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eBook details
- Title: Frederick Burwick. Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (Book Review)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 175 KB
Description
Frederick Burwick. Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. 192. $59.95. In Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power, Frederick Burwick brings together four essays delivered at the Wordsworth summer conference in Grasmere and subsequently published in The Wordsworth Circle between 1994 and 1998 with three essays written especially for this volume. In many aspects of their form and style these essays (and the new essays are in keeping with those previously published) hearken back to their original venue, with its mixed audience of graduate and undergraduate students and scholars at every level of expertise. Thus, the essays often engage the author's delightful talent for narration and his capacious scholarly memory; yet they are somewhat loosely organized and linked with each other only after the fact. There is something striking in each essay, though what is striking may not be central to or integrated in the main line of argument. Burwick, however, has provided in a brief introduction a thread that can be followed, more or less, through all of the essays: namely the concept of "psychological criticism." In chapter I "Knowledge and Power," he describes this as an "introspective mode" of criticism by which De Quincey aims to explain "the effects of literature upon the mind" (4). Though bowing to Freud, Burwick investigates this concept primarily by explicating the paradox (evident in "Suspiria de Profundis") that reverie does not pull to a center but propels outward. Thus, it emerges as a psychological economy of movements and products permeable to an economy of material and social fact: "consciousness absorbs the exterior world," domesticating the foreign imports, which then become buried in the subconscious until some stimulus, some act of power organizes and activates them (6). Other scholars (such as Margaret Russett, to whom Burwick refers) have more thoroughly explored the material connection in this criticism; Burwick is interested in the biographical resonance. In this first chapter he begins to link the psychology of power with De Quincey's literary-critical concept of the "involute," remarking that "[a] peculiarity of De Quincey's memory ... is the way in which personal experience is folded inseparably into his reading" (11-12). The feeling in the literature becomes (quoting De Quincey) "'literally reproduced in myself'" (13). Burwick suggests that De Quincey's critical method develops by following Wordsworth's belief that "The child is father of the man," not just in that the adult matures from the child, but in that the adult interprets (by unfolding) the germ in the child's experience (15). A second development arises from the analogy between the child and the dreamer. Just as the child experiences hearing without understanding, the adult experiences the arrival of ideas, images, and symbols in the opium dream; experience deposited linguistically must be retrieved visually and once again decoded linguistically.
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