Davies maintain that the listener experiences a piece of music as sad because s/he projects his/her sadness onto it or recognises the property of sadness in it. Although nowadays widely considered more valid than the expression theory, the projection theory has been refined by several critics. Jerrod Levinson, for instance, maintains that, in order to recognise or experience the emotions in music, the listener needs to be “appropriately backgrounded” and to listen to music in its (socio-historical and/or intellectual) context. Convincing as it seems, Levinson’s notion of an “appropriately backgrounded” audience, I shall argue, applies to poetry better than to music in general, in that poetry, owing to being verbally mediated, must greatly involve the reader’s cognitive mediation for him/her to infer the emotions in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Madame Bovary is often celebrated as a typical Realist novel in that Flaubert, as a narrator, exposes the follies of Romanticism by detachedly, if not mercilessly, characterising Emma as a woman whose life is dominated by her harmful desire to materialise her idea(l) of love that she encounters in Romantic literature. Upon closer examination, however, we will see that Flaubert, as a person, seems to show strong compassion for Emma's Romantic longing as an irony of life: "If Bovary is worth anything," says Flaubert, "the book will not lack heart. Irony, though, seems to me to dominate life." To further Flaubert's insights into the irony of life, I draw on the Kantian sublime and Lacanian jouissance to explicate the nature of Romantic longing--the ironic discrepancy between infinite desire and finite satisfaction--and illustrate the ways in which such longing manifests itself in Emma and, surprisingly and ironically, in Charles, arguably the most down-to-earth and content character in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]