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Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.〔Serafin and Bendixen, p. 1014〕 Sentimentalism in philosophy is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. Sentimentalism in literature is both a device used to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand,〔I. A. Richards gave just such a quantitative definition: "a response is sentimental if it is too great for the occasion." He added, "We cannot, obviously judge that any response is sentimental in this sense unless we take careful account of the situation" (Richards, p. 258).〕 (and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments), and a heightened reader response willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation.〔This was essentially the defining criterion of "sentimental" discovered in a dozen basic handbooks by Wilkie (p. 564f); Wilkie appends some textbook definitions.〕 "A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."〔Wilde 1905〕 In James Joyce's ''Ulysses'', Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegraph that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." 〔Jay Michael Dickson, "Defining the Sentamentalist in ''Ulysses''," ''James Joyce Quarterly'', Volume 44, Number 1, Fall 2006, pp. 19-37〕 James Baldwin considered that 'Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty'.〔Quoted in Berlant, p. 33〕 This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, contrasts sentimentalists and romantics with Amory Blaine telling Rosalind, “I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.” 〔F. Scott Fitzgerald, ''This Side of Paradise'', Book Two, Chapter 1〕 ==18th-century origins== In the mid-18th century, a querulous lady had complained to Richardson: "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word ''sentimental'', so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a ''sentimental'' man; we were a ''sentimental'' party".〔Alvarez, p. 11-12〕 What she was observing was the way the term was becoming a European obsession〔Alvarez, p. 12〕 - part of the Enlightenment drive to foster the individual's capacity to recognise virtue at a visceral level.〔Berlant, p. 34〕 Everywhere in the sentimental novel or the sentimental comedy, 'lively and effusive emotion is celebrated as evidence of a good heart'.〔Ousby, p. 845〕 Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation;〔Wheen p. 207-208〕 and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno"〔Quoted in Nicholas Phillipson, ''Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life'' (2011) p. 64〕 and the Stoics. By the close of the century, however, a reaction had occurred against sentimental excess, now seen as false and self-indulgent - especially after Schiller's division (1795) of poets into two classes, the "naive" and the "sentimental": natural and artificial.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sentimentality」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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