Showing papers in "ELH in 2008"

Horizons of the Publishable: Publishing in/ as Literary Studies

Abstract: It is conventionally assumed that book publishing is a process through which writing is relayed to readers: publishing conceived as publication. At most, publishing is acknowledged as a process which writing passes through, with effects that are partially acknowledged for mass-market genre fiction, and almost universally denied for literary fiction. Here I argue that publishing—as a set of processes and practices—is constitutive of all formations of writing and reading. Publishing precedes writing and governs the possibilities of reading. This article is an explicit challenge to both contemporary book studies and literary studies. The argument elaborated here takes publishing—as a set of processes, practices and relations—to the centre of literary studies. It should be immediately clear that the definitions of “publishing” and the publishable formulated here, owe little to common sense. These common senses, implicit and explicit, are elaborated in the first section of this article. Section two presents a critical alternative. A sketch of this critical alternative—horizons of the publishable—follows. I finish by outlining some of the transformations effected by publishing and the publishable on concepts such as style, genre, intertextuality, adaptation, and the literary, in its strong evaluative sense. The materiality of the book is now both topos and mantra. Varying modes of publication, the diverse physical forms of texts, and historically variegated reading practices are routinely invoked as contexts in ever more nuanced accounts of textuality and reading. In part, this represents the selective movement of book studies into the literary studies mainstream. Leah Price’s introduction to the 2006 PMLA special issue—“Book History and the Idea of Literature

Re-membering the Body Politic: Hobbes and the Construction of Civic Immortality

Abstract: If the body politic, whereby the nature and composition of the civil state is described analogically in terms of the human body, was not a dead metaphor by the early seventeenth century, it was at best in critical condition. It suffered from chronic overexposure before glazed English eyes, and Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606), essentially an elaboration on Jacobean absolutist rhetoric, came close to delivering the coup de grâce. Forset frets that “raunging too far, I be offensivelie tedious, or seeking to match all, I mar all by making more adoo than I need.”1 Anyone who wades through this account of the seemingly endless correspondences between natural and political parts, forms, functions, fluxes, and diseases is obliged to acknowledge that the author’s fears were not entirely unfounded. At the same time, it was precisely the trope’s familiarity and conventionality that made it suitable to James I as a vehicle for his bold new defense of the royal prerogative. James was fond of pointing out that “the proper office of a king towards his Subjects, agrees very wel with the office of the head towards the body”: “the head hath the power of directing all the members of the body to that use which the judgement in the head thinkes most convenient.”2 He uses the analogy to make popular rebellion against a divinely ordained king seem not only unlawful but “monstrous and unnatural.”3 While it is entirely within the natural order of things that the king crush any insurrection to protect and preserve the whole realm, the reverse is almost unconscionable: “And for the similitude of the head and the body, it may very well fall out that the head will be forced to . . . cut off some rotten members . . . to keep the rest of the body in integritie: but what state the body can be in, if the head, for any infirmitie that can fall to it, be cut off, I leave it to the readers judgement.”4 Historical hindsight, of course, enables the reader to judge James’s invocation of the anarchic, headless multitude to be an ironic prophesy of the fate of his son Charles I. For all the exhaustive emphasis on the anatomical similarities between man and the state, the traditional image of the

Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Le Guin

Abstract: These key texts foreground suffering children. Each founds its ethics in recoil from such horror but recycles it nonetheless, caught in ethical impossibility, repeating what it critiques. Poststructuralism stresses ethics as necessarily paradoxical, a response when there are no clear choices. Narrative provides a site for these insoluble dilemmas, encoding a voyeuristic ethics in excess of individual choices. Yet when narratives display children as the symbol of anguished lived contradictions, the rhetorical effects of this decision implicate those who take it. Ethics as theory provides a means to think through and in such inexplicable questions our readings uncover.

Specters of Horatio

Abstract: Throughout Hamlet , Horatio is a figure privileged to interpret, and this privilege emerges in the doubled-edged spectrality of his social position. The justness of his interpretive authority ultimately depends on a class position that does not appear to be a class position at all. Social class in Hamlet consequently is not a pre-existing structure that becomes unearthed and located in the empirical truth of economic fact. Instead, class is a never-ending, unstable process of making social distinctions characteristic of the emergent public sphere of the seventeenth century. Social class in the play always deconstructs itself.

Impossible Love and Commodity Culture in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Abstract: This essay argues that in Wuthering Heights Heathcliff’s form of love energizes a culture of both production and consumption. The story of Heathcliff’s life provides an exciting and mysterious narrative of the origins of capitalist desire. He represents the fantasy that some erotically compelling power underlies this economy. It is, instead, Catherine’s love that functions in opposition to the culture of capitalist accumulation. Catherine stands for a kind of love that undermines the desire necessary for capitalism to function smoothly. She offers an alternative to an economy of unsatisfied desire, threatening to undermine both a capitalist and patriarchal logic.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the "Individuating Rhythm" of Modernity

Abstract: In this essay, I reexamine the relationship between Joyce’s novel and the Bildungsroman tradition and argue that the distinctive form of A Portrait is the result of Joyce’s attempts to adapt the genre to the demands of Irish modernity. Drawing in equal parts on the poetics of Mikhail Bakhtin and Henri Lefebvre’s sociological “rhythmanalysis,” I show how Stephen Dedalus’s peculiar developmental trajectory, caught between progressive and regressive elements, mirrors the situation of his country, which was similarly entangled in a web of contradictory conceptions of historical development.

Extravagant Postcolonialism: Ethics and Individualism in Anglophonic, Anglocentric Postcolonial Fiction; or, "What Was (This) Postcolonialism?"

Abstract: “Extravagant Postcolonialism” takes up the issue of postcolonial individualism, the larger claim being that postcolonial fiction by and large distinguishes the rare, imaginative, “extravagant” individual as uniquely capable of ethical apprehension and action I begin by considering a question of postcolonial justice, the “economic” version of which postcolonial fiction tends to eschew as unethical Having demonstrated how these fictions associate ethical intuition with something a little less business-like--what Gayatri Spivak calls, adapting Freud, “postcolonial nostalgia”--I go on (in the final section) to show how postcolonial nostalgia may be regarded as a fundamentally imaginative, private, and authoritative mode of consciousness This last section of the essay also shows how nostalgia at times takes the form of a recognizably “modernist” epiphany Postcolonialism of the extravagant variety, I conclude, has more in common with modernism than with the kind of avowedly transcendent contemporaneity that now goes by the name “postmodernism”

Binding the Will: George Eliot and the Practice of Promising

Abstract: In The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), promises give rise to repeated conflicts and misunderstandings, crystallizing the tension between freedom and obligation that runs through George Eliot's work. Literary critics have long noted Eliot's interest in the nature and limits of the human will, but they have failed to examine her treatment of the practice of promising. In this essay, I analyze the use and abuse of promises in her fiction in the context of changing philosophical and legal ideas about consensual obligations. Whereas natural law thinkers such as Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, and Locke insisted that promises derived their force from people's wills and intentions, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, utilitarian philosophers such as William Paley and John Austin began to locate the source of promissory obligations in people's expectations. At about the same time, jurists formulated a new "will theory" of contract that drew heavily upon natural law philosophy; according to this theory, individual promises, wills, and intentions gave rise to contractual obligations. Judges, in fact, began to speak of a contract as a "meeting of minds." In practice, however, they found it very difficult to uncover the intentions of contracting parties. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most judges had come to embrace an objective approach to contractual interpretation, relying upon external manifestations of intentions as did the utilitarian philosophers.Like Paley, Austin, and Henry Sidgwick, and like a growing number of jurists in her day, Eliot embraces an expansive conception of promising: she suggests that one becomes bound by a promise whenever one knowingly excites another's expectations concerning the existence of an obligation, even though one does not intend to become bound. The willingness to abide by implicit promises and to honor the expectations that one raises in other minds is a crucial test of moral character in Eliot's fiction. However, while Eliot privileges external manifestations of intention over actual intentions in determining promissory responsibility, she remains committed to the notion that a true "meeting of minds" ought, ideally, to form the basis of agreements. As a practical matter, that is, she recognizes the difficulty of discerning others' intentions, and she shows the need to honor the reasonable expectations that one creates in other minds; but she holds out the possibility that individuals may achieve a real blending of wills and desires. In Mordecai Cohen's relationship with the eponymous hero of her final novel, she imagines such a meeting of minds, highlighting the ways in which promises can both reflect and promote understanding between people. She acknowledges, though, that such a mingling of ideas and intentions is, in the world of nineteenth-century England, limited to men.

Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

Abstract: How can we not feel that time percolates rather than flows? Far from flowing in laminar and continuous lines, like a well-behaved river under a bridge, upstream to downstream, time descends, turns back on itself, stops, starts, bifurcates ten times, divides, blends, caught up in whirlpools and counter-currents, hesitant, aleatory, uncertain and fluctuating, multiplied into a thousand beds like the yukon River. . . . Sudden explosions, quick crises, periods of stagnant boredom, burdensome or foolish regressions, and long blockages, but also rigorous linkages and suddenly accelerated progress, meet and blend in scientific time as in the intimacy of the soul, in meteorology as in river basins. Would we have understood such obvious facts without the theory of percolation? . . . [T]he word time [temps] goes back to the aleatory mixtures of the temperaments, of intemperate weather, of tempests and temperature. if the time of a planet and the time of a river can have such subtlety, what about historical time? We can say, at the very least, that history is chaotic, that it percolates. Simultaneously unpredictable and deterministic, its course blends all paces.

Time for Marlowe

Abstract: Christopher Marlowe is a serious political thinker. He read widely in English and continental political thought and was well-versed in tracts on the French civil wars. This reading is reflected throughout his works, from the plots he chooses to the words he uses. How politi cal thought works in his writings, though, is more of a problem. Un like the court poet and bureaucratic administrator Edmund Spenser, Marlowe gives no pastoral world or fairyland within which he can "[create] well-governed and well-governing subjects," proto-republican citizens formulated through humanist ethics.1 Instead of writing within the norms of civility and governance, Marlowe focuses on crises and states of emergency in order to conceptualize contemporary political thought by suspending or "estranging" its main premises, to use Emily Bartels s felicitous term.2

Allegorical Agency and the Sins of Angels

Abstract: This essay reevaluates the relationship between personification and agency—taking Milton’s Paradise Lost as a primary example—and in the process offer some insights into our conventional ideas about the agency of “literal” characters in narrative. Personifications exercise a volition radically divided between causality and freedom, I argue, whereas literal characters produce the impression of free agency not so much by resembling real people as by accepting a compromise with narrative determinism. This essay explores these issues first by examining a decidedly non-allegorical figure, Milton’s Satan, who in heaven makes the most perplexing choice in the history of literature, and then by looking at the appearance of the most peculiar character in the poem, Milton’s Sin.

Less Well-Wrought Urns: Henry Vaughan and the Decay of the Poetic Monument

Abstract: "Less Well-Wrought Urns" focuses on the concern of seventeenth-century poets with the durability of literature. Donne, Waller, and Herrick each reconsider the classical tradition that the poet created a work "more enduring than bronze," hinting that such durability was a poetic fiction. But Vaughan suggests that his poems may last as mere matter devoid of form. Vaughan imagines his poem "The Book" as a thing that, even as it falls apart, continues to yield or offer meaning. Such a theory suggests one of the appeals of material studies-that, in the absence of shared assumptions, it may be possible to forge a community based on attention to matter itself.

Boudinot's Change: Boudinot, Emerson, and Ross on Cherokee Removal

Abstract: This essay engages Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot's shift from resisting to supporting Cherokee Removal and his treasonous signing of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. Reading Boudinot's change alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1838 "Cherokee Letter," published in New England newspapers, and Cherokee Chief John Ross's insistence on the limited "freedom" of the Cherokee national press in his 1828 annual address, I turn away from readings of Boudinot as trapped between white and Cherokee identifications, reorienting the question from "why" to "where" did he do what he did. Boudinot's change of opinion had a long history of suppression and appearance in the Cherokee and United States national presses. I argue that that this publication history portrays not the polarization between but the increasing geographical, political, and legal overlap of the Cherokee Nation and the United States.

Romantic Amplification: The Way of Plagiarism

Abstract: This article argues that for the British romantic poets, including William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Mary Robinson, and Peter Bayley, appropriative behaviors that constitute plagiarism according to most agreed-upon definitions might pass unremarked if the plagiarist either was allied with or had power over the plagiarized poet. On the other hand, if the plagiarist opposed the plagiarized or had less power, accusations of plagiarism followed. Further, plagiarisms by allies and opponents alike led the poets to re-appropriate and amplify their textual materials in games of literary—and sometimes social and political—one-upmanship. In this limited sense, plagiarism helped make romantic literature.

Will in Overplus: Recasting Misogyny in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Abstract: if thy soul check thee that i come so near, swear to thy blind soul that i was thy Will, and will, thy soul knows, is admitted there; Thus far for love my love-suit sweet fulfil. Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love, ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one; in things of great receipt with ease we prove among a number one is reckoned none. Then in the number let me pass untold, Though in thy store’s account i one must be. For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold That nothing, me, a something sweet to thee. Make but my name thy love, and love that still; and then thou lov’st me, for my name is Will. —William shakespeare, sonnet 1361

Estrangement on a Train: Race and Narratives of American Identity

Abstract: Jim Crow laws in a segregated train car or station. These scenes are a direct response or allusion to the 1892 arrest of Homer Plessy for riding on a white train car in Louisiana, the incident that triggered the Plessy court case and affirmed de jure segregation in the United States. In each text, the scene becomes an allegory about the role that race plays in deciding who can be included in America. Harlan imagines a nightmare scenario in which the despised Chinaman rides legally in the whites-only train car while the Christian, patriotic Negro cannot. In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt depicts a Chinese laundryman and a black female servant boarding a whites-only train from which his protagonist, Dr. Miller, has just been ejected. This pairing of Chinese and African-American laborers catalyzes Miller's thoughts on how the train makes visible the intersecting relationships between race and class. Finally, in his memoir, Wu recounts an incident in which he hesitates over which compartment he should enter at a Washington, D.C. train station: "white" or "colored." Although a porter eventually leads him to the "white" area, Wu writes that he does not seem to belong in either space. What makes these moments so intriguing?and explains this essays motivation for reading them in relation to each other?is that while each of the works depicts the confrontation between a Chinese and black man, the historical record shows that no Chinese man was

The Shop of Curiosities: Henry James, "the Jew," and the Production of Value

Abstract: This essay breaks the critical impasse regarding Henry James’s ambivalence toward “the Jew” in his late works, by rethinking this figure through the logic of cosmopolitan detachment, diasporic mobility, and the gift economy. It traces how social and economic exchange enacted by liminal characters produces dynamic, contingent forms of value (economic, aesthetic, social, moral), and exposes concealed links between sacred and secular economies. Specifically, James redeems the avaricious Jewish pawnbroker who, both central and marginal, best captures the position of the modern cosmopolitan writer at the nexus of capitalist and gift exchange.

Gray's Ambition: Printed Voices and Performing Bards in the Later Poetry

Abstract: This essay examines the connection between Thomas Gray's later poems and Celtic oral culture. Scholars believe Gray to be nostalgic for medieval modes of literary authority and have tended to see the latter half of his career as a retreat from the literary marketplace. I suggest instead that in "The Bard" (1757) and in imitations of Celtic oral poetry from the 1760s Gray invents and refines a poetics of printed voice that simulates the sense of immediacy that he perceives to exist between bards and their audience. Rather than disengaging from the literate in favor of the oral, these poems simulate bardic voice in print and thus make a concerted attempt to counter the sense of alienation and misunderstanding that for Gray characterizes the relationship between modern authors and readers in print culture.

The Legacy and Rhetorics of Maternal Zeal

Abstract: Lady Anne Halkett, the author of this passage, lost her four-year old daughter to smallpox in 1660 and a son to a lingering disease one year later. The loss of all but one of her children was intensified by the death of her husband, Sir James Halkett, on 24 September 1670. Meditating on her circumstances, the newly widowed Halkett gains strength from reminding herself of "the only and cheife thing that tyes [her] to the world": despite her overwhelming grief, she knows her primary duty in life is to continue to care for her one surviving child, Robert, instructing him in the ways of the Church of England.2 Halkett s text is a mother s legacy, a genre that offers religious advice from a dying mother to her children as its primary purpose.3 These texts are shot through with a complex set of claims that are grounded in the maternal body; legacy writers assert a vital, corporeal link with their children, which is the unique result of having conceived, carried, and borne them. This bodily connection creates a naturalized bond between mother and child that authorizes composition: the obligation a mother has to nurture her child's physical body begins in pregnancy and carries over into youth.4 Yet bodily authority has its limits. A dy ing mother?the rhetorical persona behind the legacy?writes on the verge of physical dissolution that spells the loss of the bond she shares with her infant. After all, how can a dead mother provide day-to-day care for her children? In response to this dilemma, legacy writers shift their claims away from their bodily substrate. They espouse an anti-worldly position, encouraging their children to reject the lure of

“And the Lord’s power was over all”:Calvinist anxiety, sacred confidence, and George Fox’s journal

Abstract: This essay investigates the starkly contrasting affective states of seventeenth-century spiritual subjects. Whilst the self-inscriptions of Calvinists such as John Bunyan are characterised by an unassuagable anxiety, the Journal of the founder of the Quaker movement, George Fox, charts his transition from a position of anxiety to an equally overwhelming and unshakeable spiritual, social and subjective confidence. Locating its argument in relation to the critical debates about early modern masculinity and the specificities of Quaker doctrine, it concludes that Fox’s confidence is rooted in a heteronomous subjectivity predicated on the Quaker theological cornerstone of the indwelling Christ.

Playing the Lord: Tudor Vulgaria and the Rehearsal of Ambition

Abstract: In early Tudor grammar schools, the use of vulgaria , or English-Latin phrase books, linked literary instructin and dramatic play as rehearsals for social self-advancement. Schoolmasters composed several remarkable collections of these "vulgars" to inform the practice of colloquial Latin and to season schoolboy conversation with ludic pleasure. The earliest printed vulgaria include vivid expressions of school life, but they also thrust boys into speaking in a broad variety of roles well beyond their own experience and social circumstances. Recent criticism has tended to emphasize the regulatory functions of humanist pedagogy, but the vulgaria provide impressive evidence for emancipatory possibilities. From these daily acts of impersonation, a schoolboy learned to regard social rank as the performance of roles. Moreover, the vulgaria arguable contributed to the development of English drama: first, as they conditioned a relatively sophisticated audience of readers and writers, practiced in impersonation and in performing the language of social striving; second, as they introduce into English monologue and dialogue a rich and various rhetoric of worldly ambition.

Know Thy Side": Propaganda and Parody in Jonson's Staple of News

Abstract: In 1626 Ben Jonson began to produce work for the public stage again, after a hiatus of nearly a decade. The Staple of News, the play that represents Jonson's re-entry to the world of the commercial theater, is a curious textual artifact. Viewed from one angle, it is an attack on the growing English news-trade, and especially on the compilers and publishers of corantos-news sheets that claimed to reveal the events of the Thirty Years' War to credulous Londoners.1 Viewed from another it is, as Anthony Parr notes, a "sophisticated but wholly unironic" prodigal play, detailing the fall from grace and restitution to favor of the spendthrift heir Pennyboy Junior.2 Framing the action are four Intermeans inhabited by chatty London ladies of self-proclaimed quality, who comment-with varying degrees of perspicuity-on the evolving action. To add to the complexities faced by a reader or viewer of the play, the action of the drama has no central locus, and censure is ultimately dispensed onto a wide range of culprits (the jeerers, Picklock the lawyer, and the miserly Pennyboy Senior) who have ranged confusingly in and out of events, unified only in their attempts to capture Pennyboy Junior's inheritance. This inheritance can be understood, allegorically, as Wealth. In the play, it is personified as a "Cornish gentlewoman" named Aurelia Clara Pecunia (S, 1.6.39). Audiences and readers have been at a loss to explain what Jonson was up to, structurally speaking, since the time of the comedy's first performance. Any coherence we can initially identify in the plot of The Staple of News appears to result from the poet's preoccupation with new commercial trends in the abuse of language. This preoccupation gives us a way of linking, as mutually relevant plot elements, the activities of the News Office; the social world of the jeerers; and Pennyboy Junior's plan to found a Canter's College, where professors and students alike will strive to "speak no language" (S, 4.2.52).3 The Staple of News, however, is undeniably a dispersed and fragmented work-rambling, paratactic, odd. Its capitulation to the naive pleasures of the conventional prodigal play is balanced uneasily against a sophisticated attack

The Primitive Mind of Silas Marner

Abstract: This essay investigates the peculiar phenomenon of catalepsy in the context of Eliot’s narrative realism. The primitive mental state depicted in Silas Marner and those reduced social forms that it engenders together obstruct the operation of sympathy—a key feature of Eliot’s organicist aesthetics. Catalepsy, with its sudden and inexplicable reduction of the organism to purely automatic functions, at once bars the narrator from the character’s consciousness and prevents an intuitive study of mind-world through the organs of sympathy that, in Eliot’s other novels, complements the scientific exploration of nature’s still unknown laws.

Terms of "Indearment": Lyric and General Economy in Shakespeare and Donne

Abstract: Renaissance poetry has long been linked to historical and political cultural issues: social ambition, eroticized power politics, and poetic self-promotion.2 More recent criticism ties economic metaphors in lyric to historical and contextual issues such as usury, coining, and counterfeiting, yet in addressing those practices and policies such criticism tacitly defines the economic as a closed system or mode of management and controlled exchange; it conflates economy and restric tive economy3 But only to read the discourse of economy with such conceptual limits is to be blind to George Batailles work on general or unrestricted economy, work from which I take my epigraph, and to foreclose interpretive and conceptual possibilities for the ongoing study of lyric and early modern culture. General economy, which shadows or (for Bataille) historically antecedes the hegemony of restrictive economy, refers to unproductive or sacrificial expenditure, to absolute loss, incalculable and unquantifiable; for Bataille, an affirmation of the true gift, of "squandering without reciprocity."4 Jacques Derrida found in Bataille s theory affinities with deconstruction and poststructuralist economies of knowledge and signification, in their radical question ing of thought limits, or, as Bataille puts it, the d?pense that undoes la pens?. More recently, in ambitious new work, Scott Shershow has seen in general economy and its connection to the gift (as theorized by Marcel Mauss) a model for radical reconfiguration of community and the political.5 Though these works certainly do not address, and