Charles Batteux
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Denis Diderot felt that imagination is merely "the memory of forms and contents," and "creates nothing" but only combines, magnifies or diminishes. It was precisely in 18th-century France, indeed, that the idea of man's creativity met with resistance. Charles Batteux wrote that "The human mind cannot create, strictly speaking; all its products bear the stigmata of their model; even monsters invented by an imagination unhampered by laws can only be composed of parts taken from nature." Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-1747), and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) spoke to a similar effect.
Leo Tolstoy @180
Stéphane Mallarmé died 110 years ago.
- Howard Bloom sees Shakespeare's two supreme "Machiavels", Iago and Edmund, along with Chaucer's wicked Pardoner, as prefigurations of corrupt, exploitative Dostoyevskian nihilists (and uncanny proto-Freudian depth psychologists) like Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment and Stavrogin in The Possessed. William R. Elton has argued that Edmund's atheism and materialist sensualism can be seen as precursor to the Don Juan tradition of the later seventeenth century.
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