“The Spectator” (Publication, 1711-1712)
Year
1711-1712
Text
The Spectator. By Richard Steele, Joseph Addison [et al.]. (London : Printed for S. Buckley and J. Tonson, 1712-1713). [Enthält Eintragungen über China].
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030. (Add2)
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030. (Add2)
Type
Publication
Contributors (2)
Addison, Joseph
(Milston, Wiltshire 1672-1719 Kensington, London) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Dramatiker, Journalist, Politiker, Gründer des The Spectator
Steele, Richard
(Dublin 1672-1729 Carmarthen) : Irischer Schriftsteller, Dramatiker, Herausgeber der London Gazette, Gründer des The Tatler und The Spectator
Subjects
History of Media
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Literature : Occident : Great Britain
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Literature : Occident : Ireland
Chronology Entries (5)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1711 |
The Spectator ; vol. 1, no 69 (May 19, 1711). Joseph Addison schreibt : "The Infusion of a China Plant sweetened with the Pith of an Indian Cane." |
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| 2 | 1711 |
The Spectator ; Vol. 1, no 189 (Oct. 6, 1711). Joseph Addison schreibt : "It is Father Le Comte (The present state of China, if I am not mistaken, who tells us how Want of Duty in this Particular is punished among the Chinese, insomuch that if a Son should be known to kill, or so much as to strike his Father, not only the Criminal but his whole Family would be rooted out, nay the Inhabitants of the Place where he lived would be put to the Sword, nay the Place itself would be razed to the Ground, and its Foundations sown with Salt; For, say they, there must have been an utter Depravation of Manners in that Clan or Society of People who could have bred up among them so horrible an Offender." |
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| 3 | 1712 |
The Spectator ; Vol. 3, No. 511 (Oct. 16, 1612). Addison, Joseph : Eine der ersten englischen Geschichten mit Thema China : "I have another Story to tell thee, which I likewise met with in a Book. It seems the General of the Tartars, after having laid siege to a strong Town in China, and taken it by Storm, would set to Sale all the Women that were found in it. Accordingly, he put each of them into a Sack, and after having thoroughly considered the Value of the Woman who was inclosed, marked the Price that was demanded for her upon the Sack. There were a great Confluence of Chapmen, that resorted from every Part, with a Design to purchase, which they were to do unsight unseen. The Book mentions a Merchant in particular, who observing one of the Sacks to be marked pretty high, bargained for it, and carried it off with him to his House. As he was resting with it upon a half-way Bridge, he was resolved to take a Survey of his Purchase: Upon opening the Sack, a little old Woman popped her Head out of it; at which the Adventurer was in so great a Rage, that he was going to shoot her out into the River. The old Lady, however, begged him first of all to hear her Story, by which he learned that she was sister to a great Mandarin, who would infallibly make the Fortune of his Brother-in-Law as soon as he should know to whose Lot she fell. Upon which the Merchant again tied her up in his Sack, and carried her to his House, where she proved an excellent Wife, and procured him all the Riches from her Brother that she had promised him." |
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| 4 | 1712 |
Addison, Joseph. The pleasures of imagination. In : The Spectator ; vol. 2 ; no 414 (June 21, 1712). Er schreibt : "If the Writers who have given us an account of China tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line; because, they say, any one may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to show a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the art by which they direct themselves. They have a word, it seems, in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the imagination at first sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an effect. Our British gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, lobes, and pyramids." Sekundärliteratur Tony C. Brown : Addison presents Chinese taste in landscape gardening as exemplary of aesthetic experience itself. In the way they appreciate a well-laid garden, the Chinese uphold a principle of variety without end, make apparent the immediacy of aesthetic pleasure, and exhibit a positive use of an imagination not beholden to the dictates of reason. Though what the Chinese therefore illustrate is a largely unconditioned state—of perpetual novelty, immediacy, and freedom from reason's rule—this is not because Addison thinks them undeveloped, akin to what we would call a primitive society or culture. Addison, like many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europeans, considers China to be a site of competing civilization. The China he presents in the "Pleasures" is not a figure of primitivism or a predicate of simplicity prior to complex bureaucratic and commercial development. Nor does it stand in for a condition of simple negation. On the contrary, Addison finds in the figure of Chinese taste something that enables him to delimit the aesthetic, something that he does not find available at home in Europe. Addison's need for China follows from the noticeably new way he tries to conceive the aesthetic. For him, the pleasures of the imagination are not governed exclusively by the divine final cause but operate via the efficient cause, considered as a primitive, universal human faculty. For this reason, Addison finds aesthetic experience to be immediate and pre-cognitive, hence largely unconditioned—a formulation that posits the aesthetic as something that precludes direct description. It is to define what he cannot therefore otherwise present that Addison calls upon China. China's exotic status supplies him with a geopolitical principle of differentiation that he turns to remark a limit of another order, namely a subjective one. Binding in itself the known and unknown, China allows Addison to figure something lacking in initial distinction, the aesthetic and the self of an aesthetic experience. As Addison wants to articulate the aesthetic itself through the figure of Chinese gardening, we can call the figure allegoric rather than, say, metaphoric. Whereas the latter, to maintain its coherence, brackets any incompatibility between tenor and vehicle, for Addison Chinese gardening designates something—the aesthetic—that in effect exhibits a qualitative non-equivalence with its vehicle or fable. An allegory for Addison appeals not only to the understanding but to the imagination as well, a double appeal that gives it its pedagogic utility. Allegories can dress up difficult ideas in pleasing attire, though that attire must fit well. This is what Addison wants to achieve with the figure of Chinese taste. Addison finds the Chinese garden so attractive because it presents a seemingly free distribution of natural objects. |
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| 5 | 1712 |
The Spectator ; vol.2 ; no 415 (1712). Joseph Addison schreibt : "The wall of China is one of those eastern pieces of magnificence, which makes a figure even in the map of the world, although an account of it would have been thought fabulous, were not the wall itself still extant." |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2007- | Worldcat/OCLC | Web / WC |
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