The Renaissance

British Decadence and Renaissance Italy

“…It shares with Botticelli's paintings his signature mood, 'the wistfulness of exiles conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of them explains', an 'ineffable melancholy'. 19…”

“…Pater singles out 'a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair, the cheek-line in highlight against it, with something voluptuous and full in the eyelids and lips'. 26 But he finds more than a sexual frisson in Leonardo's subjects. Like Swinburne, he strives to identify Leonardo's 'type of womanly beauty', but he also attempts to articulate how and why he is moved by these figures, the nature of the encounter, and what his role is as a critic: 'Nervous, electric, always with some inexplicable faintness, these people seem to be subject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, the receptacle of them, and pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences'.…”

Conrad's Carbon Imaginary: Oil, Imperialism, and the Victorian Petro-Archive

“…10 We gain much by ordering historical periods into a sequence of encompassing "energy regimes," which can reveal creative constellations that transcend neat demarcations of time and space: correspondences between Émile Zola's beleaguered colliers in Germinal (1885) and Upton Sinclair's coal miners in King Coal (1917), or between Walter Pater's "hard, gemlike flame" in The Renaissance (1873) and Ray Bradbury's kerosene-lit Fahrenheit 451 (1953). 11 But I wish to avoid the reification of energy regimes into isolated units within which particular texts fit; instead, I investigate the formal protocols that enable energies to become possible to apprehend as energies. My gambit is that in addition to reading in indexical terms-cataloging diegetic, a priori illustrations of coal in novels of the coal era-scholars might more expansively examine the imaginative, infrastructural, and commercial innovations at the threshold before big oil, so as to reassess our assumptions about how new energies are born.…”

Refamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky

“…While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. 49 Shklovsky could be glossing these lines from the "Conclusion" to Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) when he writes: "Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." 50 But the emphasis falls differently.…”

“…Although apparently with much more reason than the settled Oxford don to view existence as a "continual vanishing away, [a] strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving," Shklovsky lacks Pater's painfully keen sense of evanescence. 51 Despite his close friendship with Mayakovsky, ended by the poet's suicide; his exile in Berlin after participating in an anti-Bolshevik plot, from which he thought he might not be allowed to return home; the early death of his sister; the execution of his two brothers; the sudden and complete transformation of the Russia of his childhood and youth into the Soviet Union of the rest of his life-despite all this, Shklovsky conceives of the necessary struggle as that against solidity, not impermanence. 52 For Pater, life must be rescued from dissolution; for Shklovsky, ossification.…”