Erotic Interiors in Joseph Addison’s Imagination
2008; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ecf.0.0004
ISSN1911-0243
Autores Tópico(s)Architecture, Design, and Social History
Resumoand celebrated faculty that endowed each subject with a selfcontained capacity for excitement, appreciation, and pleasure: the imagination. The pleasures of the imagination, writes Joseph Addison, edify and diversify a subject’s autonomous capacity for delight because they allow him to “converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companion in a Statue. He meets with a secret Refreshment in a Description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures: So that he looks upon the World, as it were, in another Light, and discovers in it a Multitude of Charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of Mankind.”1 Addison’s famous lines describe the polite aesthetic stance of the Spectator’s presumably refined and self-conscious readers. The imagination, portable and ever available to the subject’s own use, accommodates an interior, “secret” life replete with beautiful spectacles, narrative engagement, and the satisfaction of virtual ownership, a “kind of Property” in all visible things. Addison envisions an infinitely renewable dynamic of pleasure between a man and his world, one in which the realms of rational discourse
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