Term Paper on "City in Modern Literature Professor and Author"

Term Paper 11 pages (3609 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

City in Modern Literature

Professor and author Richard Sennett is frequently depicted in biographies and scholarly journals as a left-leaning social science thinker whose writing, though sometimes brilliant and always original, is also on occasion confusing and esoteric, sometimes psychologically baffling. His work, when explored carefully, is controversial, albeit stimulating and thought-provoking. His views and his book, along with the writings of scholars, authors and critics connected with urban-themed literature, will be reviewed at length in this paper.

On page 152 of The Fall of Public Man, when speaking about personalities in public (e.g., people in urban settings) Sennett seems simplistic in his narrative: "Personality varies because the appearances of emotion and the inner nature of the person feeling are the same. One is what one appears; therefore, people with different appearances are different persons." And yet, he goes on to put appearances into historical context, and thus, ties his point in a fairly neat box with a red ribbon.

Personalities are "not only composed of variations in rage, compassion, or trust between people," he writes (Sennett, 152), urban personality also possesses "the capacity to 'recover' one's emotions. Longing, regret, and nostalgia acquire an importance in 19th Century psychology of a peculiar sort." he continues; "the 19th Century bourgeois recalled what he was like as a young person, and so his personal "self-consciousness is not so much an attempt to contrast his feelings with those of others as to take known and finished feelings, whatever they once were, as a definition of who he is."

His observations of people in the 18th Century - which he considers the Gold Age of urban life - are that people reflective of all economic levels of society lived their lives in almost continuous performance, and paraded themselves about publicly in wildly expressive costumes. Those 18th Century city people, Sennett explains, wanted to make the city a kind of live theater of frivolity and joy.

And gradually things changed in the urban world; people who were "involuntarily expressive" in the 19th Century, psychologists - who believed them to be "insane people" - carried out the illogical fear that the "spontaneous feeling" is "abnormal." But when the modern personality shows expressiveness involuntarily, it is thought of as charming, and unique.

Sennett's book - The Fall of Public Man - which, in brief summary, is an attempt to create and justify a theory that has to do with how people, social relations, and the drama of intimacy are going through - and have gone through - dramatic changes in American urban society. His theory, Sennett explains, is one that attempts to explain the "confusion" that has "arisen between public and intimate life." Masses of people are concerned with "their single life histories and particular emotions as never before," he writes; but in the process of people being concerned they are falling into a "trap" rather than being "liberated."

Much of what Sennett describes, critiques, and investigates has to do with the public vs. The private self; and he uses the props and characters of theater frequently as metaphors to embellish his narrative on people and change over the past three centuries. A political candidate, he writes (p. 4), is seen by the public in terms of "credibility" and "legitimacy" based on what kind of person he is, not what programs he advocates. The stage on which politicians act out their themes and recite their predicable lines is not that different from the stage on which the public side of average citizens is judged, as well.

Our understanding of society has meaning only in terms of our personal responses to others, and in terms of our own personalities, Sennett explains. An example of his view of society and individuals' changing intimacies is on page 7, when he discusses how physical love has been "redefined, from terms of eroticism to terms of sexuality." In Victorian times, "eroticism involved social relationships," Sennett writes, but today, "sexuality involves personal identity."

Moreover, the term "affair" has repressed the idea "that physical love is a social act" (Sennett 8) whereas "seduction" used to mean "the arousal of such feeling by one person...in another that social codes were violated." And that very violation "caused all the other social relations of the person to be temporarily called into question..."

NARCISSISM: Sennett takes great pains to develop his view of narcissism, which is quite different than the traditional definition of "self-love," and embraces instead what "this person, that event means to me" (Sennett, 8); or, this is or isn't "what I wanted..." Psychologists aren't seeing the "hysterical symptoms which were the dominate complaints of Freud's erotic and repressive society," he writes, because narcissism in the 21st Century more often takes the form of, "If only I could feel more, or if only I could really feel, then I could relate to others or have 'real' relations with them" (Sennett, 9). Narcissism is more along the lines of "the world is failing me" than self-absorption and self-admiration, which it once was almost exclusively.

Sennett is fond of explaining narcissism in terms that suggest that what we want and think we want, yet we can't actually have: "There is a never-ending search for gratification [in urban society today]; and at the same time the self cannot permit gratification to occur" (Sennett, 10). Narcissistic feelings, the author explains (Sennett 11), "often focus themselves on obsessive questions of whether I am good enough, whether I am adequate, and the like."

Later in his book, on page 333, Sennett claims that the "denial of gratification for purposes of validating the self" is actually "worldly asceticism"; and so, "denying oneself pleasure in concrete experiences (such as the sexual experience) shows one is a real person." Denying oneself "pleasure in the world makes a statement to oneself, and to others, about what kind of person one is," Sennett explains. And so, "worldly asceticism and narcissism have much in common" (Sennett, 334): In both, 'What am I feeling' becomes an obsession." And in both world asceticism and narcissism "there is a projection of the self onto the world, rather than an engagement in worldly experience beyond one's control."

What does all of Sennett's attention to narcissism and self-image really mean? To conservative editor and critic Roger Kimball, Sennett's writing "displays considerably more urgency than clarity." When Sennett writes that the social world lacks "intimacy," "warmth, trust, and an open expression of feeling," and that the "world outside seems to fail us, seems to be stale and empty," Kimball replies that "there is no reason to expect the social world to be full of intimacy - that intimacy is best reserved for our private lives and gets along perfectly well there, thank you..."

But Kimball perhaps misses Sennett's point; perhaps Kimball digests the word "intimacy" in personal sexual terms, and perhaps Kimball didn't read Sennett's explanation of intimacy on pages 311-312. "Urban planners have yet to learn a profound truth which conservative writers [like Kimball, one presumes] have perceived but have put to the wrong uses. It is that people can be sociable only when they have some protection from each other; without barriers, boundaries, without the mutual distance which is the essence of impersonality, people are destructive."

Conservatives, Sennett continues, believe that people are destructive because "the nature of man" is "malevolent." But on the contrary, he asserts, people are destructive because "the sum effect of the culture spawned by modern capitalism and secularism makes fratricide logical when people use intimate relations as a basis for social relations" (Sennett, 311). The problem that Kimball has is he seems far more interested in plucking Sennett's phrases out of context and attacking them with sophomoric spears than carefully critiquing what Sennett is attempting to convey, both philosophically and psychologically. For example, Kimball takes Sennett's line - "The fear of exposure is in one way a militarized conception of everyday experience" - and asks, "How did militarism get dragged in here?"

What Sennett was saying was simply that too often many of us just go through our days in patterns that repeat the steps we took yesterday and the day before; "militarized" simply meant that we're marching to the same drummer every day. But Kimball saw it perhaps as a left wing assault on the Pentagon, or the right wing passion for fat defense budgets. In any event, it caused Kimball to say: "Such problems make reviewing this book like trying to review a swamp: anywhere you step you sink into a wet, oozy morass of pieties and cliches." That is a lively critique, and it entertains the senses, but it doesn't really relate to Sennett's book.

A less cynical and more straight-forward description of Sennett's work is offered by author Gunther Barth of the University of California, albeit Barth isn't entirely enthralled with the veracity of Sennett's assertions and comparisons. "[Sennett] argues that changing perceptions of self in society now produce a cult of personality which inhibits the blunt exchange of diverse political… READ MORE

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