In Volume II, Chapter 17, pg. 98, Sterne includes an entire sermon – word for word.

The sermon seems to be asserting a certain stance on morals that a human being should practice. However, the sermon is placed at an odd part of the novel. In fact, it seems to be quite contradicting. The positioning of the sermon demonstrates that man do not act like they should, and even certain testing life events do not steer them in the right way. The sermon turns out to be a complete failure: Trim weeps for his brother, Walter theorizes about authorship, Uncle Toby sorts out the military metaphors, Dr.Slop sleeps. Clearly, no one feels a stir in their conscience upon hearing the sermon. In fact, the sermon actually creates an opposite effect – it symbolizes the lack of conscience. It takes a while for the characters to actually get through reading the sermon, for everyone keeps interrupting. Everyone seems to be more concerned with technical matters of the sermon, rather than the content itself, or rather the message behind the content.

Maybe that’s the point though? Not to discover some secret meaning, but to elicit a response. Reading Tristram Shandy, and especially watching it, the main “thing” that I understood is that there is no moral to the story. Sterne seems to be writing about the nature of art, and the idea is that art is able to make us feel something. For example, in the film, the directors, producers, actors, etc. are not in the slightest bit concerned with the content of the novel – the only thing they care about is what will do best with the audience. At the end of the film, the response itself doesn’t even matter, what matters is that the creators were able to generate one.

As for my picture, like Sterne, I am just going to leave the following: 

I am sure everyone is able to associate this color with something or even argue what it could possibly symbolize. It’s hard for our brains to see something and not associate it with anything else. I think Tristam Shandy perhaps plays with that idea, maybe at times wondering if the response is something an author can control.

At first glance, Clara Reeve’s argument for the limitations of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is something I found myself agreeing with. As we have discussed in class, the biggest issue Reeve finds in the novel is that “the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite” (Reeve 2). In other words, she believes that Walpole’s incredibly fantastic descriptions of certain events fail his very own intentions of producing a successful marriage of the romance and the novel. However, as I kept reading the preface, the following line puzzled me, “When your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter” (Reeve 2). Reeve finds laughter as the wrong reaction the novel. I however, found it difficult not to laugh when a ridiculously mammoth helmet somehow squished a seemingly pivotal character in the first couple of pages of the novel. Here is where I found my alliances to begin to change. No response other than laughter seemed more natural and appropriate. I feel sorry for Reeve – she failed to comprehend the very essence of the novel. However, that may only be the case because unlike me, Reeve was not aware of camping. I would like to propose that Horace Walpole not only succeeded in combining the elements of the romance and the novel (and deeming such combination gothic), but in doing so, he gave way for camping. I think that if placed on a spectrum, The Castle of Otranto can be found somewhere between camp and the gothic. The two concepts definitely share a certain soft spot for aesthetics. On the one end, the origins of Goth in architecture point to its preoccupation with surfaces and the genuine capacity that architecture had to disturb. On the other there is camp and as Susan Sontag points out, “ It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not” (Sontag). In combining the romantic with the novel, Walpole was not only able to evoke feelings (particularly those of terror and sublime), but he has done so in such a serious, sure-of-itself manner that gives way for comedic response. The ‘aesthetical’ manner of supernatural situations that Walpole creates is its very talent of going beyond any limits is absolutely genius.

As for my image, I of course chose Kim Kardashian. Completely fascinated with the philosophy of camp, I just wish we could know Susan Sontag’s opinion on her image in the media. Whoever came up with this idea for a shoot is a genius. The cover story isn’t just meant to be another way for the star to ‘flaunt’ herself, in fact, she is willingly objectifying herself and not taking the whole thing seriously, but it is the very fact that millions of people will take this as a serious attempt to ‘break the internet’ which makes for the whole joke. Camp. Absolutely amazing camp.