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Lädt ... Culture and Anarchy and Other Writingsvon Matthew Arnold
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Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) is one of the most celebrated works of social criticism ever written. It has become an inescapable reference-point for all subsequent discussion of the relations between politics and culture, and it has exercised a profound influence both on conceptions of the distinctive nature of British society, and on ideas about education and the teaching of literature more generally. This edition establishes the authoritative text of this much-revised work, and places it alongside Arnold's three most important essays on political subjects - Democracy, Equality, and The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. The editor's substantial introduction situates these works in the context both of Arnold's life and other writings, and of nineteenth-century intellectual and political history. This edition also contains a chronology of Arnold's life, a bibliographical guide and full notes on the names, books, and historical events mentioned in the texts. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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When Culture and Anarchy first appeared in book form in 1869, Matthew Arnold was forty-six. He was best known as a poet - the most gifted of the generation immediately following Tennyson and Browning, the author of such renowned anthology pieces as "The Scholar Gipsy" and "Dover Beach." But by this time his poetic career was largely behind him, and he was to write very little further verse of much consequence. He had, however, acquired a formidable second reputation as a critic, based chiefly on the lectures he had delivered as professor of poetry at Oxford from 1857 to 1867, and more particularly on the selection of them published as Essays in Criticism (First Series) in 1865.
In their breadth, lucidity, and high standards, these essays marked Arnold as the most important English critic since William Hazlitt or even Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the best of them - above all in the one entitled "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" - he also ventured well beyond literary criticism proper into the region which a later generation would have called cultural criticism. He discussed the prevailing values of his society - its tone and its unthinking assumptions no less than its formal beliefs; and he was especially scathing about its philistinism (a term imported from Germany, which he was the first to put into widespread circulation) and its self-complacency.
Some things today would undoubtedly shock Arnold, as they must shock even the most adaptable Arnoldian. The modern world simply seems more given over to anarchy - more irredeemably anarchic - than anything Arnold could have imagined, and nowhere more so than in the realm of culture itself, and particularly in the scene of devastation presented by so much intellectual and academic life.
"And we are here as on a
darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms
of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash
by night". Matthew Arnold. Dover Beach.
Arnold's basic aim is to defend high culture as useful to society. He argues that it is the excellence of the citizens rather than the representativeness of their government that is essential to a healthy society and true progress. He rejects the argument that democratic institutions themselves tend to enlighten and educate--rather, they corrupt, by giving free rein to the aristocratic tendency toward unintellectual high-spirited barbarity, the middle-class tendency toward materialistic narrow-minded philistinism, and the lower-class tendency toward violence, sentiment, prejudice, and drink. The anarchy spawned by "doing as one likes' expresses itself in the darkling plain of willful dissent, religious and ethnic intolerance, spiritual emptiness, greed, intellectual relativism, and riot.
Accepting democracy as inevitable, and indeed necessary in the long run, Arnold brings culture to the rescue. What is culture? He describes it as a blending of the Hebraic impulse toward moral perfection and right action with the Hellenistic impulse toward clarity of thought and right reason. True culture blends sweetness (beauty and subtle decorum) with light (critical reflection). The cultured person, liberated from the self-deceptions of the flesh and the indolence of the aesthetic by the Hebraic element, and released from the "machinery" of economic interest and political power by the Hellenistic element, follows only reason and the will of God. Cultivated people manage to escape and become alienated from their inherited class and ethnic limitations into a wider, more humane universality, by means of some combination of natural potential and education. The health of a society depends on increasing by education the numbers of the cultured.
Arnold saw culture ("contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world" or "high culture"), as the crucial component of a healthy democratic state.