Sir, this is the report Sartor Resartus.
I found this essay extremely challenging to read and through the first
five pages it was tiresome to go through such eloquent language and an
alien topic that I never read about. As I went on I found it very
interesting yet challenging because there was a lot of information I
never knew about or thought of and as I started to understand, I was
already taking sides to the argument involved in my mind. From this
essay I understood the roles of the subject of the biography, the
biographer and the editor.
In Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Croker claims that
the greatness of the Life of Johnson is due to the editor’s
reconstruction of the original. He argues that the subject and the
biographer mainly work with anecdotes and other trivial resources and
it is the art of the editor to validate the information and make it
presentable to the reader by literary art. This is the reason for his
systematic attack and criticism on Boswell, the biographer, in his
edition of Life of Johnson. These claims fueled a controversy about;
whether the greatness of the Life of Johnson due to the subject,
Johnson or the genius of its author. This created tension between the
relationship of the subject of the biography, the author of the
biography and the editor Croker.
Carlyle claimed that it is the art of the biographer that makes
biographies like the Life of Johnson great. He even spoke in defense
of Boswell and criticized Croker for being conspicuous through his
commentary in the biography when it should be solely about the
subject. But in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the Editor’s (Carlyle’s)
Heuschrecke’s Teufelsdrockh, he seems to repeat the same thing Croker
did by criticizing the biographer and the subject, Heuschrecke and
Teufelsdrockh. In his book he seems to be repeating the actions of
Croker which he criticized earlier and therefore; the author of the
essay argues that Carlyle’s and Heuschrecke’s Teufelsdrockh in Sartor
Resartus resembles Croker’s and Boswell’s Johnson and thus makes
Carlyle the unreliable editor.
I found this essay extremely challenging to read and through the first
five pages it was tiresome to go through such eloquent language and an
alien topic that I never read about. As I went on I found it very
interesting yet challenging because there was a lot of information I
never knew about or thought of and as I started to understand, I was
already taking sides to the argument involved in my mind. From this
essay I understood the roles of the subject of the biography, the
biographer and the editor.
In Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Croker claims that
the greatness of the Life of Johnson is due to the editor’s
reconstruction of the original. He argues that the subject and the
biographer mainly work with anecdotes and other trivial resources and
it is the art of the editor to validate the information and make it
presentable to the reader by literary art. This is the reason for his
systematic attack and criticism on Boswell, the biographer, in his
edition of Life of Johnson. These claims fueled a controversy about;
whether the greatness of the Life of Johnson due to the subject,
Johnson or the genius of its author. This created tension between the
relationship of the subject of the biography, the author of the
biography and the editor Croker.
Carlyle claimed that it is the art of the biographer that makes
biographies like the Life of Johnson great. He even spoke in defense
of Boswell and criticized Croker for being conspicuous through his
commentary in the biography when it should be solely about the
subject. But in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the Editor’s (Carlyle’s)
Heuschrecke’s Teufelsdrockh, he seems to repeat the same thing Croker
did by criticizing the biographer and the subject, Heuschrecke and
Teufelsdrockh. In his book he seems to be repeating the actions of
Croker which he criticized earlier and therefore; the author of the
essay argues that Carlyle’s and Heuschrecke’s Teufelsdrockh in Sartor
Resartus resembles Croker’s and Boswell’s Johnson and thus makes
Carlyle the unreliable editor.
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