|
COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
By Linda M. Austin. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 233. $29.95.
What critical task could be more difficult than the effort to delineate the shifting confines of an author's sense of audience? If we attempt to clarify the writer's ambivalence, dependency, hostility, elusiveness, or whatever toward the imagined audience we drift into the conundrums of intention. Yet we are tempted to travel this way because so much of the cultural territory of a period is drained by the twisting flow, the surprising tributaries, the deeps and shallows that are the course of a major writer's lifelong conception of audience. And so we steam into the perhaps dark interior of the writer's motivations and those of the culture whose tribes of readers the author meant to trade with, excite, chasten, or perhaps subdue. Such a journey, for all its theoretical risks, is especially enticing to the student of John Ruskin's work, for the terrain of his intentions toward audience is so vast and irregular. He would, in various ways and degrees, have taught his audiences how to see both art and nature, how to read and reflect; not merely how to appreciate quality in art and artifact, but how to work, worship, and care for the land; even how to collect and conserve things of value, including his own writings. In sum, Ruskin intended to guide his audiences in realms that range from the most arcanely spiritual to the most...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
