The “Double Nature” of Presentness
The “Double Nature” of Presentness
Byron’s Don Juan
Chapter five describes the comic epic poem’s foregrounding of the narrator’s writing process as a “presentness,” heightened through interruptions and other kinds of digression as well as the ottava rima stanza form. Turning to the arguments of Hugh Blair and Adam Smith, this chapter recounts the contemporary controversies about what place digressions should have in historical writing. Analyzing key moments in the English cantos, this chapter argues that the temporality of Don Juan’s aesthetic engages with and defies the Enlightenment rhetorical principles of Blair and Smith, while upending the philosophy of progress that often went with them. Suggesting that the historical imagination might take into account not just a progress of what happened, but also a notion of what did not happen but might have, Don Juan creates a sense of time that is less progressive or regressive than digressive—a lateral temporality. The chapter concludes by suggesting what implications this lateral temporality might have for twenty-first century critical practices.
Keywords: Hugh Blair, Byron, digression, Don Juan, English cantos, ottava rima
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
