An Archaeology of Sympathy
The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema
392 pages
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68 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2013
In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people’s very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being.
In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein’s influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra’s It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work.
Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.
Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge
“James Chandler’s An Archaeology of Sympathy demonstrates in spades the continuing value of an attitude or disposition to cultural production that often goes by the name of close reading. In a dazzling display of erudition, razor sharp argumentation, and the sheer enjoyment of reading, looking, and thinking well, Chandler moves with both ease and friction across the films of Frank Capra, the poetry of William Wordsworth, and the philosophy of Adam Smith. Each of these cultural products and all of the other works both recent and historical that are drawn into Chandler’s sentimental disposition take on new and surprising guises. Read this book: the archaeology of sympathy may not change your life but you'll never watch a film or read a work of literature again without hearing as you do so ‘In a Sentimental Mood.’”
Michael Wood, Princeton University
“This learned, fluent, subtle, and surprising book brings together an old/new moment in European thought and a new/old moment in American cinema, showing how ‘sentimentality’ may include not only messy or displaced feelings but also a whole modern structure of relationships based on who is looking at (or caring about or troubled by) whom. Few writers have connected film and print in such a persuasive fashion, and none, as far as I know, has made, for example, Lord Shaftesbury, Lawrence Sterne, Adam Smith, Charles Dickens, Frank Capra, and Joseph Conrad look as if they might belong in the same room.”
Contents
Preface
Introduction The Sentimental Mode
Introduction The Sentimental Mode
Part 1 The Capraesque
1 Capra’s America
2 Capra Remakes Capra
3 Cinema as a Medium of Sentiment
1 Capra’s America
2 Capra Remakes Capra
3 Cinema as a Medium of Sentiment
Part 2 The Making of Literary Sentimentalism
4 The Case of the Literary Spectator
5 Sentimental Journeys, Vehicular States
6 The Emergence of Sentimental Probability
7 Sentimental Monstrosity
Part 3 Against Sentiment
8 Romanticism
9 Modernism
Coda
Notes
Index
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Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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