Showing papers in "Nineteenth-Century Literature in 2000"

Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions

Abstract: Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attachments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool ofQuality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of relationship from the other—even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sentimental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to memorialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects of this variety—objects particularly valued because they are the surrogates for particular persons—their props. This practice marks the novelists' fashion-consciousness. On the testimony of the OED, which dates the word keepsake to 1790, it was only in the eighteenth century that keepsakes came to be identified as a distinct kind ofmaterial good. The fact that by 1 790 members of the propertied classes had learned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another bespeaks the reciprocal influence

The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body

Abstract: 1. And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways and pour out the vials of the wrath of Cod upon the earth. 2. And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. Revelation 16 In the secular apocalyptic visions that have proliferated wildly in the last 200 years, the world has been destroyed by nuclear wars, alien invasions, climatic changes, social upheavals, meteor strikes, and technological shutdowns. These baroque scenarios are shaped by the eroticism of disaster. The apocalyptic desire that finds satisfaction in elaborating fictions of the End is double-edged. On the one hand, its ultimate object is some version of the crystalline New Jerusalem, an image of purity so absolute that it denies the organic messiness of life. [1] On the other hand, apocalyptic fictions typically linger on pain and suffering. The end result of apocalyptic purification often seems of less importance than the narrative pleasure derived from the bizarre and opulent tribulations of the bodies being burnt by fire and brimstone, tormented by scorpion stings, trodden like grapes in the winepress. In this interplay between the incorporeal purity of the ends and the violent corporeality of the means the apocalyptic body is born. It is a body whose mortal sickness is a precondition of ultimate health, whose grotesque and excessive sexuality issues in angelic sexlessness, and whose torture underpins a painless--and lifeless--millennium. The apocalyptic body is perverse, points out Tina Pippin, unstable and mutating from maleness to femaleness and back again, purified by the sadomasochistic "bloodletting on the cross," trembling in abject terror while awaiting an unearthly consummation (122). But most of all it is a suffering body, a text written in the script of stigmata, scars, wounds, and sores. Any apocalypse strikes the body politic like a disease, progressing from the first symptoms of a large-scale disaster through the crisis of the tribulation to the recovery of the millennium. But of all the Four Horsemen, the one whose ride begins most intimately, in the private travails of individual flesh, and ends in the devastation of the entire community, is the last one, Pestilence. The contagious body is the most characteristic modality of apocalyptic corporeality. At the same time, I will argue, it contains a counterapocalyptic potential, resisting the dangerous lure of Endism, the ideologically potent combination of "apocalyptic terror", a nd "millennial perfection" (Quinby 2). This essay, a brief sketch of the poetics and politics of the contagious body, does not attempt a comprehensive overview of the historical development of the trope of pestilence. Nor does it limit itself to a particular disease, along the lines of Susan Sontag's classic delineation of the poetics of TB and many subsequent attempts to develop a poetics of AIDS. Rather, my focus is on the general narrativity of contagion and on the way the plague-stricken body is manipulated within the overall plot of apocalyptic millennialism, which is a powerful ideological current in twentieth-century political history, embracing such diverse manifestations as religious fundamentalism, Nazism, and other forms of "radical desperation" (Quinby 4--5). Thus, I consider both real and imaginary diseases, focusing on the narrative construction of the contagious body rather than on the precise epidemiology of the contagion. All apocalyptic and millenarian ideologies ultimately converge on the utopian transformation of the body (and the body politic) through suffering. But pestilence offers a uniquely ambivalent modality of corporeal apocalypse. On the one hand, it may be appropriated to the standard plot of apocalyptic purification as a singularly atrocious technique of separating the damned from the saved. …

Slipping into the Ha-Ha: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen's Novels

Abstract: The novels of Jane Austen are filled with instances of sexually risque humor, but this aspect of her comedy has rarely been recognized or subjected to extended critical comment and analysis. This essay examines the way in which Austen integrates bawdy humor into three of her novels-Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion-in order to demonstrate the surprising prevalence of this material and to show how Austen marshals bawdy humor both in the service of a critique of patriarchal culture, including the system of marriage and courtship, and as a way to affirm the vigorous reality of female sexuality. In Emma Austen uses the riddle "Kitty, a fair, but frozen maid" as the basis of a subversive portrait of the profound linkages between courtship and venereal disease; in Mansfield Park (the novel perhaps most replete with sexual material) she wittily but also poignantly dissects the fine line between the marriage market and prostitution; and in Persuasion Austen9s bawdy joking becomes a way to affirm the strength and pleasure of the female sexual gaze. This essay offers a more comprehensive view of the uses to which Austen puts her bawdy humor; it not only helps to clarify her fictional art but also breaks down the image of her propriety that has so long limited our full understanding of Austen and has rendered her less-chaste comedy especially unintelligible and inaccessible.

The Man Who Came to Dinner: Ian Watt and the Theory of Formal Realism

Abstract: Those of a certain age recall Monty Woolley's Broadway and film performances in the Hart-Kaufman play, The Man Who Came to Dinner. A nationally renowned critic, while on a lecture tour, injures his hip on an icy staircase of a home where he had been invited for an evening's meal. For various reasons, he ends up staying far beyond the time allotted for his recovery. The critic has opinions, and, despite his curmudgeonly nature, completely rearranges the affairs of the household he occupies, at the same time keeping in constant telephone and telegraph contact with the world's artistic and intellectual luminaries. Curiously, one of those with whom he keeps in touch is a man named Dafoe. At the end of the play, the critic finally readies to leave when we hear him tumbling down the stairs on the way out, presumably to repeat his convalescence and, for better or worse, his influence on the affairs of the household. If analogies are proffered as too exact, they become allegories. Before that happens I am almost done with this one. But my point is obvious. In the house of early eighteenth-century fiction, Ian Watt is the man who came to dinner. He has taken up a kind of semi-permanent residence. For some, his stay for the last half century has turned out to be amenable; for others, less so. Revisionist theorists of the novel, especially in the last decade, adduce a thousand and one reasons why Watt and his theories should depart posthaste, ranging from his failure to understand the inherent generic instability

Queen of the Air or Constitutional Monarch?: Idealism, Irony, and Narrative Power in Miss Marjoribanks

Abstract: Margaret Oliphant9s political allegiance has been a vexed question: was she a feminist or did she share the conservative opinions of her most frequent employer, Blackwood9s? By considering Oliphant neither as a feminist nor an antifeminist, but rather as an anti-idealist, this essay attempts to explain why no definitive answer to this question has arisen. Oliphant9s anti-idealism can be seen very clearly in her novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866), a novel that many other critics have turned to in order to define Oliphant9s gender politics. Anti-idealism manifests itself primarily as irony in this novel. There is irony of narrative tone (as seen most obviously in the mock-epic metaphors used to describe the main character) as well as a more structural irony that exposes the artificiality of narrative itself, the idealized view of history as a coherent and teleologically meaningful whole. One of the narrator9s repeated mock-epic ironies is the description of Lucilla Marjoribanks as a queen, including some specific comparisons to Queen Victoria. This essay provides historical context for the Lucilla-Victoria motif and demonstrates how it works toward Oliphant9s anti-idealist agenda.

Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, and the Political Economy of Beat Letters

Abstract: On June 23, 1953, an aspiring poet employed as a copyboy for the New York World Telegram wrote a long letter to an old friend in San Jose. The letter ends by reproducing a telegraph sent to President Eisenhower protesting what David Caute has called "the midsummer's night of postwar anti-Communist, anti-Soviet hysteria" (62)--the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the so-called atom spies: "Rosenbergs are pathetic, government Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion machine only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror" (Ginsberg, As Ever 150). Since the copyboy was Allen Ginsberg and the friend Neal Cassady, the letter witnesses a precise intersection of the dominant narrative action of early Cold War America and its dissident counternarrative as represented by key figures in the emergent Beat movement. However, in context of the exemplary character of Beat cultural politics, Ginsberg's telegram of public protest is not just atyp ical--his friends were shocked at him for "doing anything outright about his political complaints" (Carolyn Cassady, Off the Road 222)--but anomalous. What's important is not the intersecting of narratives, personal and political, dominant and dissenting, but their correspondence. Defining the relation between Cold War and Beat generation along the double axis private/public and personal/political, Ginsberg's letter turns out to be a key document, and this unlikely point of departure brings to light a scene that is central to what might be termed the political economy of Beat letters. The Rosenberg case was one of a series of national and highly public trials stamped by the paranoid style of American politics, a style that responded to global stalemate by waging domestic war on enemies within. This was a total conflict fought on microscopic scale and through inflated symbolic dramas, so that the early Cold War years were marked by an unprecedented politicization of culture and by the conscription of private life in the name of national security. The key to political containment abroad was, then, personal self-containment at home, and the Cold War penetration of the private by the public was as much a matter of patriotic self-policing and voluntary self-censorship as of panoptic state surveillance. In context of this disciplinary and demonizing feature of Cold War culture, the hyperbolic escalation of the Rosenbergs into evil "atom spies"--condemned to death by Judge Irving Kaufman for a "diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation" (qtd. in Caute 67)--represented a definitive es calation of the local. The Rosenberg case did not prove that scientific secrets vital to national security had been betrayed. Rather, it proved the assumption that an absolute secret existed in the first place--what Caute called the Myth of the Vital Secret--and that it might be given away by what passed for ordinary men and women. Absolute secrets demand absolute secrecy. The Secret therefore motivates all the secrets of everyday life and equals their apocalyptically scaled-up master narrative: it symbolized the total implications of mundane acts in a war whose front line was, ideally, not just here or there but everywhere and implicating everyone. What turned the Rosenberg case into a central document in this politicized field of Cold War culture was its transformation into a particular kind of text-an epistolary text. I refer to Death House Letters, the correspondence between Ethel and Julius from their cells in Sing Sing. This notorious exchange served as vital political propaganda for the Rosenbergs at the time and was then used as an essential text against their intellectual sympathizers in the aftermath of their deaths. Here I refer to the articles in Commentary and Encounter by Robert Warshaw and Leslie Fiedler respectively, two cultural critics who took it upon themselves to subject the Rosenbergs to a second trial, this time by New Critical close readings of their letters. …

The Mysterious Magnum Bonum: Fighting to Read Charlotte Yonge

Abstract: This essay argues that Charlotte Yonge has presented a particular challenge to critics because she depicts rebellious youths only to subsume them within an overriding (and unpalatable) ideological nexus. She encourages readers to identify with these dissident characters in order to share their inevitable conversions to a Yongian worldview. A close examination of Magnum Bonum; or, Mother Carey9s Brood (1879) reveals the mechanisms by which Yonge manipulates her readers. This novel centers on a mysterious legacy, a medical discovery named the "Magnum Bonum," left by a dying father to his most deserving son. Magnum Bonum exerts a normalizing force on the younger generation, suppressing daughter Janet9s lesbian desires and feminist activism, and disciplining son Jock9s iconoclastic and anticapitalist performances. The only person empowered by the Magnum Bonum is Mother Carey, who becomes its guardian, exalts it into a near-religious icon, and finally acquires a voice of her own through being ventriloquized by her dead husband9s wishes. Through the Magnum Bonum, the patriarch9s disembodied, omnipotent authority transforms his unruly offspring into docile (if suicidal) replicas of himself. Magnum Bonum reveals that the mixture of realist observation and pious oppression in Yonge9s novels is a sophisticated literary strategy and suggests that monitoring this technique might be the most useful way into Yonge9s fiction.

Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel?

Abstract: I feel we have reached a saturation-point currently in academic studies of eighteenth-century fiction—at least in those studies that bear on the history of the genre qua genre. While vast gains have been made—and I truly think the genealogical, historical and bibliographic work done on the early English novel over the past twenty years is one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century literary criticism—we also have reached a kind of intellectual dead end, and like exhausted little Lovelaces with word processors can go no further.

Staging Readers Reading

Abstract: The rise-of-the-novel narrative, as perfected by Ian Watt in 1957, and extended by many other literary histories in the years since, is not \"wrong,\" but it is biased and incomplete. Why is this so? First of all, Watt's classic account places the novel within a progressive narrative, which assumes that the modem era has discovered increasingly powerful writing technologies for representing reality: he calls this \"formal realism\" and links it to another focus of modemist triumphant narratives, the bourgeois invention of a complex and deep self. Second, the rise-of-the-novel narrative is vitiated by the fact that its essential aim is to legitimize the novel as a form of literature. Thus the rise-of-the-novel narrative demonstrates that the technology of realism enabled prose narratives about love and adventure, which, by the second half of the seventeenth century, large numbers of readers had begun to read for entertainment, to rise into a form of literature every bit as valuable and important as the established literary types of poetry, epic, and drama. Third, and this point follows from the first two, the use of the definite article in the phrase \"rise of the novel\" turns novelness into a fugitive essence every particular novel strives to realize. What has been the effect of this narrative? It has ratified the project of the novel's moral and aesthetic elevation undertaken by novelists from Richardson, Fielding, Prévost, and Rousseau to Flaubert, Henry James, Joyce, and Woolf. But it has also impoverished our sense of what the novel is, first by taking novel criticism into interminable and tendentious debates about what realism really is, and second by making it our business to be guardians of the boundary between the \"tmly\" novelistic and the \"merely\" fictional. We need a more historically rigorous and culturally

Looking the Part: Performative Narration in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield’s “Je Ne Parle Pas Français”

Abstract: n the early part of the twentieth century Djuna Barnes and Katherine Mansfield each wrote a work whose Parisian setting and sexually ambivalent characters provide the backdrop for an inquiry into the convoluted mechanisms of desire and loss. Barnes's Nightwood, after an initial success boosted by T. S. Eliot's endorsement of the novel, was discussed marginally in terms of its stylistic innovation by critics until the mid-1980s, when feminist scholars rediscovered in it the thematic struggle to depict female homosexual desire. Mansfield's short story 'Je Ne Parle Pas FranCais," on the other hand, has been largely passed over by critics and anthologists in favor of her apparently more domestic, tranquil pieces concerned with childhood and family. Besides setting, what the two texts have in common is their peculiar spokesmen: Matthew Dante O'Connor and Raoul Duquette, selfstyled guides to the Parisian underworld, whose exorbitant volubility and narcissism place them in a difficult relationship to the reader. Comparing these narrators raises critical questions about the elusive narrative gap between what a character says and what the text intends us to hear. Recent readings of each work tend to agree that Matthew and Raoul are treated ironically by their authors, so that the narratives signify in opposition to their pronouncements by sharing a joke with the readers at the pair's expense. The "perversion" of the two speakers constructs them as parodic figures within works of early-feminist satire of male social authority and its various ruses. Critical consensus positions these male narrators as

Joyce's Epiphanic Mode: Material Language and the Representation of Sexuality in Stephen Hero and Portrait

Abstract: James Joyce's transformations of themes, language, and characters from one of his own works to another have long been among the signal preoccupations of Joyce's readers. The manuscript fragments known as epiphanies, written in the years 1900 to 1903, are the earliest sources of specific scenes and more general interests which we can see Joyce draw upon in all his longer works of fiction. [1] While Joyce's theorization and use of epiphany from Stephen Hero onward have been central to many readers' understandings of his work as a whole, the connection of this general aspect of Joyce's work to the specific records of scenes and interactions represented in the epiphany manuscripts has been of secondary interest. Perhaps remembering (with some embarrassment) along with Stephen in Ulysses his "epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if [he] died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria" (3.141--42), Joyce's readers have not often given serious attention to the ways in which his mature works use the material first developed in these fragments. The most common critical approach to the epiphany fragments has been to examine their themes and Dublin locations and to suggest specific places in Joyce's later fiction in which these epiphanic elements are deployed. But this focus on the epiphanies as sources for the later works can obscure the particular workings of language in the epiphanies and in Joyce's earliest integrations of epiphanic material into his fiction. The linguistic contexts of these early uses of the epiphanies--from the passage in Stephen Hero in which Stephen first defines epiphanies, through scenes of Stephen's intense sexual or artistic feeling in Portrait--have a significance beyond their possible prefiguration of Joyce's later fiction. These moments where Stephen theorizes epiphanies or experiences overpowering feelings are not, for the most part, straightforward recyclings of Joyce's original epiphanies; however, in these passages Joyce's language echoes Stephen's initial encounter with an epiphanic scene in order to focus the tensions between Stephen's attempts at rigid self-definition and Joyce's more ambiguous constructions of selfhood. What is chiefly at stake in these climactic passages is Stephen's alternating mastery and helplessness before his nascent sexuality and the extent to which he can define his intellectual and physical self as discrete from his context. Though Stephen tries to assert an intellectual source for his own language, the language Joyce uses to convey Stephen's assertions is insistently grounded in the corporeal and in several characteristic tropes such as murmuring, which stress the material nature of language itself. This dispersion of the source and nature of language beyond the confines of a discrete, fully cognizant agent undermines Stephen's attempts to assert such an agency for himself. By staging the materiality of language and the diffusion of the self within the context of Stephen's sexual crises, Joyce also links Stephen with the corporeality and diffusion of sexuality more firmly than can Stephen's hyperbolic denials or embracings of his sexuality. I shall argue that, more than merely constituting a progression in theme between the epiphanies and climactic passages in Portrait, these moments and the defining passage in Stephen Hero are linked by their framing in language this tension between Joyce's and Stephen's constructions of self and sexuality. Because of this continuity of evocative language across distinct climactic moments, we can address this mode of language as a particular force and isolate its specificity and power. I use the term "epiphanic mode" in this essay to refer to this general practice of representing Stephen's nascent selfhood and sexuality, which Joyce develops first in the Stephen Hero passage--with its particular tension between the epiphanic text and Stephen's theorization of epiphanies--and then expands in his rendering of Stephen's emotional climaxes in Portrait, which have varying connections to the epiphany fragments. …

The Creative Potential of Dialect Writing in Later-Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: When Walt Whitman in An American Primer called his native language "a tongue that spurns all laws," he furnished a description that can serve as a perfect characterization for the mode of literary expression during the period spanning the final decades of the nineteenth and the beginning decades of the twentieth centuries. It was a phase in American literary history that was particularly rich in texts that, in order to achieve their literary effects, availed themselves of the expressive potential inherent in unconventional language use. Produced by writers such as Finley Peter Dunne, Charles Godfrey Leland, Thomas A. Daly, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Posey and others-names rarely listed in standard literary histories-these texts derived their appeal from the way they used language but also from the perspective their linguistic strategy created. While dialect texts enjoyed a tremendous popularity, the critical reception by literary scholars has mostly been one of indifference or even scorn. Encouraged by the more favorable evaluations of dialect writing that have appeared in recent times, in this essay I argue for a reappraisal of these neglected forms of literary activity in the United States. Their linguistic virtuosity, their potential value as documents of folklore and linguistic diversity, and their significance in the development toward alternative forms of literary expression make them an unusual treasure in America9s literary heritage.

Willa Cather’s My Ántonia: Haunting the Houses of Memory

Abstract: Memory is much more than a recurrent or pervasive theme in Willa Cather's fiction; remembrance is the very essence of Cather's writing--the inexorable principle of her characterizations, the vital foundation of her settings, the impelling force within her novels. Her narratives exemplify, above all else, a certain style of remembrance, a mode of memory that one can neither overlook nor penetrate, that is both extensive and elusive, a fabric spun from unyielding cords and spectral fibers. In response to this complexity and vitality, Cather's readers have interpreted her representations of memory in a variety of insightful and provocative ways. [1] The very breadth and diversity of these critical interpretations suggest that memory has multiple and changing functions in Cather's work--suggest, in fact, that reading Willa Gather is perhaps most of all an act whereby one can both discover and imagine an almost endless number of ways in which memory inspires and terrifies, comforts and haunts, sustains and shocks not simply individuals but also communities, cultures, and nations. [2] For, if it is true that remembrance sketches the details of Gather's characters, draws the settings they inhabit, and colors their actions, fears, and longings, then it is also true that the shades and tinctures of remembrance seep out to Cather's readers as well, making us profoundly aware of how deeply we are inscribed by the past that we have forgotten, as well as by the one we sometimes tenuously remember. Of all Gather's novels, My Antonia is perhaps her most thorough as well as her most intricate representation of the processes and effects of memory, both personal and collective. [3] As Jim Burden narrates his nostalgic return, Gather is able to portray not only the content of Jim's memories but also their structuring, their methods of articulation. [4] Throughout this novel, Cather is interested not simply in what Jim remembers but also in how and why he does so. Her deliberate, intense focus on the most enigmatic details within the architecture of Jim's remembrances ultimately creates a certain imperative to look beyond Jim's memories of Antonia to more closely examine the memories that surround and intrude upon her. If Jim's representation of Antonia seeks to keep her firmly within his control, as Katrina Irving and others have argued, the memories that surround and permeate that representation are essentially and frighteningly out of his control. Those invasive memories are significant not simply for wha t they mean to Jim but also for what they reveal about collective attempts to silence and subdue the ghosts of a communal past. My Antonia ultimately suggests that, much like Jim's more personal remembrances, cultural or national memory frequently struggles to preserve a sense of identity by excluding or abjecting memories for which it cannot or will not account. Most critical studies of this novel emphasize the relationship between Jim and Antonia, seeing Antonia as, in one way or another, the center of the novel. Yet, in the spaces that separate Jim and Antonia, we find a shocking variety of memories that recount disturbing, radical violence, stories of "violent deaths and casual buryings" that give Jim "a painful and peculiar pleasure" (72, 41). [5] His memories of Antonia, and of the various homes that frame her, are thus riven with, even blasted by, his combination of fear and desire with respect to other, less-comforting and less-redeeming, memories. Jim's memory houses--the houses he remembers, and the home he finds in memory-may be constructed with Antonia as their foundation, but they are, nevertheless, haunted by figures infinitely less accountable. Setting Antonia temporarily aside thus clears the ground for a more complete analysis of the ways in which memory works in this novel, an analysis that suggests that Jim is not alone in his ambivalent embrace of the painful and peculiar, and that he is not the only one for whom the halls of memory are haunted. …

Apocalyptic Narratives: The Nation in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract: The radically performative laying down of the law by the legislator must create the very context according to which that law could be judged to be just: the founding moment, the pre-, is always already inhabited by the post-. Geoffrey Bennington (132) Thus the veil had to fall so that with it the strongholds of reactionaries preventing women from being educated and participating in public life would fall. Amina Said (360) In the Book of Revelation, John is living in forced exile on the island of Patmos.[1] Opposed to and alienated from the existing social and political order, he predicts the overthrow of a corrupt world and the everlasting reign of the New Jerusalem. In this revolutionary prophesy, John imagines himself as the consciousness of the collective; the boundary between the world and the word, between narrative and history, must dissolve, and all margins, including the one he inhabits, must be eradicated to complete this dream of a perfectly integrated community at the end of history. [2] While the belief in the actual or imminent end of the world has receded, Frank Kermode argues that "the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world" (28). With the shift from God's plan for humanity to secular dreams about the world, nationalist narratives that both replace and echo Revelation are one of the ways we order that world. Apocalypse continues to be understood in a secular context as a revelation or unveiling (from the ancient Greek apokalupsis), and this paradigm underlies the nineteenth-century teleological narrative of modern nationalism, where the emergence of the nation is understood as the point of arrival for an "imagined community" (Anderson 6). As Benedict Anderson has suggested, as traditional religious belief wanes, national narratives come to satisfy the desire for origins, continuity, and eternity (11). Like the biblical story, secular apocalyptic writings about the nation also express the dreams of the ostracized and the oppressed about the renewal or rebirth of a community; the call from beyond (the interference from the Other) that characterizes apocalyptic writing challenges the established order, confuses accepted rules, and ignores the prevalent codes of reason. As Jacques Derrida writes, "By its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres, and codes, and the breakdown [le detraquement of destinations, apocalyptic discourse can also dismantle the dominant contract or concordat" ("Of an Apocalyptic Tone" 89). It is not surprising then that the Romantic poets, and Blake in particular, conceived of the French and American Revolutions in millennial terms; the violence and upheaval of these events seemed to mark the dawn of a new earthly order, freeing man from the tyranny of monarchy and church.[3] And in Writing the Apocalypse, Lois Parkinson Zamora reads both the Hebrew (Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah) and Chri stian (Mark 13, Matthew 24, 2 Peter, and Revelation) apocalyptic texts, with their emphasis on the merging of private and public destinies, as inspiring the "communal" or national fictions of Latin American writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar. However, the events of the twentieth century have also cast doubt on apocalyptic nationalist narratives. In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Aziz clearly joins the revolutionary chorus when he declares that "India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!" (289). But while Forster suggests that the colonial presence in India is intolerable, completing his novel in the aftermath of the First World War, he is clearly not convinced by the revolutionary promises of nationalism: Fielding taunts Aziz with the remark "India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood!"(289). And as a Muslim, Aziz himself is only half taken with the idea of the modern nation as he recognizes the es of teleology and origins that accompany this model. …

Empires of Objects: Accumulation and Entropy in E. M. Forster’s Howards End

Abstract: [T]here seems something else in life besides time, something which may conveniently be called "value," something which is measured not by minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles... --E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel 19 One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys. --E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy 6-7 Speaking to a BBC audience in 1946 on the topic of the "Challenge of Our Time," Forster addressed with candor and typical irony a dilemma that he felt keenly and unapologetically: his attempt to reconcile the ubiquity of the "New Economy" with the "Old Morality" that he felt was disappearing and which was to remain so indispensable to him in later years: But though the education [I received] was humane it was imperfect, inasmuch as we none of us realized our economic position. In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts, and we did not realize that all the time we were exploiting the poor of our own country and the backward races abroad, and getting bigger profits from our investments than we should. We refused to face this unpalatable truth.... All that has changed in the present century. The dividends have shrunk to decent proportions and have in some cases disappeared. The poor have kicked. The backward races are kicking--and more power to their boots. Which means that life has become less comfortable for the Victorian liberal, and that our outlook, which seems to me admirable, has lost the basis of golden sovereigns upon which it originally rose, and now hangs over the abyss.... [Y]ou are brought back again to that inescapable arbiter, your own temperament. When there is a collision of principles would you favour the individual at the expense of the community as I would? Or would you prefer economic justice for all at the expense of personal freedom? In a time of upheaval like the present, this collision of principles, this split in one's loyalties, is always occurring. (Two Cheers 56-58) Faced with the growing disenfranchisement of England's working class and the ugly legacy of Victorian imperialism, the clarity and force with which Forster perceived the demands of ethical responsibility proved difficult to reconcile with his equally profound allegiance to private feeling and individual memory. This very ambivalence was to play a more subdued but nonetheless central role in Forster's later biography of his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, where it runs throughout his nostalgic account of the Clapham Sect and its distinct blend of philanthropy, sentimentality, and moral conservatism. [1] As a family portrait the work is perfectly balanced, at once generous and deeply sympathetic--even proud--but always shrewd, sharply observed, and conscious of anachronism. Here was the very source of emotions that Forster recognized as most intimately and resolutely his own--the deep attachment to a family home not least among them--and yet the picture jarred with the contemporary world he observed around him, where a friend's farm could be commandeered by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and appropriated for subdivisions and public housing. [2] His awareness of his own contradictory position could only be made more acute by his fond exercise in family biography: as a young boy Forster had inherited from his great-aunt Marianne the seed capital for a lifetime of investment, dividends, and freedom from conventional wage labor. Although the bequest was to cause him occasional dismay throughout his life, he recognized that it left him free to pursue a career as a professional writer. [3] Written more than three decades before Marianne Thronton, Howards End (1910) marks the conversion of a writer's personal ambivalence into a specific formal problem: the work may be read as an extended meditation on the difficulty of representing capital accumulation, in all its elusive and terrifying abstraction, as a total process. …

Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Subject Formation in The Wide, Wide World

Abstract: In recent criticism, arguments about whether domesticity in The Wide, Wide World (1850) empowered or disempowered women, and whether it was embraced or critiqued by Warner and her contemporaries, have been founded upon, or at least buttressed by, readings of horses and horsemanship. The interpretation of Ellen Montgomery9s riding lessons as a metaphor for her disempowerment, and the ubiquitous denunciation of John Humphreys as "brutal horse-beater," however, have little grounding in the nineteenth-century horsemanship on which Warner drew. While for centuries horses in Western culture had been associated with human passions and horsemanship with their forcible domination, a combination of new methods for disciplining equines and new forms of recreational riding rendered the equine body, in the nineteenth century, discursively situated to communicate the internalized discipline and self-regulation that was necessary to make a human body middle class. Through horseback riding and other lessons, Ellen attains the particular mental and bodily development necessary for her to become a proper, sentimental, middle-class woman who is inserted into a network of power relations-a network in which Ellen attains power over other kinds of women who fail to meet the standards that she does. Historical contextualization also reveals that John9s horsemanship accords quite well with nineteenth-century standards and would not have been seen as abusive by his contemporaries. As nearly all arguments about The Wide, Wide World9s resistance to domestic ideology have been predicated upon John9s propensity for horse-beating, this essay calls for a reexamination of what has become a principal claim of Warner criticism.

“Night and Day Is Dead”: Virginia Woolf in London “Literary and Historic”

Abstract: [We] don't want the [Hogarth] Press to be a fashionable hobby patronised and inspired by Chelsea. Virginia Woolf, Diary 190 What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years--since 1919--and N. & D. is dead--I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities far beyond counting: though I feel now and then the tug to vision, but resist it. Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary 184 Chelsea provoked Virginia Woolf. In the early twentieth century, the London borough was reputed to be the artistic center of London both because it had been home to eminent Victorian writers and painters and because it was the haunt of Woolf's so-called "bohemian" contemporaries. To Woolf, Chelsea and Chelseans also signified smugness, capricious and cutting appraisals of art, and worst of all, thorough respectability. However, while "Chelsea" became shorthand for everything Woolf despised about London's literary world, its provocation also lay in its resemblance to her own literary world. An admixture of innovation and tradition, fashion and stability, bohemianism and social establishment, Chelsea emblematized Woolf's own compound of traditionalism and iconoclasm, snobbery and fellow feeling--a compound too complexly muddled to be explained away as a divided allegiance between her father's Hyde Park Gate and her own Bloomsbury. That Woolf placed her 1919 novel Night and Day in Chelsea therefore corroborates the widely held view that this novel worked a transition for her from traditional to experimental fictional forms: in Night and Day, she uses the Chelsea setting to represent a conflict between innovation and imitation, between creative modern writers and the preservative literary establishment--a conflict arguably won out by the heroine's moving out of Chelsea. [1] Woolf's characterization of Night and Day as "dead" suggests that this 1919 "novel of fact" also gave life: Night and Day arguably gives life to a distracting "tug to vision" that characterizes her impressionistic novels, and it gives life to characters who, because now "dead," could become the subject of biography. Indeed, Night and Day was viewed by many of Woolf's contemporaries as a portrait of Anny Ritchie, a portrait that hurt the feelings of the still-living subject. [2] This essay, however, argues that what Night and Day gives life to is London "literary and historic." By 1919, private societies, municipal government, and tour book writers had identified for the public and preserved as memorials the homes of writers, artists, statesmen, and scientists; their publications mapped London through literary and historic associations--including associations with events in fiction. This London was created not only to promote London's status as a "great" city but also to educate its citizens and attract touri sts. Literary and historic London was therefore both a physical place and an ideal, marked out by publications (tour books, maps, and histories), by visitors (tourists, school groups, and ramblers), and by plaqued houses and museums. This essay examines how Night and Day takes as its setting the literary haunts and homes of London, a setting of fiction that Woolf sees as "fact." In Night and Day Woolf engages with the project of literary and historic London, a project that attempted to make the imaginary spaces of London real--a project that created visitable and material shrines out of authors' lives and literary works in London. Woolf would have this novel "dead" not only because it represented her painful recovery from a nervous breakdown (as Woolf herself suggested [3]) but also because it represents literary and historic London as a fact that makes everything "not possible" (Night and Day 194) for a modernist woman writer in London: Night and Day is structured by a space that orders the central characters and events of the novel through an ideology of tradition and "great men. …

Lolita's Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel

Abstract: Early reviews of Lolita (1958), from both admirers and detractors, concocted the perfect mixture for an American best-seller: with praise for the novel's writerly achievement and comedy mixed with condemnation of its "highbrow pornography" (Boyd 364), the popular groundswell that greeted "Hurricane Lolita" was almost inevitable. The novel and subsequent Stanley Kubrick film, with their pedophile narrator and his nymphet prey, soon entered the national mythology. And as the more recent film adaptation demonstrates, this story possesses a seemingly inexhaustible power to incite controversy. Because of this immediate and continual controversy, few readers have encountered the novel without some preconceptions about its salacious content. Merely cracking such a scandalous book cedes immense liberties to the author who then spirits us into a world where the principal character violates fundamental taboos, criminal laws, and social mores with more evident glee than disgust. Even the earliest, naive readers found a dmonitions enough in the "foreword" by fictional psychologist "John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.," who amply enumerates his disgust for the author of the "Confession" to follow: "No doubt, he is horrible," Ray writes, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy....A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. (5) Those inclined to skip prefatory remarks discover within three short paragraphs that the narrator's obsession is a diminutive ("four feet ten"), school-aged "girl-child" and Humbert himself, a "murderer." The reader, like Humbert on his cross-country tour and like Nabokov in creating such a fiction, enters a world where the most egregious offenses have already been conceded and "everything [is] allowed" (268). In this environment marked by severe initial crimes and admissions, Humbert's less severe transgressions, his everyday incivilities, become more humorous than damning as he comments devilishly on the superficial faults of people around him, fiddles with ridiculously "wrong" verbs, and dismisses one pompous and overzealous dentist with these words: "On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr. Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course a much better dentist than you." I do not know if any of my readers will ever have a chance to say that. It is a delicious dream feeling. (291) Humbert couples this disregard for taboos and the niceties of social interaction with an abuse of poetic license, the excesses of prose that become a badge of his outlaw status: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" (9), he writes. He defends these literary transgressions with the same excuses--his psychological instability, Lolita's irresistibility, and the relativity of tastes and mores--that he hopes will mitigate his crimes. With Lolita he feels "lost in an artist's dream" as he attempts to "fix" her unadulterated form in words and, while touring the American landscape, to evoke the "delicate beauty ever present in the margin" (152). The author's concluding remarks, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," affixed to every edition but the first, identifies the novel as a purely artistic enterprise designed to produce a state of "aesthetic bliss" (314). In response to an American critic who characterized it as the product of a "love affair with the romantic novel," Nabokov writes that "the subst itution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct" (316). Like Pale Fire (1962), Lolita begins with an immoderate conceit that allows its author and reader to explore the extravagant, pleasurable, and disturbing fringes of the language. But as Kauffman points out, Nabokov's commentary on Lolita has become as essential to the fiction as John Ray's more explicitly fictional foreword (131). Ray introduces the novel with promises of a "moral apotheosis" (5), and "an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov" (311) polishes it off with an equally monologic elevation of art over morality. …

Bleak House, Vanity Fair, and the Making of an Urban Aesthetic

Abstract: This essay focuses on the relationship between certain popular visual forms, such as the city sketch and the panorama, and the making of an urban novelistic aesthetic, of which Charles Dickens9s Bleak House (1852-53) is the most developed embodiment. In order to delineate the specific features of this urban aesthetic I turn to the very different ways in which William Makepeace Thackeray in Pendennis (1848-50) and, especially, Vanity Fair (1847-48) articulates the city and those who inhabit it-despite Thackeray9s familiarity with the representational modes that developed in the relatively "lower" forms of visual culture. Through this process of differentiation I show how this urban aesthetic involves distinct ways of negotiating such problems as the tension between the dispersive and the centralizing impulses of the city, as well as the threat that the teeming, socially unpredictable life of the city posed to the traditional domain of the novel, the middle- or upper-class home. Finally, by setting off Dickens9s mode of figuring character against Thackeray9s more self-consciously literary methods, I highlight the ways in which the urban aesthetic that underlies Bleak House affected Dickens9s methods.

Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolf's the Voyage Out

Abstract: At the heart of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out is a disengagement from the authority of the paternal word and an affirmation of the semiotic otherness of the maternal voice. The term semiotic here refers to those primarily aural, vocal, or physical qualities in language, such as rhythm, stress, repetition, echo, silence, and so on, that inform and can disrupt "literal" signification, and thus, by creating uncertainty, ambivalence, and paradox, destabilize meaning. Julia Kristeva distinguishes the semiotic, which she associates with the voice and body of the mother, from the symbolic, which is bound up with the paternal word and the law of the father. Since the semiotic arises from the preoedipal, preobjectal, and prelinguistic phase of human development, however, it is essentially genderless, relating to the feminine rather than the female, as well as to the voice (and ear) rather than the word. It is installed in the subject as "semiotic disposition" (Desire in Language 7), a latency that is repressed once the infant enters into the symbolic code, but can be activated by exposure to the pressures in language referred to above. The semiotic and the symbolic are therefore symbiotic and complementary, with the semiotic acting, so to speak, as the "other" of language, responsible for its inherent rhetoricity, for its affect. The disengagement in The Voyage Out from the paternal word or symbolic code emerges from the persistent defeat of verbalization evident in the curiously frustrated conversations and abortive utterances of the characters, and particularly in the sterile rhetoric of the Dalloways, who epitomize the complacency of colonialism. Deconstruction of the paternal word is also manifest in tropes relating to sound. There is an insistent focus on the brutal, mechanistic noises of industry, the alienating effects of new acoustic technologies (such as the telephone and the phonograph), and the primordial din of the jungles of South America, which ultimately undermines the coherence of colonial, patriarchal language. Thus an affirmation of the maternal voice is aligned with a subtle and cumulative interrogation of the hollowness of the colonial enterprise itself. The text's disenchantment with conventional rhetoric and social intercourse culminates, during the up-river sequence, in a stylized collapse of signification, a symbolic divestiture of the word, while there is a reciprocal investment in the purely vocal, as well as a gathering awareness throughout the text of the disruptive and uncanny power of sound. Simultaneously, the assumed impregnability of colonialism and the symbolic code is challenged in the indifferent otherness of the jungle. The way the novel develops can therefore be characterized as a response to the confining nature of its own language. There is a movement through and out of the discursive vapidity of colonial rhetoric and the paternal word and toward a reinstatement of the maternal voice. The semiotic stealthily emerges from the symbolic as the novel proceeds. Dissension from the authority of the paternal word and realignment with the other of the maternal voice occur most disruptively and explicitly toward the end of the novel, with the journey up-river and with Rachel's death, but the ground is prepared earlier by the way in which imperial or colonial rhetoric deconstructs and destabilizes itself throughout the text. The reading process is progressively a listening process where we increasingly share Woolf's acute ear for the concealed weaknesses and tropological instability of apparently uncontroversial rhetorical formulations. The unraveling of the authority of colonial rhetoric centers around two particular tropes, the figure of inside/outside, and the metaphor of the state as machine. We are partly alerted to this rhetorical self-deconstruction through its accompaniment by what might be characterized as a soundtrack, the increasingly insistent inscriptions within the narrative of inhuman noise and nonverbal vocalizations, so that the apparent coherence of th e symbolic code is eroded by the alterity of sound and the increasingly explicit emergence of the semiotic. …

“Chaos Invading Concept”: Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture

Abstract: It is Chaos invading Concept and bursting it like nitrogen. Wyndham Lewis, Blast 38 The advertisements in the final pages of the modernist journal The Egoist were usually modest affairs, small boxes of print that announced the availability of publications such as Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own or Benjamin R. Tucker's State Socialism and Anarchism. But on 1 April 1914 a peculiar full-page ad appeared in these pages, an ad that loudly proclaimed the imminent arrival of a periodical to be edited by Wyndham Lewis. The ad promised that this new journal, brazenly christened Blast, would provide its readers with a "Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." From this "Discussion" would emerge the English avant-garde movement vorticism. Lewis, Pound, and the other artists and writers affiliated with this new journal had yet to ascribe a moniker to their movement, but in form and content this ad for Blast adumbrated the vorticist cultural agenda, which belligerently demanded that the art public reject anachronistic sentimental culture in favor of a radically new a nd distinctly English visual and literary aesthetic. [1] The aggression that would characterize vorticism was evident in this first ad, for it pushed the other ads in The Egoist--conservative notices for books and journals featuring traditional typography, complete sentences, and abstemious claims--to the margins. At center stage was the ad for Blast, which used the visually striking typography of mainstream commercial advertising: oversize, boldface type, capital letters placed only for emphasis, and unlineated text with large white spaces. It also invoked the sensational language, the telegraphic messages, and the outlandish promises of commercial advertising when it offered Blast's potential readership "NO Pornography. NO Old Pulp," and the "END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA." [2] This ad, composed by Ezra Pound well before the actual birth of the vorticist movement, serves as a trenchant example of how modernist intellectuals deployed the tropes of commercial print advertising to publicize a nascent avant-garde movement and its organ of cultural and political expression. The broad claim that modernists employed the practices of commercial advertising in their aesthetic production or that they aggressively marketed their wares is not particularly electrifying in a field enamored of studying the interplay between mass culture and modernism. While the first half of the twentieth century was rich with academics from the Leavisites to the New Critics eager to assert that modernism was either indifferent or hostile to mass culture, around the time of Andreas Huyssen's now-famous contention that "Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project" (47), many critical studies began to clarify how mass culture offered modernist authors a rich source of inspiration both for stylistic innovation and for subject matter that reflected contemporary life practices. [3] In particular, recent critics have explored the modernists' relationship to promotional culture, a term the sociologist Andrew Wernick uses to describe our culture as one in which advertising is a "rhet orical form" that has "come to shape not only that culture's symbolic and ideological contents, but also its ethos, texture, and constitution as a whole" (vii). [4] A number of works have explored the relationship between promotional culture and modernist art, but perhaps the most salient sign that the academy has come to recognize the important interplay between promotional culture and modernism is the publication of Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, edited by Dettmar and Watt. In this anthology, a variety of well-established literary and cultural critics provide readings of modernist texts and practices, all supporting the editors' assertion that "Advertising is arguably the modern(ist) art form par excellence" (5) [5]--a claim with which fictional modernist admen such as Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Dos Passos's J. …

Introduction Twentieth-Century Apocalypse: Forecasts and Aftermaths

Abstract: We are all haunted by visions that we are trying in vain to put out of our minds. Robert Jungk (3) You loved the scenes, didn't you, when I first showed you them? A flat-out fascination with the threat, soberly maintaining that the only thing to do when the world begins to end is to stand aside and paint it. Richard Powers (341) The arbitrary chronometric click of the millennium was registered last I year, and it was quite wonderful to see the millennial dawn in every time zone broadcast on Public Television. It was so serious, such an Event, a sure sign that nothing was happening. Only the Danes thought to perform a millennial parody, which ended with the queen of Denmark being assassinated! What was truly noteworthy, though, was not how little took place, but how little was expected. Millennial feeling, for the first time, was almost entirely severed from apocalyptic urges and fears. There were still, of course, people catastrophizing on websites, stockpiling weapons in Texas, and waiting for the end in Jerusalem. But these responses seemed quaintly anachronistic; one could feel almost a pleasant nostalgia knowing that there were still a few people looking forward to the end of the world. The only endemic anxiety concerned Y2K, the possible worldwide computer glitch. Most of us, though, ultimately were convinced by government and business assurances that the problem had been addressed; and, as it happened, the world's computers changed their dates quite smoothly. And yet, as Walt Whitman once wrote, "Something startles me where I thought I was safest" (208). Certainly, I am relieved that nuclear annihilation no longer seems imminent. One doesn't really feel nostalgia for Mutual Assured Destruction, Ronald Reagan, and Hal Lindsey. But still I wonder about the causes of the sudden evaporation of apocalyptic feeling at the end of the twentieth century, a century so thoroughly marked, perhaps even defined, by apocalyptic impulses, fears, representations, and events. The reasons for this general millennial calm are both obvious and not so obvious. First, there is no great global crisis that would help precipitate apocalyptic fears and desires. There is, of course, a very real ecological crisis, but corporate and government public relations seem to have successfully numbed public concern. Without the Cold War and the Soviet Union, there is no Evil Empire, no Antichrist, no immediate threat of annihilation. The terrible eruptions of bloody local conflicts do not seem likely to widen into Armageddons; even the Middle East conflict, without the added heat of superpower ideological rivalry, has receded to the status of just another brutal, local idiocy, in spite of the efforts of zealots to make it something more. Furthermore, the apparent prosperity created by global capitalism has made the millennium seem irrelevant. Even those of us bashing this consumerist Babylon and its international war against labor and the environment want to make sure our TIAA-CREF funds are doing well. But there is another factor, I believe, contributing to the relative scarcity of apocalyptic fervor at the end of the millennium, and that is a kind of apocalyptic fatigue, or indeed, a widespread sense that the apocalypse has, in some sense, already happened. No, we didn't actually get nuked or wiped out by ebola or nerve gas; aliens didn't land on the White House lawn. We in the developed West are still alive and more or less kicking. But we need to consider seriously the fact that even the most dystopic visions of science fiction of the last half century cannot replicate events that have actually taken place, events that we have seen, recorded, and reproduced. We don't need to speculate. We know what the end of the world looks like. We kno w because we've seen it, and we've seen it because it's happened. The images of Nazi death camps, of mushroom clouds and human silhouettes burned onto pavements, of not just massacres but genocides in a dozen places, of urban wastelands and ecological devastation are all part of our cultural heritage. …

To “Flash White Light from Ebony”: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Abstract: The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation--and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic--and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage" (Ecrits 4) The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was shaped by domination, which it universalized. This holds true as well for art-works. The more they freed themselves from external goals, the more completely they determined themselves as their own masters. Because, however, artworks always turn one side toward society, the domination they internalized also radiated externally. Theodor W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 17--18 My concern is solely with art. What am I? Jean Toomer to John McClure, July 22, 1922 (qtd. in Kerman 26) The temptation to read Jean Toomer's Cane as something of a modernist experiment in autobiography is strong, and scholars who do so fall into two camps: those who see the work as a tribute to the discovery of a true self, and those who read it as testimony to the failure of an attempt to make that discovery. Critics in the first camp take as their starting point Toomer's own compelling story of the genesis of Cane: trapped in genteel poverty in Washington, D.C., caring for two ailing grandparents, feverishly working to train himself as a writer, he accepts a temporary job in the fall of 1921 at an industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia, and there, exposed for the first time in his life to the Southern African American rural folk, discovers his creative voice. Those biographical readers of Cane who stress this flowering of Toomer's creativity see the book as a lyrical celebration of rediscovered African American roots; content is stressed over form, as we are encouraged to read past Toomer's style to uncover the racial, psychosocial meaning beneath. The poem in part 1, "Song of the Son," is held to bear a truth at once personal and aesthetic: before he could become a great artist, Toomer--an olive-skinned young man who passed for white in college (Kerman 63)--first had to become black. Cane thus is cast as the mirror of Jean Toomer's soul, reflecting to him a moment, however brief, of true racial vision and, it follows, great artistic achievement. The aesthetic importance of Cane thus lies less in its formal and stylistic experiments than in its unapologetic, nonbourgeois choice of the Southern black peasant as hero. [1] Events in Toomer's life subsequent to Cane can seem to bolster this critical argument. In 1923, when Horace Liveright urged Toomer to stress his "colored blood" in the brief biography Boni & Liveright planned to use in publicizing Cane, Toomer objected: "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine" (qtd. in Kerman 110-11). This first link in a long chain of racial disclaimers climaxed in the 1932 pamphlet "A Fact and Some Fictions," in which Toomer wrote: "As for being a Negro, this of course I am not--neither biologically nor socially" (qtd. in Benson 43). Toomer "had considered the matter and was determined to erase, as much as possible, his connections to the Afro-American experience," notes Nellie Y. McKay, concluding that this rejection had debilitating artistic consequences (199). The sense of wholeness and creative well-being that flowed from Toomer's embrace of rural blackness evaporated as the author sought a "raceless," philosophical (as opposed to a esthetic) unity of spirit. His writings became increasingly dry and didactic, and the vast bulk remained unpublished in his lifetime. [2] Thus, while Cane is seen as a pinnacle of achieved wholeness, a moment of aesthetic racial truth, [3] Toomer himself is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly modern incarnation of "double consciousness": the racially alienated man. …

From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”

Abstract: John Hersey's "Hiroshima" was first published in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker. A relatively liberal and sophisticated magazine, The New Yorker devoted its entire contents to Hersey's story that week, deleting its usual light-hearted cartoons and humorous editorials. The response was sensational: the text was republished in full by several newspapers, ABC radio broadcast a reading of the entire text over four nights, and the book version of the text became an immediate bestseller (Boyer, 203-05; Lifton and Mitchell 86-88; Weart 107-09). "Hiroshima" has remained in print continuously since its initial publication and has been required reading for generations of American high school and college students (Huse 35-36; Yavenditti 24-25). It is difficult to overstate the importance of Hersey's text in the history of the Atomic Age: as one reader of The New Yorker put it, Hersey showed the world "what one [atomic] bomb did to people as distinct from a city, the Japanese people or the enemy" (qtd. in Luft and Wheeler 137). The atomic bombing of Hiroshima provides a definitive example of a technology that radically alters history and challenges the prevailing view of the world. As a response to this technology, Hersey's "Hiroshima" struck a chord with a huge number of Americans, providing us with a unique and powerful example of how narrative structures arise to make sense out of new technologies. Using the "wasteland" imagery of literary modernism, Hersey encapsulated for his American audience the horror of the atomic bomb within a familiar framework. At the same time, Hersey criticized the widely held view that the atomic bomb was a justified, science-fiction-style attack against an evil and militaristic Yellow Peril. In the year between the attack on Hiroshima and the publication of Hersey's story, American culture was engulfed in debates about the meaning of the atomic bomb. American newspapers, magazines, films, and radio programs were littered with representations of this new ultimate weapon, as Americans tried to make sense out of what this new technology really meant. So what was it about Hersey's text that made it so influential and that distinguished it from the scores of other representations that permeated American culture? Part of the answer to this question becomes evident when we look at the half-century before the atomic bomb was realized. As recent theories of genre have shown us, new discourses do not emerge out of thin air; rather, they draw on preexisting discursive structures to make sense of some new situation. A genre, which Todorov describes as a "historically attested codification of discursive properties" (19), functions as a discursive frame that arises to solve recurring communication problems fa ced by members of a community (Bazerman). The problem of representing the atomic bomb after the Hiroshima attack was vexing: the United States government used its monopoly on information about the new technology to greatly limit the possibilities for representing the attack. Yet both the government and the public had access to one preexisting genre that had in fact predicted the atomic bomb and given it a name. The genre was known as science fiction. Science-fiction representations of the atomic bomb developed Out of the future-war-story genre that became popular in the late nineteenth century. The popularity of future-war stories can be traced to May 1871, when an English military officer published a short story entitled "The Battle of Dorking" in the middle-class English monthly Blackwood's Magazine. As I.F. Clarke has shown, this short story caused an immediate sensation around the world and led to numerous imitations and controversies for years to come. More importantly, it established the future-war story (or what Clarke calls "the tale of the next great war" Tale 1) as a recognizable genre that still thrives in American culture today. The best-known example of the futurewar story from this period is H. …

Harriet Martineau's Black Hero and the American Antislavery Movement

Abstract: In 1841 the well-respected British writer Harriet Martineau published The Hour and the Man, her account of the Haitian Revolution, specifically to support the antislavery movement in the United States. Constrained by white middle-class values, essentialist notions of race, and her particular adaptation of utilitarianism, Martineau9s "historical romance" of Toussaint L9Ouverture reveals the strikingly conservative perspective of many of those involved in the early antislavery movement in Britain and America. The novel-widely read and reviewed by abolitionists-provided a rich and timely resource for those involved in the American movement, which by the end of the 1830s was moving into a more widespread and increasingly political phase. Martineau presented Toussaint as a black hero, a tragic, larger-than-life hero who acted with conviction and courage to defend his people from slavery and who, as a general, was finally defeated by the overwhelming numbers and power of the French forces. She also affirmed revolution as the almost inevitable consequence of a slaveholding system, linking Toussaint to the heroes of the American Revolution. Martineau9s images and themes would figure in the rhetoric of black and white antislavery writers alike, especially Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison. Martineau9s presentation of Toussaint made a black man central to the conception of what freed slaves might be capable of accomplishing, and it provided a crucial, if complicated, model for American writers.

Fatal Fluency: Behn's Fiction and the Restoration Letter

Abstract: Pardon me Sir that I aply myself to your Lordship: as the ffountaine from whence all the marcy I can expect (it seemes) must spring ... tis true I am sent for home: but tis as true that they knew well I had not money enough to com withall: I could not Beg nor starve heare ... if your Lordship will be pleasd to lett me have a Bill upon mr shaw for on[e] 100 pound more, of which my friend shall have part: I will heare promise your Lordship: if when I com home I can not give you absolute sattisfection I will Justly returne it againe. ... for god of heavens sake Sir take Pity on me; let me be usd like a Christian & one who would venture her life to gaine your ffavorable opinion & to be permitted amongst the number of my Lord your Lordships most ffaithfull & humble servant: A. Behne.

"The Case with My Dear Native Land": Nathaniel Hawthorne's Vision of America in The Marble Faun

Abstract: Although many critics have read The Marble Faun (1850) as a dull European travelogue that conveniently and inappropriately ignores the issues facing pre-Civil War America, in fact, this novel does engage the questions about national identity posed by the antebellum era. The central argument of The Marble Faun is whether or not African Americans and Catholic immigrants can become full-fledged Americans. That most troublesome of characters, the either admirable or hypocritical Hilda, is so troublesome precisely because she is a nexus where American tensions over the formation of national identity during the antebellum period coalesce. She demonstrates the vulnerability of white, Protestant-American identity to the influence of other ethnic, religious, and racial identities, and her response to those various potential influences indicates how such threats or possibilities will be managed in the new nation. The novel decides that African Americans cannot be reconciled to society and included in the nation9s future. American identity can resist the not entirely pernicious influence of Catholicism, but it cannot risk further contact with Africanist Others. However, The Marble Faun argues not that the shifting, complex, open American identity should be fixed, established, and rendered impenetrable to at least some outside forces; instead, it suggests that such a fixed identity, once achieved, will inevitably crumble under the weight of these excluded outside forces.

Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism

Abstract: Iam, of course, immensely flattered to be invited here, and for many reasons.1 As Horace Walpole said about the unexpected success of The Castle of Otranto, \"It is charming to totter into vogue.\"2 It is particularly charming because it lends credibility to the hypothesis of my continuing survival, which is not universally accepted: not long ago I fell into conversation with a student at Berkeley, and when, on parting, I told him my name, he answered with genuine astonishment: \"Oh, I thought you were dead.\" A third reason, no doubt, is that I cannot claim to be wholly a stranger to what Johnson said about Richardson: that he \"could not be content to sail quietly down the stream of reputation without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.\"3 My original difficulty in deciding whether to come and, if so, what to talk about arose partly from a sense of decorum which told me that I should not be observed visibly to agitate the stream of reputation myself; and yet this is what Paul Hunter in effect has asked me to do. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I don't want to repeat an earlier solicited transgression in the self-

A “Need of Distance and Blue”: Space, Color, and Creativity in To the Lighthouse

Abstract: I shall briefly revisit Bloomsbury aesthetics and interarts theory and then focus on space and color, perception and composition, in To the Lighthouse. According to Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry held that "G[acute{e}]zanne and Picasso had shown the way; writers should fling representation to the winds and follow suit. But [Fry] never found time to work out his theory of the influence of Post-Impressionism upon literature" (Roger Fry 149). Woolf worked out the interaction herself in To the Lighthouse, which was published in 1927, the same year as Fry's C[acute{e}]zanne: A Study of His Development. In C[acute{e}]zanne, Fry describes "plastic colour" as a "direct exponent of form" (17, 13); and in "Some Questions in Esthetics" (1926), he maintains that "our reaction to works of art is a reaction to a relation and not to sensations and objects or persons or events" (3). Fry's formalism gave Woolf her shaping principles for To the Lighthouse; she then worked out the relation of "architectural plasticity" (Fry, "Some Questions" 5) to verbal impressionism in composing the novel. Woolf observes that the "arts of painting and writing lay close together and Roger Fry was always making raids across the boundaries" (Roger Fry 208). She herself made raids on postimpressionist painting in the experimental writing of "Kew Gardens" (1919) and "Blue & Green" (1921), where the act of looking is so intense that it dissolves content into purely visual form. [1] In "The Artist's Vision" (published in 1919, the same year as Woolf's "Modern Fiction"), Fry says that those "who indulge in [aesthetic] vision"-- as distinct from the more active "creative vision "--"are entirely absorbed in apprehending the relation of forms and colour to one another" (47; my italics)--as Woolf is in "Blue & Green" and "Kew Gardens." [2] Woolf remarks that few writers met Fry's formalist standards: "they lacked objectivity, they did not treat words as painters treat paint." Her emphasis on words in relation to paint is the converse of Fry's, "many of [whose] theories held good for both arts. Design, rhythm, texture--there they were again--in Flaubert as in Cezanne" (Roger Fry 209). Fry saw texture as subsuming details in overall design: "The texture of the whole field of vision becomes so close that the coherence of the separate patches of tone and colour within each object is no stronger than the coherence with every other tone and colour throughout the field" (49). This is the effect of "distance and blue" toward the end of To the Lighthouse (279)--the effect of constructing a network of human interactions from associations of tone and color. Woolf told Fry that she emphasized texture, which she associated with language, rather than structure, which she associated with plot (qtd. in Broughton 46). Fry admired the postimpressionist s' "attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences" (Roger Fry 154), but his disjunction of "the spaceless world of psychological entities and relations" from the plastic world of "spatial relations" (Fry, "Some Questions" 23) is the effect of extreme formalism. [3] Woolf, in contrast, strove to invent "a system that did not shut out" (Writer's Diary 189) and to unify psychological and spatial, vital and formal values. As distinct from the still-life painter, the "writer has to keep his eye upon a model that moves, that changes" (Collected Essays 2:162). She wanted to make the novel more like a work of art, while catching the movement of life itself. [4] While Fry dichotomizes art and life, he "also admit[s] that under certain conditions the rhythms of life and of art may coincide" (Roger Fry 186). He concludes his study of Cezanne with the reminder that "such analysis halts before the ultimate concrete reality of the work of art" (Cezanne 88). More recently, Wendy Steiner has noted that the "semiotic concreteness" of modern art "seeks a repleteness of meaning that is never fully available in art, but only in life" (xii, xiii). …