Title: Matthew Arnold

Subject: Extracts from “Scholar Gypsy” and "Culture and Anarchy". ****

Date:

<aside> 💡 Key Points:

• Main Ideas
  • Culture is everything what is best and perfect and the process of self discipline
• Key words
  • Hebraism
  • Hellenism
  • Barbarians
  • Philistines
  • Populace
  • Protestantism
  • Sweetness and Light
  • Culture
  • Anarchy
  • Materialism
  • Totalitarianism
  • Curiosity
  • Desire
• Quotes that connect points
  • “The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.”
  • “Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger.”,
  • Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.”
• Important points

Write it after the class

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<aside> ✏️ Notes:

Main lecture notes

• Arnold defines culture as “the study of perfection,” or the pursuit of individual and social betterment through intellectual and moral growth. Culture, in Arnold's view, involves engaging with the best ideas, arts, and wisdom humanity has produced, and fostering a spirit of reason and self-reflection.Unlike the Victorian notion of culture as simply “high art” or “civilized behavior,” Arnold's culture is holistic and moral, a personal and collective endeavor to improve society. For Arnold, culture also means cultivating empathy and a sense of human unity.

Scholar Gypsy

• 10 line stanza pattern
• Almost reminds pastoral Elegy
• Also wearing the metro Arnold criticism. Victorian also takes classical into consideration. Arnold dont like Chaucer
• Continuity between past and present?
• Starts with imperative GO! and COME!
• Quest of human existence
• Power of imagination
• As if he is narrating a story
• imaginative and full of questions he needs to find the answer
• Discovery of human brain to control the brain
• Profit and abandon and tell the world about the knowledge secret
• Transcendental implications (kinestezi?, fortunetelling, dark arts, manipulate the human mind, occultist, Faust like desires,
• Glanvill’s book
• line 60 But, creating contrast pronoun I more personified implications.
• Listener is now the scholar, stanza explains the escape from the exhausting world
• line 97, archaic language, he is referring to an older one, playing with time and temporality, no linear time, modern and old language uses,
• Syn-chronic and anachronistic time concepts
• Place Oxford but time is shifting
• Negative language negating
• innocence is lost, vitality of human is lost, emotional exhaustion in the modern time but its draining us it is a sick hurry, divided aims, our heads are overloaded
• Dido Hades Aeneid Aeneas, We are abandoned by the society? our life resemble Dido?
• Nightingale, associated Romantic Keats, loneliness, exhaustion, sense of abandonment, we listened with enchanted ears those flowers were fresh, sense of nostalgia
• Arnold more pessimistic than Wordsworth, Wordsworth had hopes
• Modern world is no longer capable of epic thought, he resolves to seek less competitive, nature is a escape to freedom, a desire to escape from the modern life, he transcendent the cares and the mortality of others for a more spiritual existence. Like a prophet poet he wants to learn the lore, spiritual purification within nature and the universal spirit.
• A quest for the divine and to reconcile matter and spirit.
• Epitomizes the paradoxical combination of Victorian vigor and social progressive with a sense of dislocation arising from religious doubt and social fragmentation*
• Victorian paradox
• Disturbing side of the realism and dullness of the modern life
• Compare and Contrast with Dover Beach*?
• Pre cursive of existentialist crisis? Dover Beach is more hopeless and more existentialist
• Scholar Gypsy de loss of faith prophetized but Dover beach is the loss of faith.

Culture and Anarchy

• Protestant institutions are the problem
• Freedom is important
• Rising capitalism in the dying feudalism is creates a danger of anarchy
• Personal freedom
• Personal liberty is an assertion
• We are drifting towards anarchy
• Danger of anarchy emerges within dying feudalism which was the core of British .
• Every man for himself in religion and business. Empowered middle class is scared of central power
• Losing private freedom
• Raw and uncultured working class
• Greek instinct to see things as they are so praising Greeks, art and fidelity to? nature
• No removal of religion, religion is a source of strength
• Truth = Beauty
• Hellenism vs Hebraism
• Religion practism in the institutions
• Lack of sweetness and light
• Domain of strictness of conscious non liberated mind of Hebraism
• Anti-Protestantism in institutions
• Loss of values

Write it during the class

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<aside> 📎 Summary:

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