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Pastoral 1 (AO4)
What do you understand by “pastoral”?
What is “the pastoral”?
Why is Saunders's book called Pastoralia?
Some definitions:
Terry Gifford (1999) offers several permutations of “the” pastoral tradition:
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The pastoral is any poem (particular the classical eclogue) that deals with
shepherds and rural life; it tends to idealize both.
Pastoral texts are those in which the countryside features in a significant way;
often it is privileged over & opposed to the city and city life.
An extension of more traditional pastoral texts might be “eco-texts” (such as those
by Ursula Le Guin); often overlaps with some forms of fantasy and/or science
fiction.
“Pastoral” sometimes a pejorative adjective describing romanticized, naive,
patronizing idealizations of the countryside and country life.
“The pastoral” might also be thought of as “the literature of landscape” (Stephen
Siddall [2009] calls his book on pastoral literature Literature and Landscape)
Introduction to Aesthetics and Aesthetic Theory
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Burke’s distinction of the beautiful and the sublime (1757):
“By beauty I mean that quality or those qualities in bodies, by
which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.”
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and
danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is
conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is
productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is
capable of feeling.”
The sublime and the beautiful “are indeed ideas of a very
different nature, one [the sublime] being founded on pain,
the other [the beautiful] on pleasure”
Beautiful?
Sublime?
The sublime and the beautiful are both aspects of
aesthetic experience – two faces of the same
aesthetic coin.
Introduction to Aesthetics and Aesthetic Theory
Kant (1724-1804)
Kant’s was arguably the first major contribution to aesthetic theory and
philosophy.
He was influenced in part by Burke’s distinction of the beautiful and the
sublime.
Beauty is a problem for Kant: it is an immediate experience “in” us, and yet we
perceive beauty “in” things; therefore, we act as if “x is beautiful” is
universally true.
Beauty appears to be in other things, and yet it is justified by our own
immediate experiences – so what guarantees that something really is
beautiful?
Pure aesthetic pleasure should be free from concepts; e.g., the experience of a
“something” greater than oneself when looking out over, say, the Grand
Canyon is not a representation of any thing or concept, whereas as
photograph of me is.
Introduction to Aesthetics and Aesthetic Theory
Kant (cont.)
Pure aesthetic experience should allow the “free play” of the imagination – it should allow
us to make links and leaps, without the need of concepts, and without being “for”
anything else.
Aesthetic contemplation should lead us to a point of disinterested reflection – not
uninterested; “disinterested” means free from concerns to do with my, or anyone’s,
advantage; disinterested here means contemplating the aesthetic object for its own
sake.
Pure aesthetic experience indicates a harmony between us (our rational faculties) and the
world/aesthetic objects.
Aesthetic experience should give us a sense of a “beyond” that we can neither know nor
explain, but of which we have glimpses and are given clues.
In this sense, aesthetic experience is moral, for it makes us realize we are part of a
grander design than ourselves, one we can never truly understand.
It is also linked to morality because in aesthetic experience, as in our dealings with others,
we learn to view things as ends in themselves, not means to other ends.
Not “the” pastoral at all...
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Might be better, with so many definitions on
offer, to think not of “the pastoral,” but of
“pastorals” or “pastoralism.”
Why study the pastoral?
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Two views:
1) We “map” our broader views and beliefs onto our surroundings: we
might “see the world in a grain of sand | And heaven in a wild flower”
(William Blake); we might see the oppression of the working classes
“written” into the uniformity of industrial landscapes
2) Marx - “life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness
by life.” Our aesthetics lives, at their most basic, have their foundations in
the fact that we cannot help but respond to our environment.
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Other philosophers, like George Santayana and John Dewey,
were not Marxists, but held similar views about aesthetic life
being rooted in experience. If “pastoral” is the literature of
landscape, in the broadest sense of “landscape,” then it might
also be the literature that attempts to chart our aesthetic lives.
Pastoral & the Romantic Imagination
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The beautiful and the sublime.
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The free play of the imagination.
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Imagination as the essence of “man,” in an
increasingly secular world.
What do the title and image suggest? How
do you think this text will relate to the idea
of a pastoral tradition?
Songs of Innocence
and of Experience
Shewing the Two
Contrary States of the
Human Soul
Introduction (Experience) & Earth’s
Answer
The Ecchoing Green [from Innocence]
The Sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring,
To welcome the Spring,
The sky-lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells chearful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the Ecchoing Green.
Old John with white hair
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say,
Such, such were the joys,
When we all, girls & boys,
In our youth time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.
Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end:
Round the laps of their mothers,
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest:
And sport no more seen,
On the darkening Green.
The Pastoral: Critical Approaches
Terry Gifford (1999) offers several permutations of “the” pastoral tradition:




The pastoral is any poem (particular the classical eclogue) that deals with
shepherds and rural life; it tends to idealize both.
Pastoral texts are those in which the countryside features in a significant way;
often it is privileged over & opposed to the city and city life.
An extension of more traditional pastoral texts might be “eco-texts” (such as
those by Ursula Le Guin); often overlaps with some forms of fantasy and/or
science fiction.
“Pastoral” sometimes a pejorative adjective describing romanticized, naive,
patronizing idealizations of the countryside and country life.
Vocab
• Texts/speeches etc. that exhort us to change
our way of life for another, more preferable way
can be called protreptic. We can also speak of
acts or instances of protrepsis.
• Texts/speeches etc. that exhort us to continue
with/in a particular way of life are called
paraenetic. We can also speak of acts or
instances of paraenesis.
• Gifford also outlines a tradition of anti-pastoral
writing. This is a tradition in which the faith in
the good and promise, of the Edenic character
of nature has been broken.
• Anti-pastoral writing involves a “corrective”
attitude rather than a simply celebratory attitude