Peter Garratt

Ruskin's Modern Painters and the Visual Language of Reality

Ruskin, the most influential mid-Victorian aesthetician, has typically been affiliated by critics with one of two incongruous regimes of thought; late English romanticism or an emerging counter-paradigm of factual science. Unwilling to refine this opposition, criticism has failed so far to address the relationship Ruskin bears to a native British intellectual tradition of sceptical empiricism. Beginning by arguing that his early writing on aesthetics ought to be distanced from the cultural legacies of romanticism (intuitive psychology, transcendental order, mysticism), this article offers a re-examination of Modern Painters (1843–60) as a work that intersects instead with the associationist tradition represented in the mid-century by writers like Alexander Bain and G. H. Lewes. Ruskins realism, I argue, can be rethought in these terms as it dramatises a similar model of subjectivity to that found in their key psychological works; a model whereby the self must paradoxically be sacrificed before the object it seeks to know while also authenticating arts truthfulness through the testimonies of perspective and personality. Discussion ranges from visual art, including Turner and Canaletto, to the psychological theory of Lewes and Bain, to detailed analysis of the form and meaning of Modern Painters itself, uncovering the powerful critique of mimesis that its surprising philosophical inheritance implies.

Sublime Transport: Ruskin, Travel and the Art of Speed

Towards the end of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Tom Tulliver’s uncle Mr Deane observes that the defining quality of modern life is its speed. Life, he tells Tom, ‘goes on at a smarter pace’ than a generation before, accelerated by the effects of ‘steam’.1 Reclining after an intake of snuff (a gesture poised curiously between idle recreation and stimulation), he warms to his theme: Why, sir, forty years ago, when I was much such a strapping youngster as you, a man expected to pull between the shafts the best part of his life, before he got the whip in his hand. The looms went slowish, and fashions didn’t alter quite so fast —I’d a best suit that lasted me six years. Everything was on a lower scale, sir —in point of expenditure, I mean. It’s this steam, you see, that has made the difference —it drives on every wheel double pace and the wheel of Fortune along with ‘em … I don’t find fault with the change, as some people do.2

Introduction: The Cognitive Humanities: Whence and Whither?

This volume of essays defines the ‘cognitive humanities’, starting from theories of the embodied mind and exploring them in and through cultural artefacts, texts and settings, from the Renaissance to posthumanism. The purpose is to demonstrate how recent interdisciplinary conceptualisations of the mind herald new directions for literary and cultural theory, beyond existing topics in ‘cognitive literary studies’, where much interesting debate has tended to centre on formalist textual analysis, narratology and poetics, mental representation, theory of mind, empathy, the appeal of fictional character, and even evolutionary arguments justifying literature. The essays here respond to a turn towards embodiment, phenomenology and less representationally dependent cognitive models articulated by what Mark Rowlands calls the ‘new science of mind’ or ‘4E’ cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended cognition). Exploring different historical sites, forms and practices (narrative, art, performance), these essays ask what it means to situate notions of embodied cognition culturally, such as the idea that mind is shaped by bodily, affective and material structures, that it enacts a meaningful world, and even that it can be extended into the world beyond the skin. Part 1 features chapters proposing new theorisations of narrative, fictionality, viewpoint and performance; Part 2 examines the particularity of embodied and extended cognition in four examples from concrete historical periods and sites, such as the Shakespearean stage and Romantic-era political discourse; and Part 3 looks at the forefront of interdisciplinary research, across borders with the medical and digital humanities, to show how the cognitive humanities can engage with, and contribute to understanding, complex lived phenomena. Throughout the volume a range of traditions and methods—historicist, philosophical, linguistic, narratological, empiricist—are used to explore the possibilities of a critical cultural conversation with the embodied mind. What is opened up illustrates the scope and potential of the cognitive humanities.