“The General Entertainment of My Life”: The Tatler , the Spectator , and the Quidnunc’s Cure
2015; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3–4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/ecf.27.3.343
ISSN1911-0243
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoThe quidnunc—the news addict hooked on the latest dispatches— remained a figure of fun throughout the eighteenth century, partly because he functioned as a comic canary in the era’s ever-expanding coal mine of periodically printed news. Richard Steele coined the term and, with his collaborator Joseph Addison, satirized the affliction in the pages of the Tatler and the Spectator. Each periodical, in its own way, proposed the theatre as the quidnunc’s likeliest corrective and cure. The tactics by which they did so at once anticipate and rewire some powerful theories of performance and mediation: Peggy Phelan’s on the primacy of presence; Michael Warner’s on the distinctive temporalities—theatrical, periodical—inhabited by the early eighteenth century’s emerging, overlapping publics; Walter Benjamin’s on the different operations of “absorption” triggered by the singular, aureate work of art and the mass-directed entertainments made possible (and prolific) by modern technologies of reproduction. The quidnunc’s disorder is an obsession with the trivial, but Steele and Addison, over the course of their two papers, manage to spin from it an argument more momentous, about theatre, journalism, and time itself in Queen Anne’s age of burgeoning information.
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