ON THE PLEASURE OF HATING William Hazlitt Sana Arastu Alex Dale Sandy Aguirre

WILLIAM HAZLITT ( )  Son of a Unitarian Minister Traveled a lot  Obtained most of his views from his father  Philosopher, Artist, Poet, Journalist, and Writer  Key figure in Romanticism  Stressed the importance of feelings  Political infatuation with Napoleon  Very Controversial  Very vocal and powerful speaker

SUMMARY  Hazlitt starts off talking about spider  Makes hate seem animalistic  Hate is a human necessity  Man is a Strange being  Hate is a poisonous mineral  Hate spawns from our own insecurities  Friendships  People get tired of almost everything  Sick of his old opinions  Reason why he hates himself

LITERARY TECHNIQUES  -Diction  -Syntax  -Metaphors/similes  -Imagery  -tone

TONE/STYLE/SYNTAX  -Over all his style is very old fashioned  -Verbose, long sentence structures, big fancy words  -We, us, ourselves, our  -He uses lots of exclamation points  Tone: Knowledgeable, pompous, bombastic

SIGNIFICANT QUOTES  “He hobbles awkwardly towards me” (Hazlitt, 189)  “The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands; it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others” (Hazlitt, 192)

SIGNIFICANT QUOTES  “ We serve up a course of anecdotes, traits, masterstrokes of character, and cut and hack at them till we are weary.” (Hazlitt, 194)  “It opens, and a young female head looks from it; a child, yet woman grown; with an air of rustic innocence and the graces of a princess, her eyes like those of doves, the lips about to open, a smile of pleasure dimpling the whole face, the jewels sparkling in her crisped hair, her youthful shape compressed in a rich antique dress” (Hazlitt, 196)

SIGNIFICANT QUOTES  Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action, Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men.” (Hazlitt, 190)

ETHOS  Ethos: Appeals to ethos when referring back to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford and other famous and well known writers. Explains how he hates “the very name of Fame and Genius, when works [from those authors] are “gone into the wastes of time”(195) and how now people rather read books that mean nothing.

PATHOS  Appeals to pathos with his vivid and emotional language  appeals to readers emotions when referring to horrible actions that are done day to day by humans or any life form. “Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport: ever one reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished.”  pg. 190 : explains pure good, pain, love pure good in how it grows insipid or bland pain in how there is never enough of it; bittersweet Love turns with indulgence then ends up in disgust

HAZLITT’S EFFECTIVENESS  Found it effective  Reaches to the readers with strong passion towards what he believes. ( use of exclamation points all the time ) “It is because pleasure asks a greater effort of the mind to support it than pain; and we turn after a little idle dalliance from what we love to what we hate!”  Use of literary devices (metaphors and similes) to compare his thoughts to everyday things. Compares life to “stagnant pool”