The Gaol the Story of Newgate London's Most Notorious Prison by Kelly Grovier

OEDĮven equivocal, by the OED’s own definition, is connotatively different. Having either or both of two contrary or parallel values, qualities or meanings entertaining contradictory emotions (as love and hatred) towards the same person or thing acting on or arguing for sometimes one and sometimes the other of two opposites equivocal.

Yet there is no equivalent, either in eighteenth- or in nineteenth-century currency, that quite captures the same meaning: Ambivalent, and the noun form, ambivalence, were soon afterward formed into English on the model of equivalent, equivalence. Bleuler must therefore have introduced it sometime before 1897, when the bulk of Freud’s essay on infant sexuality was written. In all likelihood, however, the word occurred slightly earlier Freud is already using what he calls Bleuler’s “happily designated” (566) word in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, published in 1905. The Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford’s Dictionary of Etymology both propose 1910 as the year of its invention, crediting the publication in that year of Bleuler’s Die Negative Suggestibilität. It comes from the German term, ambivalenz, coined by the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, grafting the Latin ambi (“in two ways”) on to valentia (“strength”). Christopher Ricks, Keats and EmbarrassmentĪmbivalence: etymologically, it must be admitted from the outset, it is anachronistic to summon the word it was born over a century after Keats. I concur with those who find markedly the greatest of Keats’s odes, and there is no coincidence in its being also the one which most naturally, subtly, and unmisgivingly accommodates the ambivalence of feeling which I consider characteristic of Keats’s truest imagination. The inherent ambivalence of panoscopic vision towards the prevalence of life or death, it is argued, came to distinguish much of Keats's writing in the last phase of his career as the promise of transmutation between literal and literary states of 'composition' and 'decomposition' became at once a comfort and anxiety for him. Stewart's curious contraption, the 'panoscope', was fashioned as a pseudo-scientific, quasi-medical implement which could enable the aperture of human perception to resolve with a kind of rationally achieved omniscience the material reality that constitutes the eternal interchange between substances in states of 'patiency' and 'agency-life and death. This articles seeks to recover a lost visual device proposed in 1812 by the English traveller and materialist philosopher John 'Walking' Stewart, and to explore how the imaginary apparatus participated in a prevailing intellectual climate of ambivalence to which Keats's imagination was particularly responsive.

The Gaol the Story of Newgate London's Most Notorious Prison by Kelly Grovier