Showing papers in "Modern Language Quarterly in 2002"

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

Abstract: \"Hayden White...is the most prominent American scholar to unite historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative and cultural understanding.\" --'The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism' In his earlier books such as 'Tropics of Discourse' and 'The Content of the Form', Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In 'Figural Realism', White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. \"'History' is not only an object we can study,\" writes White, \"it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.\

Building Brand Byron: Early-Nineteenth-Century Advertising and the Marketing of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Abstract: In early-nineteenth-century Britain few literary rumors showed greater staying power or adaptability than the tale of how a leading manufacturer secretly employed one of the age’s most famous poets to write his jingles. Originating soon after the turn of the century, when the first wave of brand-name products was filling the advertising columns of the nation’s newspapers, this rumor took various forms, with the names of different manufacturers and poets inserted in the blanks of the basic narrative. One of the earliest published versions appears in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), whose narrator recounts that “a gentleman of my acquaintance lately went to buy some razors at Packwood’s. Mrs. Packwood alone was visible. Upon the gentleman’s complimenting her on the infinite variety of her husband’s ingenious and poetical advertisements, she replied, ‘La! sir, and do you think husband has time to write them there things his-self? Why, sir, we keeps a poet to do all that there work.’”1 Other versions locate the action not at Packwood’s but at 30 Strand, the legendary home of Warren’s Blacking shoe polish.2 In one

Republicanism and Leisure in Marianne Moore's Depression

Abstract: While most writers and intellectuals in the early years of the Depression felt, as Kenneth Burke put it in 1935, “that our traditional ways were headed for a tremendous change, maybe even a permanent collapse,” there is little to suggest that Marianne Moore considered the Depression to have posed any fundamental challenge to the task of poetry.1 Responding in that year to Ezra Pound’s recommendation that she reflect more on economics, Moore replied: “I give strict attention to anything that is said about the economic foundation on which or in spite of which we live, but in art some things which seem inevitable ought to be concealed, like the working of gastric juice.”2 Nonetheless, however much she kept such questions out of poetry, she did not neglect what she understood to be her duties as a citizen. Having supported suffragism, Moore valued the franchise granted her in 1920: she exercised her right to vote when called on to do so and disapproved of self-appointed critics of American politics such as Pound who did not vote (Letters, 282). Outside of her poems, she was vocal about her political views, and her friends and colleagues knew that her commitment to Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party in the 1928 and 1932 elections was unwavering. Afraid of having offended her, Morton Zabel, associate editor of Harriet Monroe’s

The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy

Abstract: It is as a giant that the creature makes his first appearance in Frankenstein. He is the “strange sight” that attracts Walton’s attention, a “being which had the shape of a man but apparently of gigantic stature” and clearly of a different kind from Frankenstein, the wretched, emaciated stranger Walton’s crew pulls aboard the vessel. The creature’s “miserable frame” embodies the omission of infancy and childhood from Frankenstein’s conception. The creature does not come to life as a small, helpless infant in need of the care of others; his height and vigor are exaggerated inversions of the tininess and weakness of newborns. The long period of becoming (human) that follows birth and entails varied and prolonged dependence on others is precluded by the mature form that the creature has at birth. He himself associates the absence of a formative history of dependence and relation with his grossly anomalous physical shape as he describes his developing sense of being “similar [to], yet strangely unlike” human beings: “I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none. . . . My person was hideous and my stature gigantic.”1 The creature’s

The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation,popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract: What was the Scottish Enlightenment? In a pair of influential texts Alasdair MacIntyre presents it as the tragic demise of a Scottish tradition of moral philosophy grounded in Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.1 The decline began with Francis Hutcheson’s attempt to synthesize traditional ideas of natural law and religious obligation with two new strands of thought: Shaftesbury’s belief in the passions of the individual as adequate grounds for moral action, and a Lockean “epistemological stance embodying a first-person point-of-view” (Whose Justice? 270). However, this synthesis proved unstable, and David Hume helped ensure its dissolution. He did so by retaining Hutcheson’s “moral epistemology” but jettisoning his teleological and theological view of human nature. In their stead, he posited a network of sympathetic exchange through which we judge our actions by our “responses

"Overpowering Vitality": Nostalgia and Men of Sensibility in the Fiction of Wilkie Collins

Abstract: In Wilkie Collins’s controversial novel Man and Wife (1870), nostalgic and nostalgically presented old-fashioned Sir Patrick sarcastically summarizes the “cant of the day” that takes “physically-wholesome men for granted, as being morally-wholesome men into the bargain”: “I don’t see the sense of crowing over him [the model young Briton] as a superb national production, because he is big and strong, and . . . takes a cold shower bath all the year round.”1 The antiheroes of Collins’s novels eschew Victorian fashions of a muscular masculinity, anticipating the rise of the new fin de siècle antihero but also harking back to the sentimental heroes of the late-eighteenth-century novel of sentiment or sensibility.2 The shift from heroic masculinity to praiseworthy physical delicacy, which figures as a sign of moral strength, is connected to a sentimental reaffirmation of lovesickness and happy endings as well as to a corresponding redefinition of the villains, whose vitality contrasts with a series of similar feminized hypersensitive heroes. To understand this development, one needs to take a close look at the mental, moral, and bodily strengths and weaknesses of Collins’s heroes

The Mind a Department Store: Reconfiguring Space in the Gilded Age

Abstract: The essay examines the metaphor of blurred or absent architectural boundaries–what Georg Simmel termed the "modern feeling against closed spaces"–in three discursive arenas: the physical space of domestic interiors and department stores, the mental space of William James's psychological writings, and the fictive space of utopian and naturalist novels. Edith Wharton's and Ogden Codman, Jr.'s The Decoration of Houses and Henry James's The American Scene express alarm at the paucity of closable doors in American architecture, seeing in this form of decor a disregard for decorum. In contrast, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Bradford Peck's The World a Department Store celebrate the open-plan emporium as a blueprint for the successful cooperative society. The open-plan appears again in William James's descriptions of mentation: mobility, circulation, interdependence, replaceability, malleability and drift displace the more static models of faculty and associative psychology. James's substitution of fluid constructs for static ones has significant consequences for conceptions of selfhood. The malleable self, its permeability and relationality, provides both a topic and a set of narrative problems for writers like Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris.

Mansfield Park and the End of Natural Theology

Abstract: The question of Jane Austen’s relation to religion has been on the back burner since John Henry Newman declared in 1837 that she had “not a dream of the high Catholic ethos.”1 Like Newman, critical tradition has assumed that there is little to say about the subject beyond rehearsing Austen’s religious traditionalism. Even Mansfield Park, the novel most explicitly concerned with spiritual matters, has been dominated by critical interest in improvement, acting, and, most recently, slavery. Yet these themes are given meaning by the broader discourse of natural theology, the shared theological paradigm of the formally educated of Austen’s day.2 Natural theology provided the most stable and

The End of Technology: Memory in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2

Abstract: Contemporary memory’s greatest difficulty lies not in its weakness but in its strength: rather than an amnesiac disappearance of memory, recent technological developments promote an artificial and debilitating abundance of memory. The novel’s traditional mediation of public and private experience may easily be understood as the negotiation of public and private memory, in the sense not only of recording but of accounting for the past and of forming it into meaningfulness. Novels may symptomatically register the strains under which memory operates while also intervening in the construction and appreciation of memory forms that transform consciousness more widely. For both of these reasons I elaborate my proposal regarding memory’s superabundance in contemporary culture with a reading of Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2. In it narrative forms of memory confront the seemingly limitless power of artificial intelligence to simulate the distinctly human: the self-conscious experience of memory, the ability to appreciate aesthetic objects, the tragic awareness of temporality. In Powers’s novel different models of memory compete for primacy. On the one hand, a model of total storage and infinite recall carries on the Western dream of reproducing the real in order to master it. On the other hand, a model of partiality and selectivity is foregrounded that resembles Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of postmodern pragmatics: the self-legitimation of narrative that bolsters sociality and affirms agency by embracing forgetfulness. Galatea 2.2 treats a

Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin

Abstract: Ch. N. Bialik’s letter to Anna Margolin, probably written in the early 1930s, is a brief, strange document. Bialik was living at the time in Tel Aviv, revered as the greatest of modern Hebrew poets. It is interesting to speculate what led Margolin to send him her book—a modest affair, a simple volume without a proper publisher, written by an unknown, no-longer-young, Yiddish woman poet living in New York. What did she expect in return? What did Bialik mean for her as a poet? His reply is a lovely mix of propriety and bluntness:

Cities of Words: Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature

Abstract: The city is one of the great subjects of literature, both ancient and modern. Not surprisingly, the study of the city in literature is a mature enterprise. Hundreds of scholarly books are devoted to the representation of the city in specific works or authors throughout various periods. That scholarship has relied on a certain conception of the city, on a stark distinction between city and country, resolving itself into the themes of urbanism and antiurbanism. But the notion of the strict separation of the urban and the rural, embodied in such iconic images as the walled city of the Middle Ages, the fortified city of the seventeenth century, the Puritan stockade staring out into the primeval forest, even the smokestacks of the industrial city viewed from the refuge of its hills, has given way to urban conglomerations that can be mapped only by satellite, a landscape in which nature is preserved only by culture. The identification of city life with civilization itself, growing out of both etymology and a Whig sense of progress as defined by urban commerce, has been called into question, especially in America, where the

Law/Form/History: Shakespeare's Verdict in All Is True

Abstract: Thespis, at this time, beginning to act tragedies, and the thing, because it was new, taking very much with the multitude, though it was not yet made a matter of competition, Solon, being by nature fond of hearing and learning something new, and now, in his old age, living idly, and enjoying himself, indeed, with music and with wine, went to see Thespis himself, as the ancient custom was, act; and after the play was done, he addressed him, and asked him if he was not ashamed to tell so many lies before such a number of people; and Thespis replying that it was no harm to say or do so in a play, Solon vehemently struck his staff against the ground: “Ay,” said he, “if we honour and commend such play as this, we shall find it some day in our business.”1

Presence and Passage: A Poet's Wordsworth

Abstract: An early whiff of Wordsworth, I’m ashamed to say but crotchety enough to know, kept me off the Romantic trail for decades. I thought that if there never wafted another rill or daffodil anywhere near English poetry, the world might be a better place. And some blue moon ago I recorded in my journal, with unnatural glee, Cyril Connolly’s acid remark: “I refuse to be famous for a book on Wordsworth, even though it was all he was famous for.” Perhaps I held Willie responsible for the worst habits I encountered in poetry workshops, day in, day out, for decades. Not that most of my students had read him; his influence took the form, rather, of an unspoken presumption about the very nature of poetry: that it consisted in a bit of nature and a big idea (a little fresh air, then a lot of hot). Moreover, as Wordsworth himself said of The Prelude, it was unprecedented in English literature that a poet should speak so much of himself. It was not, alas, unsuccedented. Poets have been speaking so much of themselves ever since. One mustn’t blame Christ for all that Christians do, or Krishna for the occasional lobotomized gaze among his tinkling ministries. A great figure is as cursed as complimented by his followers. But it remains true today that one of the most deadly legacies of Wordsworthian witness is the sheer tedium of the rhetoric of attestation: I think, I thought, I felt, I have known, I heard, I saw, I watched, I gazed, I call to mind, I dare to tell—in short, I mull and mull—and make too little

"Everlastinge to Posterytie": Chatterton's Spirited Youth

Abstract: The brief career of the “marvellous Boy” Thomas Chatterton and the genesis of the pseudomedieval poems he attributed to Thomas Rowley have the vague familiarity of Romantic myth. So far as academic literary history is concerned, however, Chatterton has usually figured as an oddball enthusiasm, as the obscure occasion of an overblown debate, or as an avatar of modern celebrity. While recent criticism has begun to regard him as an exemplary exception rather than an isolated curiosity, two modes prevail: one focuses on the psychodynamics of the Rowley story, considered as an exaggerated version of adolescent fantasy, while the other examines how Chatterton’s generic experiments and dealings with patrons illuminate conditions in the late-eighteenth-century literary market. The present essay combines elements of the psychoanalytic and the cultural-materialist approaches both to reflect on how the literary world conspired in Chatterton’s fantasy and to understand how fantasy structures empirical reception. Cowritten by a Romanticist and a medievalist, the essay itself participates formally and thematically in the discontinuous histories it describes. Our analysis, an extended meditation on the metaphor of literary “genealogy,” alternates between intensive and extensive approaches, moving freely between the eighteenth-century context and

Historical Difference as Immortality in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel

Abstract: Aremarkable number of mid-nineteenth-century historical novels open by comparing historical imagination to the reanimation of the dead. Often the comparison is embodied in a frame story that focuses on a particular grave or ruin, and then precipitates the narrative into the past through an experience of temporal double vision that seems to rebuild the ruin or throw open the grave. The prologue to Théophile Gautier’s Romance of a Mummy (1858) follows two European explorers into the depths of an Egyptian tomb, where they break open a sarcophagus and unwrap a mummy so lifelike that she seems only to be sleeping. The marvelous preservation of the tomb makes the explorers feel that the “dead civilisation” itself is stirring to life around them: an illusion that bridges the gulf between the prologue and the novel proper, which narrates the mummy’s life in ancient Egypt.1 Sometimes the frame story is autobiographical: Edward Bulwer’s introduction to The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) explains the book as a consequence of the author’s own experience of historical vision. Wandering amid the “disinterred remains” of Pompeii, he was filled with “a keen desire to people once more those deserted streets, to repair those graceful ruins, to reanimate the bones yet spared to his survey, to traverse the gulf of eighteen centuries, and wake to a second existence— the City of the Dead!”2 In the “Proem” to Romola (1862–63), George

Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon (review)

Abstract: On its most fundamental level, Sexuality and Form attempts to understand what queer analysis can do with writers and artists such as Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon, whose names have been (wrongly and anachronistically) associated with modernist constructions of homosexuality. Graham L. Hammill rightly rejects universalizing assumptions about homosexuality in favor of an analysis that renders early modern same-sex arrangements in their historical specificity. But what makes his argument far more interesting is his acknowledgment that the concept of homosexuality might indeed be employed in understanding those specifics:

Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (review)

Abstract: With their creative genealogies, loaded metaphors, and interested claims, stories of the origins of the novel are fictions in themselves. Diana de Armas Wilson’s achievement in this broadly conceived study is to rewrite the story from a decidedly more catholic perspective. Her focus is the confluence of two phenomena during the sixteenth century: the rise of the New World in European consciousness and the appearance of Cervantes’ markedly heteroglot novels. Wilson relocates canonical Old World texts—primarily Cervantes’ Don Quijote and the Persiles but also the constellation of texts that influence them or are influenced by them—squarely in a transatlantic and imperial context. Her study is impressively far-reaching: it transcends the stubborn division in Hispanic studies between Peninsular and Latin American literature and engages with comparatists and classicists, as well as scholars of English literature, to negotiate the place of the Cervantine novel. However, its postcolonial and transatlantic dimensions will extend its importance far beyond the confines of Cervantes studies. Even if direct references to the Americas are sporadic in Cervantes’ novels, Wilson argues, the texts are permeated by the discourse of the New World. Wilson analyzes this discourse along generic lines, examining the connections between Cervantes’ novels and chivalric romance, utopian fiction, New World epic, and ethnohistory. This generic paradigm, which in some ways follows Roberto González Echevarría’s pioneering work on the transatlantic dimensions of the picaresque, serves Wilson well. She convincingly shows how, through his dialogue with Thomas More, Alonso de Ercilla, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and the legion of Spanish cronistas, Cervantes manages to “ironize, de-idealize, and even reappraise Spain’s imperialist history” (9). Don Quijote’s mad imperial longings, Sancho’s governorship of the Insula Barataria, or the barbarians’ cult of a future world conqueror in the

Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (review)

Abstract: him part of what was taking place and potentially culpable. He understood full well the possibility of cultural studies functioning as a discourse that pretended to be critically self-reflexive while obfuscating its own mode of participating in power relations: “Had I too also once.” In his Curriculum vitae (1996), Klemperer admits that earlier in his life he thought that “Germans were better than the others, freer in thought, purer in feeling, more peaceful and just in action. We, we Germans were the truly chosen people.”4 After the war Klemperer must have felt it important to repair the damage of the programming, and a good deal of that work was not of the usual academic sort. He was an active member of the Communist Party in the German Democratic Republic and a member of the national parliament. Is it still possible to think that Communism can be a positive force for the world, an antidote for a certain kind of arsenic, a way of undoing persistent and pernicious political programming? Maybe keeping that question open could become part of what we inherit from Klemperer. Bruce Krajewski, Georgia Southern University

How Milton Works (review)

Abstract: Reprinting ten essays and integrating them with five new chapters and an introduction and epilogue, this book is broader in its coverage of the poetry than of the prose writings. The poems that Stanley Fish analyzes include “At a Solemn Music,” Comus, “Lycidas,” Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Only two chapters, which are reprinted essays, deal with the prose: the one on Areopagitica, the other focusing on Of Prelatical Episcopacy but referring periodically to a few other early treatises. In his approach to Milton’s writings Fish is not oriented to literary history, largely because he acknowledges the value of many previous commentaries that reflect such an emphasis. Nor does he pursue in depth any particular strand of intellectual history, such as Renaissance syncretism, whereby certain classical or mythological figures gradually accumulated Christian significance, an interpretive tradition that presumably bears on how and why they are integrated into Milton’s writings. Rather, Fish trains his attention elsewhere in this provocative thesis-driven book. Clearly, cogently, and consistently argued, the thesis, most broadly stated, is that one’s presuppositions or beliefs inform and shape one’s perceptions, from which emerge, in turn, one’s process of reasoning. A corollary of the thesis is that change occurs when one replaces previous beliefs with present ones, and present ones with later ones, and so forth. Though argument does not bring about a change in one’s beliefs, it does convey the rationale—or, in the case of wrong beliefs, the rationalization or fallacious reasoning—for what one believes at a particular moment. Finally, in line with the Pauline theology articulated in 2 Corinthians 3.3, true beliefs are inscribed in oneself, on the tables of the human heart. Accordingly, one should be oriented to that inward inscription; this attitude will affect, paradoxically, one’s view of the outer world.