scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question

Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2006"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The notion of cognitive systems was first introduced by as mentioned in this paper, who argued that in our highly computational world, artifacts carry part of the cognitive load, operating in flexible configurations in which are embedded human thoughts, actions, and memories, but this does not generate a human standard of selfawareness.
Abstract: IThe technology of recent decades has produced a multitude of objects that quite literally respond to touch: fabrics, walls, and everyday devices with embedded sensors now contain what have been called formulaic versions of human thought. In contact with these surfaces, we are becoming familiar with questions such as those posed by anthropologist Susanne Kiichler: "We have to ask how a thing can be 'thoughtlike,' or 'how thought can conduct itself in things'" (209). Answering these questions, accounting for artifacts literally capable of taking thought beyond the cognitive realm of any individual, transforms any purely Marxian account of the life of objects as a social phenomenon, imagined under conditions of commodity exchange. Describing this new kind of cognition also takes us beyond the existing frameworks for understanding consciousness as a transformative process. The thought of which objects are now capable is not the consciousness that Hegel famously describes as the engine of history. N. Katherine Hayles makes this distinction when she points out that in our highly computational world, "artifacts carry part of the cognitive load, operating in flexible configurations in which are embedded human thoughts, actions, and memories," and yet goes on to argue that cognition must be differentiated in this new realm from self-consciousness: machines may think - indeed may even think about themselves - but this does not generate a human standard of selfawareness (139). In this essay, I would like to use the distinction that recent discourse about materiality and mediation has generated - between self-consciousness and the kinds of lives and cognitive process that things can now be imagined as having to discuss a group of mid-eighteenth-century texts. These texts operate, I will argue, as "cognitive systems": fictions that are capable of speaking formulaically about their own constitution, appearance in print, handling as objects, and the movements of their readers through their pages, but they are not, for all this, selfconscious in the way this term normally applies either to the tradition of selfconscious literature or to the transformation of human society. When the

61 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The opening sentence of Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel, Secret History: or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), frames an opposition between the life of the physical body and that of the social body: "We arrived safely [in Saint Domingue]... after a passage of forty days, during which I suffered horribly from sea-sickness, heat and confinement; but the society of my fellow-passengers was so agreeable that I often forgot the inconvenience to which I was exposed" (61). One might note the tonal
Abstract: The opening sentence of Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel, Secret History: or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), frames an opposition between the life of the physical body and that of the social body: "We arrived safely [in Saint Domingue] ... after a passage of forty days, during which I suffered horribly from sea-sickness, heat and confinement; but the society of my fellow-passengers was so agreeable that I often forgot the inconvenience to which I was exposed" (61). One might note the tonal discrepancy between the first half of the sentence, which describes the travails of a sea voyage of biblical length and duress, and the second half of the sentence, which blithely dismisses the pains of the flesh in favor of the pleasures of sociability. An incongruity of experiential registers thus marks the opening of the novel, and while this incongruity asserts itself as slightly jarring initially, it becomes increasingly pronounced and disturbing as the novel unfolds. Indeed, the contrast embedded within the opening sentence augments hyperbolically throughout the novel such that within a few short pages we find scenes of bayoneted bodies interspersed with accounts of blushing glances exchanged at balls in the colonial palaces of Saint Domingue. Sansay's novel takes the form of a series of letters written by an American woman, Mary, to her intimate friend, Aaron Burr, then vice president of the United States. Mary, and her sister, Clara, travel to Saint Domingue in 1802 with Clara's French husband, St. Louis, in the hopes of regaining the estate he had lost during the early years of the Haitian Revolution.1 As a "secret history," the novel has its roots in the dalliance between its American-born author, Leonora Sansay, and Aaron Burr. Like the primary correspondent in the novel, Mary, Sansay was a close friend of Aaron Burr's and most likely his lover as well. Like Mary's fictional sister, Clara, Sansay was married to a French colonial from Saint Domingue, Louis Sansay, and the novel is loosely based on Leonora Sansay's

34 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the case of Mansfield Park, this article argued that a momentary silence in the conversation of a Baronet's family should not be too readily equated to the "silencing" of "subalterns" themselves, however tempting the symbolism.
Abstract: In the wake of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993), the "dead silence" that follows Fanny Price's question about "the slave trade" to her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park has come to dominate critical interpretations of Austen's engagement with slavery, colonialism, and empire. The critical fascination with Austen's description of "silence" stems from the centrality of silence and speech to 1980s and '90s theories of imperial and racial domination. Gayatri Spivak asks "can the subaltern speak?"; Toni Morrison, in a quotation Said uses as an epigraph to chapter 1 of Culture and Imperialism (3), remarks of "the presence of Africans and their descendants" in the nineteenthcentury U.S. that "silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken, and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing strategies" (50-51); Said himself maintains "that the universalizing discourses of modern Europe and the United States assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world" (50). Following such views, politically engaged critics have set about addressing the injustices of the past by working to reveal and break such silences. With regard to these political models of interpretation, however, the apparent relevance of the "silence" Austen describes may be deceptive. I would argue that a momentary silence in the conversation of a Baronet's family should not be too readily equated to the "silencing" of "subalterns" themselves, however tempting the symbolism. Indeed, should a young English woman - even a dependent niece - speak out on slavery and break a post-prandial silence, it would not necessarily mark her as resisting the progress of empire. Critics, I contend, have too readily equated silence to complicity and speech to resistance.1 In the case of Mansfield Park, such an equation ultimately masks the specific ways in which Austen's novel imagines slavery and lends its support to the enterprise of empire. While I accept the need for literary criticism to examine the effects of empire and to contribute to the history of imperialism, I will nonetheless argue that Said and those who follow him misread both the silence in Mansfield Park and its cultural moment. The first section of this essay considers Said's methods in interpreting Mansfield Park, including his commitment to an ideal of interpretation as breaking the silences of the past, dependent on the model of "the colonial

26 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Cosmopolitanism is an old idea that has gained new meaning for its ability to mediate the binary of sameness and difference posed in the twin attacks on the nation-state as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In recent years, a wide range of philosophers and theorists have proposed various forms of cosmopolitanism to address the racial, ethnic, and religious strife cropping up in the post-Cold War world. If the forms of cosmopolitanism they advocate are as varied as their disciplinary, political, and theoretical commitments, then they all appear to share a profound sense that the nation-state is in crisis. Its coherence in the modern world is threatened by two seemingly opposite but historically related forces: the rise of global capitalism and a resurgence of the appeal of ethnic and religious identities.1 The first undermines the nation-state by rendering it powerless to resist the voracious appetite of the market and the second attacks it from within by questioning its legitimacy to rule over diverse populations. Hence the philosophical and political appeal of cosmopolitanism, an old idea that has gained new meaning for its ability to mediate the binary of sameness and difference posed in the twin attacks on the nationstate. Cosmopolitanism, its advocates suggest, provides a useful philosophical foundation for negotiating the newly emergent concerns regarding the commonalities and differences among people(s) that have begun to reshape the modern world.2 One way to explain the recent resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism, therefore, is to recognize that the concept serves to solve a problem that first presented itself at the moment when the nation-state was born and has resurfaced in the last two decades. That is, the problem of mediating between the conflicting claims of particularity (made on behalf of the construction of a people) and commonality (made on behalf of the needs of the global marketplace) that now afflict the nation-state were the very problems it faced at the time of its inception. At that earlier moment, the nation-state proved more attractive than its alternatives. Whether that will be the case in the current scenario is yet to be seen. Given our tendency to celebrate the late eighteenthand early nineteenthcentury political developments for their part in birthing a more democratic relationship between the state and its subject, we can easily forget that this was a period of almost continual crisis for many of the polities of Europe and the Americas. Though often rendered positive by means of the term "Age of Revolutions," the tumultuous period that witnessed the birth of the nation-state also was the cradle of modern cosmopolitan thought. The nation-state was born in a

15 citations





Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the early republic of the United States, the first volume of the new Cambridge History of American Literature (Bercovitch) as mentioned in this paper was published, which claims to cover major literary genres, styles, and topics and yet has next to nothing to say about novels written during the period of the Revolution and the founding of a new republic.
Abstract: As scholars from Leslie Fiedler to Philip Fisher have demonstrated, James Fenimore Cooper's frontier fiction lends itself to allegorical readings about the founding of a nation at once masculine and American in origin. An obvious tautology informs all such readings: if novels are about history or should be, in order to qualify as the genuine American article then we must look to history to tell us what these novels are about. Besides marginalizing so much of the fiction actually produced and consumed in the early republic, reading to validate our historical preconceptions is further disadvantaged by two faulty assumptions. First, allegory treats fiction as a coy, even deceptive text that offers a more fashionably dressed or locally targeted way of explaining what history being based on fact can say in a forthright manner. Moreover, to read allegorically, we must overlook the fact that history is a narrative too. Whether it explains how we overthrew an oppressive father/ king, displaced an older European imperialism with our more recent brand, or transformed homegrown democracy into sovereignty in a global configuration of nations, literary criticism is updating the same old story. The consequences of undervaluing the early American novel and overvaluing twentieth-century historical accounts of nation-making are evident in the first volume of the new Cambridge History of American Literature (Bercovitch), which claims to cover major literary genres, styles, and topics and yet has next to nothing to say about novels written during the period of the Revolution and the founding of the new republic. Why is this reading method still so well entrenched?

10 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Forster's final novel A Passage to India as mentioned in this paper examines issues of representation in a characteristically modernist fashion, which is characteristic of a modernist questioning of the principles of "order, harmony, and law which form the basis of liberal humanism".
Abstract: Since the publication of A Passage to India in 1922, writers and critics of the most widely disparate views have expressed the belief that E. M. Forster's final novel examines issues of representation in a characteristically modernist fashion. Lionel Trilling, in what was perhaps the most influential reading of the novel during Forster's lifetime, quotes Forster's dictum that "[possession is one with loss" in order to explain the central problems of aesthetic representation dealt with in Passage (21). Benita Parry argues that Forster examines one of the central problems of modernist representation, the confrontation of the "civilized mind" of "the modern West" with "the primitive memories dormant in man" (294). Striking a critical stance quite antithetical to that of Parry, Sara Suleri claims that A Passage to India stages a "secret attack on difference," which makes it "that archetypal novel of modernity" (108-09). More recently, David Medalie argues that Passage is a "fully fledged and seminal modernist work" because it captures the "great drama of loss and recovery" characteristic of modernism (2-3); and Mohammad Shaheen asserts that Forster's primary achievement in the novel is the articulation of "an experience of alienation expressed in the impossibility of reconciliation" that is characteristic of a modernist questioning of the principles of "order, harmony, and law which form the basis of liberal humanism" (75-77). If a recognition of the novel's characteristically modernist examination of representational issues forms the virtually ubiquitous entry point into any critical discussion of A Passage to India, some critics have located the Marabar Caves themselves within a canon of modernist literary symbols. Such is the case when John Marx considers the Caves alongside Lily Briscoe's painting in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which is said to present the problems of a non-mimetic representation by "representing] the relationship between mother and child without creating their 'likeness'" (51). This is similarly the case when Debrah Raschke situates the Marabar Caves in the company of Briscoe's painting and "Stephen Dedalus's enigmatic forging in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; [and] the culminating toothbrush hanging on the wall in Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night" all of which capture the oscillation "between a desire for an impossible certainty... and a reciprocal terror that ultimately nothing can be known" (10). Perhaps because both the novel itself, and more specifically the symbol of the Marabar Caves, have been so widely accepted as canonical examples of the

8 citations




Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The essential parts of as discussed by the authors are as truly historical, and perhaps more to be depended upon, than any composition of a political writer of the best credit we can meet with, setting aside circumstances, the conclusions, and peculiar disposition of the collateral incidents, together with every thing that concerns merely the embellishment of the work, which is entirely arbitrary.
Abstract: Setting aside therefore the circumstances, the conclusions, and peculiar disposition of the collateral incidents, together with every thing that concerns merely the embellishment of the work, which is entirely arbitrary, we declare that all the essential parts are as truly historical, and perhaps more to be depended upon, than any composition of a political writer of the best credit we can meet with.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the "Author's Note" that accompanied the second British edition of Heart of Darkness in book form (1902), Conrad responds to the "literary speculation" that swirled around his surrogate narrator Marlow by describing their relationship as if it were an actual friendship rather than an effect of artistic creation as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the "Author's Note" that accompanied the second British edition of Heart of Darkness in book form (1902), Conrad responds to the "literary speculation" (9) that swirled around his surrogate narrator Marlow by describing their relationship as if it were an actual friendship rather than an effect of artistic creation. When Conrad hints at one point that with the disappearance of his creator, Marlow's "occupation would be gone and he would suffer from that extinction" (10), it is possible to take this as a bad joke, if one that anticipates later modern critical developments such as the emergence of the concept of the "death of the author."1 But what are we to make of the fact that Conrad's somewhat glib allusion to his proxy's potential unemployment occurs in the preface to a novella so fundamentally and darkly preoccupied with the themes of work, the extinction of work, and death? After all, near the beginning of his journey upriver, Marlow will encounter a set of figures who tread the line between work and extinction, but this time in a situation much less whimsical than that framed in the "Author's Note":



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In an 1895 poem, "The Burden of Mothers: A Clarion Call to Redeem the Race!/' Charlotte Perkins Gilman launches an argument that places women's reproductive powers at the center of nation building as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In an 1895 poem, "The Burden of Mothers: A Clarion Call to Redeem the Race!/' Charlotte Perkins Gilman launches an argument that places women's reproductive powers at the center of nation building. On the grounds that "through [women] comes the race" (8), she insists as long as women are "fettered with gold or with iron" (7) humanity will be "besotted, and brutish, and blind" (14). But while her address is ostensibly to the entire human "race," her model is more national than global. Asserting that "No nation, wise, noble and brave / Ever sprang tho' the father had freedom / From the mother a slave!" (22-24), Gilman links the fate of the nation to its mothers: how can a nation rise to glory if half its population is enslaved? If women "[make] the men of the world" (12), then the country where women enjoy the most freedom must be the country with the superior race. Gilman thus enjoins American men to give American women equal rights not for women's sake but for the nation's. The logic that Gilman elaborates is not particular to her alone. Feminists have rightly critiqued nationalism (in both its imperial and anti-colonial guises) for its masculinist and heterosexist deployment of the female body. Until very recently, however, postcolonial and Anglo-American feminist criticism has neglected the active role that feminist movements play in consolidating the nation on and around the bodies of women. This essay focuses on the feminist investment in nationalism to show that early twentieth-century feminists in the U.S. and India rely on eugenic reproduction to obtain a privileged position for a modern feminist subject within the nation. I use the phrase "eugenic feminism"1 to refer not only to U.S. and Indian feminism's historical engagement with the eugenics movement but also to the rhetoric of feminism itself. Eugenic feminism is a selfpurifying and self-perfecting rhetoric that works to create a feminist subject who, free of race, guarantees the reproduction of the sovereign nation. In so doing, eugenic feminism comes to depend on race in the form of phantom and figurai racial others to shape an identity in negative terms, defining what a feminist subject must avoid incorporating in order to advance the nation as a whole. While this definition should immediately bring to mind how African American women are excluded from "the American," in this essay I am concerned with the place of Asian women in the construction of the national ideal. Through a reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's economic theory and Utopian novels, I will elaborate the logic of eugenic feminism in order to demonstrate how, at the turn of the century, an American feminist subject was constructed in relation to abject Asian womanhood. I will then go on to trace this construction though Katherine Mayo's 1927 travelogue, Mother India, revealing how pathological Asian motherhood is figured as a contagion from which American women must be protected.

Journal ArticleDOI
John Marx1