Bad Behavior

Samuel Johnson and Modern Cultural Authority
In this book, Martin Wechselblatt explores Samuel Johnson's double professional self-construction as alternately Augustan sage and Grub Street hack: as the exemplary "Dr. Johnson" and as one of the many "authors to let" brought to life and just as suddenly extinguished by mass-market publishing. Unlike previous studies of Johnson and print culture, however, Bad Behavior is concerned with the reasons so many readers and critics of Johnson have been led to regularly subsume into the monumental precedent of Johnson the sage, the material conditions of modern authority expressed by self-reflections of Johnson the hack. Situating Johnson within a historical and sociological model of modernity adapted from critical theory, Dr. Wechselblatt argues that Johnson's double self-construction as at once high-cultural sage and popular hack dramatizes tensions between learned and commercial cultures in the emerging public sphere of contemporary civil society. As Johnson was acutely aware, the great paradox of cultural criticism is that it depends for its authority on the very culture it criticizes. For this reason, it is particularly useful to read Johnson through his critics - to reconfigure, from the directions criticism has taken, criticism's own conditions of possibility. In a version of what Horkheimer and Adorno characterize as modernity's epistemological closure and its ritual transformation of the "unknown" into "the well-known of an equation," Bad Behavior investigates the critical reduction of Johnson's discourse to its maxims, and the relation of this critical practice to the peculiary modern identification felt by fans toward celebrities. Dr. Wechselblatt finds that Johnson authority reproduces the tension between, on one hand, a stable, delegated form of knowledge, which Johnson associated with the patronage system and with Locke's temporal duration; and on the other, the mere succession of authorities characteristic of experience in the marketplace.

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