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Sherwood Anderson's Theory of Art. Dillard Floyd Sebastian Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College

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Sherwood Anderson's Theory of Art. Dillard Floyd Sebastian Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1972 Sherwood Anderson's Theory of Art. Dillard Floyd Sebastian Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Sebastian, Dillard Floyd Jr, "Sherwood Anderson's Theory of Art." (1972). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2241. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2241 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This dissertation was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. You will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap. If necessary, sectioning is continued again — beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. The majority of users indicate that the textual content is of greatest value, however, a somewhat higher quality reproduction could be made from "photographs" if essential to the understanding of the d issertation. Silver prints of "photographs" may be ordered at additional charge by writing the Order Department, giving the catalog number, title, author and specific pages you wish reproduced. University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 A Xerox Education Company SEBASTIAN, Jr., Dillard Floyd, 1926- SHERWOOD ANDERSON'S THEORY OF ART. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1972 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © 1972 Dillard Floyd Sebastian, Jr. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED SHERWOOD ANDERSON'S THEORY OF ART A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Dillard Floyd Sebastian, Jr. A.B., Stetson University, 1947 B.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1951 Th.M., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1952 M.A.T., University of Florida, 1962 May, 1972 PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am grateful to Dr. Lewis P. Simpson for his guidance and encouragement in the preparation of this study and to Dr. Thomas L. Watson, Dr. Otis B. Wheeler, Dr. James L. Babin, and Dr. John H. Wildman for their valuable comments and suggestions. Further, I am indebted to Dr. Thomas A. Kirby, Head of the Department of English, and to the Graduate School for the Dissertation-Year Fellowship which permitted me to devote my full attention to research and the completion of this dissertation. ii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENT............. ............... ii ABSTRACT .............................................. iv Chapter Page I. THE PROBLEM OF THE ARTIST IN A M E R I C A ........... 1 American Culture and the Puritan Spirit .... 1 The Impotence of the Artist in America .... 9 II. ART AND IMAGINATION .................................15 Two W o r l d s ........................................16 Two S e l v e s ........................................32 Imagination and the A r t i s t ...................... 37 III. AN AESTHETIC OF FEELING ............................ 50 Love as Intuition ................................. 51 Art as Intuition ................................. 70 IV. STYLE AND F O R M .................................... 120 S t y l e ....................................... 120 F o r m ............................................. 135 V. THE ROLE OF THE A R T I S T ........................... 158 Anderson's Literary Development ............... 158 Agrarian Mysticism .............................. 162 The Artist in a Religious R o l e ...................166 The Artist and Am e r i c a .......................... 168 A F T E R W O R D ..................................................175 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................. 182 VITA ........................................................ 186 iii ABSTRACT Sherwood Anderson's philosophy is based on a panthe­ istic vitalism and corresponding intuitive "love of life” which functions on two levels: as primitive rapport with the rhythm and harmony of life processes and as humanitarian com­ passion. The Puritan heritage of materialism and industri­ alism, he believed, had suppressed the vitality of life in America and had resulted in personal psychic distortion as well as fragmentation and disorder in social experience. The function of art is the restoration of instinct and emotion in a civilization which subordinates human vitality to im­ personal structures of materialism. Anderson's theory of art— he is concerned only with American art— is focused in three basic concepts— life, love, and beauty. He begins with the premise that aesthetic value is dependent on vitalist value. Where vitality thrives An­ derson finds beauty: where it is suppressed (which is his typical theme), he finds ugliness— but also an "odd" beauty in the pathos of privation. The sense of beauty therefore arises from appreciation of life, either as joy in vital ful­ fillment or poignant recognition of the unfulfilled potential for life where it is inhibited, the latter resulting in the muted tone of Anderson's grotesguerie. V For the writer, style is the approximation in language of the vital expressiveness attained by the painter in the color and texture of a canvas. In terms of style words have a dual function: cognitively, they communicate the "essence" of the subject as felt by the author; and, through their im­ pact as sensory objects, they endow prose with vitality and surface beauty. Form is likewise defined in vitalist terms. Objectively, form exists as the rhythm and symmetry of life hidden beneath chaotic factual reality. Subjectively, it is manifested, first, as the artist's intuition of order in ex­ perience and his simultaneous realization of the intuition in a work of art where it organizes and manifests beauty and, second, as the viewer's or reader's corresponding discovery of life and beauty evoked in the artifact. Realized form is an illumination of the coherence of a work of art, which brings together artist, reader, and character (usually a grotesque isolated and crippled by emotional privation) in a shared intuition of the coherence of life. And the communion thus established through sympathy for life constitutes a start toward restoration of vital contacts and harmonious order in social arrangements. The "purity" of feeling— i.e., fidelity to one's authentic reactions to life as it actually is— required of the artist who evokes form in experience is, Anderson believed, perhaps the only basis of moral value in the meaninglessness of modern life. Anderson conceived beauty in humanistic rather than aesthetic terms— as a function of vitality. His humanitarian vi impulses also led him to a concept of the artist as "lover,” whose sympathetic imagination can transform human frustration and express it as beauty. At every point aesthetic value is authenticated by human value. Hence the moral significance of aesthetic form, which is inseparable from form in human arrangements. Only that art which comprehends life in its disorder and crudity can be pure and moral, Anderson argues, and likewise only a value system which recognizes the crudity of life and does not gloss it over in the interest of false idealism can have moral validity. Hence also Anderson's re­ ligious definition of the role of the artist who, because his materials are human lives and his objective the salvation of men, is seen as a priest and a prophet of personal and nation­ al renewal. The artist seeks nothing less than the regenera­ tion and reordering of American life. CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM OF THE ARTIST IN AMERICA Like Mark Twain and Henry Adams before him Sherwood Anderson was disturbed by the cultural effects of industriali zation in the West. He feared no cataclysms of uncontrolled technology such as those suggested in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Education of Henry Adams and
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