Friday, February 10, 2012
Synthesis Question
In the Romantic era, the main focus transformed from religious aspects to secular ideas. Romantic literature basically dealt with themes of human rights, folk traditions, nostalgia for the past especially the Gothic, and the emphasis on the beauty of nature. Romanticism does not entirely disappear in the Victorian Period, but there was a movement emphasizing social or moral themes over artistic values. The Victorian age saw the significant rise of prose writing with remarkable writers such as Charles Dickens who wrote about the degenerating condition of society. Charles Dickens’s work has been highly praised for its realism, mastery of prose, and the reward to noble virtues: kindness, courage, humility, and selflessness. Due to his intense human sympathy, unsurpassed emotional and dramatic power, and his aggressive humanitarian zeal for the destruction evil, he enhanced the Victorian ideal of improving nature with central moral lessons at heart. This idea is also enhanced in Hardy’s Jude: The Obscure. Another significant writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote himself into history by creating the eccentric and brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes' stunning powers of deduction rest on an astute logic which is a direct reflection of the pragmatism of the nineteenth-century Victorian mind. Moreover, Thomas Hardy also reflected his stoical pessimism and harshly conflicted with the Victorian standards of morality through his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Overall, although both periods emphasized human rights and nature in general, Victorian era focuses on high morals, modesty and proper decorum.
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I first must say that I find their to be a strange, and unique, depravity in sentence variation, yet over-abundance of relatively complex and vivid diction choice. Although I find this to be odd, and although not quite so much as suspect, but nearing that area nonetheless, I must say that the overall ideas presented are perfectly solid. Moving forward, certain statements such as Dicken's apparent mastery in totality of "unsurpassed emotional and dramatic power" feel more like fluff then having any relevance to the overall thesis of the synthesis, a thesis that only appears to be in conclusion. This odd technique of a conclusive thesis, not something I am against based on merit alone, seems to reflect the overall ill-filling nature of the piece. To make such statements about the nature of Sherlock Holmes, a character not of whimsy or of short remark, and to base the nature of his deductive powers on the overall, for lack of a better term, zeitgeist of the Victorian time seems to almost be giving credence to only the upper level of society. Although you built up the overall ideals of the Victorian era mind, it seemed to almost be coming in a rudimentary, almost list like fashion, with absolutely no care taken to the manner of presentation. Although the ideas and ideals presented are strong, and the examples presented in a diction that quite accurately reflects the nature of the pieces, the presentation of this is both dull and unoriginal, and feels like a glorified list.
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