Envisioning visionaries: The visual impulse in prose from Diderot to Ruskin

This study investigates the incorporation of a visual aesthetic in prose in the works of Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin. The "visual impulse," the desire to render reading a visual experience, signals radical shifts in attitude toward language, representation, perception and reader response. Closely tied to contemporary epistemology, aesthetics and psychology, the visual impulse reflects a burgeoning mistrust of the expressive power of ordinary language. As the mind, memory and imagination were increasingly defined in terms of simultaneous and synthetic visual imagery observed by an internal eye, words--abstract, linear and conventional--were perceived as fundamentally at odds with human thought and experience. Thus I examine the visual impulse as a deliberate and motivated aesthetic response to a perceived lacuna between language, thought and communication.;As authors and art critics, Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin demonstrate the visual impulse with unprecedented stylistic and aesthetic clarity. Each defines both writing and reading as acts of envisioning, and each implements a suggestive, deliberately vague prose in his evocations of paintings in order to enlist the active participation of the reader's eidetic imagination. Visual prose is predicated on a theory of reading as process, as activity, as experience. Furthermore, each of these authors hopes to edify his reader through the experience of envisioning the text, and the lesson will arise as much from the form as from the content. Diderot proposes a moral education, Baudelaire an aesthetic of modernity and Ruskin a political paradigm of labor, but in each case signification is the product of the dialectic movement between reader, author and text. As the image is suggested by the author but actually synthesized in the mind of the reader, meaning is achieved, produced and experienced by the reader, not dictated by the author.;This study, by presenting these authors and their critical and creative writings within a cultural, philosophic and aesthetic context, determines why authors felt it necessary to render prose visual, and how each attempts to do so. Thus the visual impulse is positioned within the framework of the early modern world view and reflects an important component of our understanding of the history of literature, aesthetics and reader response.