Student Question
Summarize chapter five "Modernity, Multiplicity and Becoming" in Pelagia Goulimari's Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to Postcolonialism.
Quick answer:
In the fifth chapter, Pelagia Goulimari talks about the unstable and rapidly changing world of the nineteenth century. She explains how Karl Marx felt capitalism’s whirlwind pace would eventually lead to an uprising from the working class. She also explains how Baudelaire’s fleeting poetry, Nietzsche’s critiques of history, and Mallarme’s views on literature reflect the nineteenth century’s distrust of neat, tidy narratives.
In the fifth chapter, Pelagia Goulimari describes the nineteenth century as a period of “rapid change” and instability.
She begins with Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. These two thinkers saw capitalism as a monster that was exploiting working-class people.
She then moves onto the novelist George Eliot (the penname of Mary Ann Evans). Goulimari explains how Eliot tried to elicit sympathy for her characters via “realism.” Eliot tried to illustrate the hardships of the nineteenth century by creating characters who were as complex as real people.
She compares Eliot to Charles Dickens. Goulimari seems to suggest that Dickens's characters are too comical or absurd to be read as completely realist.
After Eliot, Goulimari returns to Marx. Goulimari notes Marx's connection to Hegel. For Hegel, the human spirit determined history. For Marx, capitalism would determine history. There will come a time when the workers will rise up against cruel...
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capitalism. Goulimari includes many of Marx's caustic descriptions of capitalism. Marx says capitalism turns people into a “fragment.” It makes them "an appendage to a machine.”
From Marx, Goulimari moves onto Charles Baudelaire. For Goulimari, Baudelaire's ephemeral, gritty poems represent the cold, fleeting reality of the nineteenth century.
Next up is Mathew Arnold. Arnold was concerned with culture. According to Arnold, culture is “the development of [our] best self.”
Nietzsche, whom Goulimari focuses on next, doesn't seem to believe people have a single, best self. Nietzsche appears to be against the idea that people can be reduced to single nature or essence. According to Goulimari, Nietzsche believes in “multiplicity.”
Goulimari then brings up Nietzsche's attitudes about history. Nietzsche doesn't see history as an account of what truly occurred. He doesn't view history as possessing a stable origin. Lastly, Nietzsche doesn't believe history coincides with progress. History is interpretation, not fact.
The final two figures Goulimari discusses in chapter five are Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarme. Goulimari sees Wilde as a cross between Plato and Baudelaire. She sees Mallarme as someone who rejects the idea of a stable author altogether. Supposedly, Mallarme doesn't believe literature can express or mimic anything. What literature mainly does is produce a chain of meanings and symbols that the reader has to figure out.