Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2010"

The Coming into Being of Literature: How J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year Thinks through the Novel

Abstract: J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year begins with a statement about the origins of the state that is also a statement about literature. Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we”—not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one—participate in its coming into being. But the fact is that the only “we” we know—ourselves and the people close to us—are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are. (3) Coetzee, linking the “we” of readership to the “we” of citizenship (af! rming the connection before denying it), here commences a prolonged consideration of the relationship between reader and text, author and tradition, genre and its delimitations, all via a disquisition on the state. 1 The passage not only launches a book-long rethinking of the many presumptions about power relations that have clustered around the idea of the modern state and the master-slave dialectic, but it also gives clues about how to read a book whose narrative structure and visual layout explicitly defy, reform, and to some degree reinvent the realist novel. It makes sense that Coetzee would use political theory as a platform for probing literary form and, by extension, genre. “Forms are the abstract of social relationships,” Franco Moretti has written, “so, formal analysis is in its own modest way an analysis of power” (66). One of the most pressing questions posed by Diary of a Bad Year pertains to the problem of the novel genre generally: what it is and is not, how readers “create” texts and their meanings, how literary tradition and genre typologies are constructed and passed down, the plasticity of narrative form, whether the pressure of historical precedent can be evaded, and so on. In what follows, I discuss how these questions are examined obliquely through political opining, even as the printed page—segmented by lines and asterisks throughout—offers its own mute, running input. Diary of a Bad Year builds upon a series of experimental works (Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man) in both tone and theme but does more than any of Coetzee’s previous works to examine how the “coming into being” of a work of ! ction happens. In style, expository thinking, and

Dickens's “Supernumeraries” And the Biopolitical Imagination of Victorian Fiction

Abstract: Juxtaposed against the previous chapter’s scenes of poverty, despair, death, and the horrors of the overcrowded churchyard, this glimpse of the beau monde seems to contain an obvious commentary on the fatal consequences of indifference to “our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed” (180). This is a familiar theme for Dickens; Little Dorrit offers a strikingly similar parody of political reason among the ruling class:

History of the Novel, Theory of the Novel

Abstract: there are many ways of talking about the theory of the novel, and mine will consist in posing three questions: Why are novels in prose? Why are they so often stories of adventures? Why was there a european but not a chinese rise of the novel in the course of the eighteenth century? Disparate as they may sound, the questions have a common source in the guiding idea of the collection The Novel: “to make the literary field longer, larger, and deeper”—historically longer, geographically larger, and morphologically deeper than those few classics of nineteenth-century Western european “realism” that have dominated the recent theory of the novel (and my own work). What the questions have in common, then, is that they all point to processes that loom large in the history of the novel but not in its theory. Here I reflect on this discrepancy and suggest a few possible alternatives.

Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage-Plot

Abstract: In Great Books, his reflections on academia after taking introductory literature courses at columbia, David Denby laments the fate of “poor Henry James, whose sexual ambiguity, hesitations, and renunciations now [make] him a ripe subject of academic curiosity.” He goes on to explain that “James, the greatest—some would say the sole—chronicler of romantic love between men and women in American literature [is] being recuperated as a ‘queer’” (329). An analogous tone is struck by David Horowitz in his attack on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as he warns that “disappointment” awaits any students taking Sedgwick’s class on A la Recherche du temps perdu if they are “anticipating an introduction to the grand themes of childhood memory and unrequited love that infuse Proust’s classic novel.” Instead, Horowitz tells us, Proust is fated to be “drummed out of the closet” by “Professor Sedgwick’s politically motivated theories” (324). I assume that neither Denby nor Horowitz is suggesting that, since it would be impossible for homosexuals to write insightfully about heterosexual love, James and Proust could not have been gay. The more plausible claim they may be making is that reading Proust or James through the framework of the authors’ disavowed real-life sexuality risks becoming an obstacle to appreciating the insights they furnish on universal “grand themes.” The exact logic behind their objections is made explicit in neither case, and we might be forgiven for suspecting that it is homosexuality more than biographical criticism per se that is the stumbling block for both these critics. Nonetheless, these objections to the treatment, especially of James (who unlike Proust does not even write about homosexuality) as a gay writer, do raise some interesting questions. What is the link between queer theory and queer identity? Does queer theory have any business outing writers at all? Is the knowledge that James was secretly homosexual relevant to our reading of his (heterosexual) fictional worlds, and if so, how, exactly? For Simon During, the knowledge of Henry James’s closet enriches his treatment of heterosexual themes:

Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in Djuna Barnes

Abstract: This essay investigates the idea of biofuturity within modernism, focusing specifically on the figure of male maternity in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. Although the figure of the pregnant male occurs in ancient and classical literature, it surfaces significantly in modernist works-Joyce's Ulysses, Pound's Cantos, Freud's Schreber case-at a moment when biological life was being reimagined through the optic of eugenic science and comparative anatomy. The essay extends Lee Edelman's critique of reproductive futurity in No Future to suggest that dystopic biological futures were being imagined around figures such as Dr. O'Connor whose desire, as he says, to “boil some good man's potatoes and toss up a child … every nine months” reinforces his queer identity and annexes the importance of disability in many of the novel's characters. Modernist cultural representations of the pregnant male foreground the spectacle of reproduction loosed from its putative organic site in the female body and displace it elsewhere-the test tube, the surrogate womb, the male body, and, not insignificantly, the novel. This displacement is both a queering and cripping of normative attitudes toward reproductive health and the futures that such embodiment implies. It also warps traditional narrative attitudes toward biological futurity when the family romance no longer reproduces the heterosexual body. Barnes's novel is not a baroque anomaly among stream of consciousness narratives but perhaps the representative modernist novel because it offers an inside narrative of individuals interpellated within biological and racial science.

The Time of Breach: Class Division and the Contemporary African American Novel

Abstract: c. Refereed Journal Articles • “The Time of Breach: Class Division and the Contemporary African American Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43.1 (2010): 11-17. • “Black Crisis Shuffle: Fiction, Race, and Simulation,” African American Review 42.2: (2008): 1-19 (Winner of the Joe Weixlmann Award for best essay on 20thand 21st century literature). • “How the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism, Masculinity, and Performativity,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.2 (2005): 299–321. • “Diaspora by Bus: Reginald McKnight, Postmodernism, and Transatlantic Subjectivity.” Contemporary Literature 46.1 (2005): 46-77. • “The Long Strut: Song of Solomon and the Emancipatory Limits of Black Patriarchy.” Callaloo A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 22.1 (1999): 121-33.

"Whose Injury Is Like Mine?" Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and the Sincere Postures of Suffering Men

Abstract: Of the many repeated terms in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, a few are particularly striking: pain, suffering, injury. Critics have long argued that the “oppressive narrowness,” as Eliot describes it, of life in St. Ogg’s generates emotional and cognitive limitations for its central character, Maggie Tulliver; it circumscribes her aspirations, imagination, ideas, and desires (363). After several hundred pages in which Maggie suffers, culminating in the loss of her reputation when she and her suitor Stephen Guest briefly elope, it seems only natural that she would exclaim, “[W]hose pain can have been like mine? Whose injury is like mine?” (647). Indeed, given her thwarted and at times ill-conceived attempts to attain agency, such an expression seems decidedly appropriate. Only Maggie does not utter these words; Stephen does. The incongruity of Stephen’s self-pitying rhetoric at the very moment when Maggie becomes a social pariah encapsulates several vexing social questions. These questions frequently recur in both The Mill on the Floss and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a novel written thirteen years earlier that also evinces an interest in male suffering. Why do men repeatedly assert their own powerlessness despite the legal, familial, and social authority they enjoy? What is the source for the anguish of which they speak? Does the seemingly misogynistic convention of transforming the subjugated woman into an imagined agent of oppression—as the men in these novels, attempting to identify the cause of their distress, often do—originate in something other than an entrenched cultural hostility? Focusing on the transition from a traditional yeoman economy to a system of capitalist property ownership, and with it the changing definitions of dependency affecting able-bodied and disabled men alike, these novels track the emergence of a wounded masculinist liberal subject.1

War, Optics, Fiction

Abstract: Richard Altick tells the story in his engrossing book The Scholar Adventurers. During World War II, aerial photographic interpreters had experimented with optical shortcuts for evaluating possible targets, monitoring enemy troop and supply movements, and assessing bombing damage. Placing \"before\" and \"after\" photos of a location into adjacent slide projectors, intelligence workers superimposed the two images by aiming the projectors at a single screen and then caused the images to oscillate rapidly. The hope was that any variations between the images— discrepancies caused by a ground object's having been moved, damaged, or repaired—would appear as flickers or wobbles as the projectors toggled on and off in quick alternation. Owing to the difficulty of taking perfectly aligned photos from high altitudes, this optical comparator was never widely used during the war. But a young naval intelligence officer named Charlton Hinman heard about the technique, and it set him thinking about—what else?—disparities in the Folger Library's many copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare. Hinman had recently completed his doctorate in English at the University of Virginia and would spend most of the war in Australia under the command of his dissertation director, Fredson Bowers, in a code-breaking unit that produced several other bibliographers of note. After the war, with backing from the Veterans Administration, the Bureau of Standards, and the Folger, Hinman pursued his dream of an optical collator that would aid the early modern textual scholar. He built the prototype out of bindery cardboard, a wooden apple crate he found in the alley outside the library, and pieces of an Erector set scavenged from a friend's son (Smith 139). Later versions, using mirrors and light bulbs to juxtapose actual texts instead of photographs of those texts, revolutionized bibliographic studies by ushering in the era of mechanized collation. Hinman had used reconnaissance to illuminate the renaissance. The sort of buoyant meliorism with which I've retold the story of the Hinman collator is the house style of a familiar popular history of technology that celebrates the convergence of problem, serendipitous hint, and plucky inventor, the triumph of the bright idea over the setback. A public radio series called \"Engines of Our Ingenuity,\" sponsored by the University of Houston's College of Engineering, says that Hinman \"had managed to beat a flawed sword into^a most unexpected plowshare\" (Lienhard). Such a voice seldom tells you about how the plow dreams of its sword days or how it gives the farmer an excuse to keep blades around to the ready. Instead, it naturalizes the distinction between wartime and peacetime, insisting that war was back then and peace is now, that civilian applications are the benign

The Schizophrenic Solution: Dialectics of Neurosis and Anti-psychiatric Animus in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract: Of the many roles St. Philip’s Episcopal Church has played in Harlem’s modern history, perhaps none is as remarkable as or more improbable than its tenure as the home of the LaFargue Psychiatric Clinic. From 1946 to 1959, the clinic operated literally underground in the basement of St. Philip’s parish house, catering to Harlem’s racial and economic minorities and offering, in the words of its founder, “the will to survive in a hostile world” (“Psychiatry” 50). On Tuesday and Thursday nights, from six to eight in the evening (though the all-volunteer workforce almost always stayed later), Harlem’s residents would descend into a realm described by Ralph Ellison as a “labyrinth” (Shadow 47) of stairways and hallways to receive treatments and therapies unavailable to them anywhere else. The scene must have been a strange one: outside, a line of the most unlikely candidates for psychotherapy waited for a chance to speak with doctors whose time was more often reserved for the privileged white folk who could pay them; inside, a makeshift waiting room was cobbled together from Sunday school chairs and tables, and the skeleton of a clinic took shape from a row of cubicles stretching the length of a hallway. Perhaps the only thing more incongruous than the apparatus of psychiatry in the bowels of a church would have been the very existence of a psychiatric clinic in the heart of Harlem, where, following the social logic of the day, there would hardly have been a need for it. For while the inescapably poor and largely African American clientele could and, in accordance with the era’s familiar social prejudices, likely would suffer from a kind of vulgar insanity, psychotherapies of the sort that Dr. Fredric Wertham and his staff sought to provide were considered applicable only to the civilized and sophisticated (read: white and rich) patients who struggled with the more refined neuroses of modernity.