Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an Italian architect, artist, and classist. His views of Rome have been known globally for their artistic quality, photorealism, and their imaginary perspectives of ancient monuments. Piranesi influenced many neoclassical artists and experimented with the usage of space and vastness in a way that preempted the Impressionist exploration of light. His “Imaginary Prisons” influenced many Romantic and Gothic authors and have become the topic of much scholarship in modernity. This essay explores how Piranesi’s choice of aesthetics and content were influenced and influenced Enlightenment thought surrounding punishment, pain, and democratic imaginations of identity. Throughout, Michel Foucault’s history and theorical approach to the development and use of torture in the west is explored through the lens of Piranesi and contemporaneous thought. Piranesi’s influence continues in subtle remarks in various canonical texts and authors, such as De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. This essay explores the historical moment of liberal, enlightenment thought with the artistic representations of power structures by a largely unsuccessful artist at the moment he emerged into relative fame with a comparative literary approach to textual analysis.
Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) is frequently credited as the first English detective novel. The novel grips the reader into the mystery by infecting them with what is described as a “detective fever.” That is, readerly pleasure is contingent on uncovering the mystery. The pathology of “detective fever” is thus central to understanding the novel’s affective sensationalism. This paper situates Collins’ work in a Freudian and Focauldian model and argues that the desire to unveil feminine privacy underlies the detective aim. Thus, the gendered valence of detection is the primary characteristic of “detective fever.” The detective’s aim, then, closely aligns with what Foucault describes as the Victorian “incitement to discourse” of private sexual desire. The importance of confession to the novel’s conception of detection produces a cursory model for the Freudian psychoanalyst. Ultimately, the gendered anxiety underlying Collins’ detective novel problematizes the genre’s conceit that detection is governed by an agnostic and objective desire for truth.
Does art – literature – have a place in the ethical life? Can it practice moral formation? Moral philosophers from the nineteenth century through the modern era have answered both questions in the affirmative. In this paper, I argue that several of the former, such as G. E. Moore and Arthur Schopenhauer, inspired the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to use distinctively modern narrative strategies to morally form their readers. To establish a vocabulary useful in explaining how and to what end they did so, a brief exposition of contemporary virtue theorists opens the paper. Analyses of each writer follow; first, Mann relies on irony, emotional and deliberative narration, and the sublime to provoke the reader into confronting their biases on ethical-aesthetic problems throughout Death in Venice. Woolf creates ordinary “common meeting-places” and uses stream-of-consciousness narration to engender readers’ sympathy in “The Mark on the Wall” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Despite those strategic differences, however, both draw their readers into morally valent individual psychological realities without trying to destroy them. In this way, their texts are capable of re-creating the reader as “finely aware and richly responsible,” a faculty which I then situate in late modernity’s nascent discomfort with and inability to disavow grand narratives. The paper concludes that Woolf and Mann’s formative modernism is a critical midpoint between modernity and poststructuralist postmodernity.
