Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2011"
TL;DR: In this paper, the development of the genre of alternate history, also called allohistory, is discussed and the authors argue that it may be treated as a philosophical genre that meditates on contingency and determinism.
Abstract: The article sketches the development of the genre of alternate history, also called allohistory and argues that allohistory may be treated as a philosophical genre that meditates on contingency and determinism. It examines two contemporary allohistorical novels, Israeli author Nava Semel’s IsraIsland (2005) and American writer Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), that comment on the role of Israel in the Jewish imagination. The thematic and formal elements of these texts reveal how a version of allohistory can also function as a kind of detective fiction that may influence the reception of historiographic narratives.
14 citations
TL;DR: Our Mutual Friend as mentioned in this paper is the first book of the first series of Our Mutual Friend, and it is the only book in which we are aware of the existence of a single-legged seller of ballads.
Abstract: The end of the first book of Our Mutual Friend discovers Silas Wegg, a one-legged seller of ballads, hopping around Boffin’s Bower “like some extinct bird” (211). Raised from his lowly social position by becoming Mr. Boffin’s “literary man,” Wegg repays his kindly master by assessing what he might be able to thieve from Boffin’s room and that this might further aid him in his ascent up the social scale. He is, though, like the Dodo and other extinct birds, ultimately unsuccessful in the fierce struggle for survival anatomized in Dickens’s final completed novel. Sir Richard Owen, eminent anatomist and a leading figure in the scientific establishment throughout Dickens’s career, took a particular interest in “extinct birds”; the megalasaurus that walks up Holborn Hill at the start of Bleak House was central to his theorizing as “the highest form of reptile, with real affinities” to mammals (see Levine). Dickens’s fiction is stuffed full of references to animals, but in his later work, and in particular in Our Mutual Friend, such references need to be understood in relation to early and mid-nineteenth-century natural history. Gaffer Hexam, we are told, is “half savage” with his “wilderness of beard and whisker”; he is a “bird of prey,” or, as Rogue Riderhood puts it, “like the wulturs” (14). When Riderhood visits Wrayburn and Lightwood in an attempt to implicate Gaffer Hexam in the Harmon murder, Wrayburn dismisses him in consecutive sentences as “vermin” and “a water rat” (172). The people who make their livings along the shoreline, a “knot of those amphibious human-creatures who appear to have some mysterious power of extracting a subsistence out of tidal water by looking at it” (80), merge with the primeval “slime and ooze” (13) of the Thames with which Our Mutual Friend begins; their world is in tension with the modern world of commerce on which the river and its workers, and London itself, depended in mid-Victorian Britain.
12 citations
TL;DR: Dickens used to walk the streets of London obsessively, devouring miles and miles in his perambulations, and the influence of these walks on Dickens's imagination has been noted by many critics, from Alexander Welsh in The City of Dickens to the recent studies by Peter Ackroyd, Jeremy Tambling, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer.
Abstract: Dickens used to walk the streets of London obsessively, devouring miles and miles in his perambulations. The influence of these walks on Dick- ens's imagination has been noted by many critics, from Alexander Welsh in The City of Dickens to the recent studies by Peter Ackroyd, Jeremy Tambling, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer. But the nature of this influence has been the subject of a debate, with critics divided between what might be called the aesthetic and the social poles. On the one hand, in his 1981 essay "Dickens the Flâneur," later in- cluded in Dickens and the Grotesque, Michael Hollington uses the habit of walking to connect Dickens to the concept of flânerie, introduced by Charles Baudelaire and developed by Walter Benjamin. The flâneur is an urban aesthete, a connoisseur of the crowd, "roaming the streets and practicing his eyes" (41). Baudelaire describes him as follows: The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird's, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits... The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. ("The Painter of Modern Life") The flâneur, confronted with the sights of misery and privation, keeps his distance. While not necessarily devoid of social conscience, he is consumed by what Baudelaire calls "the deep and joyful curiosity" of childhood that makes no distinction between sad and happy images but delights in the overwhelming flood of impressions. Jeremy Tambling emphasizes the influence of the aesthetics of flânerie on Dickens's ur- ban poetics: "Streets, figures and crowds, they generate, for Dickens as flâneur, his own 'figures': figures of speech, fictional characters, and a figural, that is to say, allegorical sense of reality" (2009: 10). Dickens's reading and writing of the city implies an aesthetic detachment that en-
10 citations
TL;DR: The authors place Lanyer's use of scopic metaphors within the context of early seventeenth century Protestant idioms of devotion and sight, and argue that the aim of her work was not only to rewrite Christ's passion or the Original Sin, nor merely to make bid for patronage, but also a femnine re-conception of seeing, reading, and believing which clashed with contemporary ideas of vision and cognition.
Abstract: The dedicatory poem Aemilia Lanyer wrote for Queen Anne invites the reader to see the verses as a Eucharistic mirror. Despite the volume of critical literature on Salve Deus , Lanyer’s uses of sight in the definition of feminine cognition and religious devotion have been ignored. In this article I place Lanyer’s use of scopic metaphors within the context of early seventeenth century Protestant idioms of devotion and sight — I thus argue that the aim of Lanyer’s work was not only to rewrite Christ’s passion or the Original Sin, nor merely to make bid for patronage — it was a femnine re-conception of seeing, reading, and believing which clashed with contemporary ideas of vision and cognition. What Lanyer was doing in her poems was to reconceive both her role as poet and that of the reader’s as the two sides of an optic and Eucharistic encounter.
9 citations
TL;DR: It has been said that without George Eliot's last novel, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), the state of Israel might not even exist as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: It has been said that without George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), “the state of Israel might not exist.” In the novel itself, at any rate, the state of Israel only appears as a hazy hypothesis entertained by its narratorial consciousness from within the confines of an implicit European regionalism predicated on English common sense. In Eliot’s final fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), the sinister anxieties affecting that common sense in the face of a lurid fantasy of judaeo-techno-capitalist “alienism” of its own making bleed back, generating complications of voice and vision, challenging Eliot’s authorship and authority, and straining her text into rhetorical reaction formations indicative of a new crisis in the imagination of human community that all her writing had worked to refine.
9 citations
TL;DR: This paper focused on the aggressor-victim paradigms upon which Dickens built three of his female characters in Great Expectations : Mrs. Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, and Molly.
Abstract: The article focuses on the aggressor-victim paradigms upon which Dickens builds three of his female characters in Great Expectations : Mrs. Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, and Molly. Usually described as monstrous, the three characters are here discussed in terms of the hidden motives of their strange behavior, one of the sources of uneasy pleasures in the reading process. Viewed from the feminist standpoint, the representation of the three characters is associated with Victorian views concerning the treatment of women, sexuality, crime, and marriage; viewed in psychological terms, all the three display symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, wit the roles of victim and aggressor shifting over time.
8 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that humans cannot be reduced to genes or reproductive strategies, nor can they be compared to mere cultural constructs. But they can be seen as being both nature and culture, free, but only within limits.
Abstract: In the sesquicentennials of Darwin's The Origin of Species and Mill's On Liberty, determinism and freedom returned to grand and popular narrative. NeoDarwinian books like The Literary Animal (2005) and Madame Bovary's Ovaries (2005) returned us via evolutionary psychology or E. O. Wilson's socio-biology to a universal human nature based in genes and reproduction. Whereas Habermasians grounded freedom and constraint solely in community and communication, NeoDarwinians reduced human decisions to reproductive instincts. Then 2010 saw the tenth anniversary of the completed human genome sequence, and reductive conceptions of the genome were rife. Confronted with such reductionisms, we are challenged to maintain a more complex understanding of the interworkings of nature and culture in species self-formation.This essay does so by reconsidering the methods of the philosophical anthropologists who valued the human capacities for freedom and choice, self-creation, and self-formation, within natural limits and constraints. In the complex workings of nature and culture, humans cannot be reduced to genes or reproductive strategies, nor can they be reduced to mere cultural constructs. The philosophical anthropologists studied the way culture and technology mediated biological nature, and vice versa, the way nature mediated culture and technology. When they wanted to know what humankind was, they looked at the history of its interactions with nature. Through that history, they saw its capabilities and limits. There was no essence of humankind outside its historical existence, and the ability to reflect on that history opened the world to ideal goals.This empirical or historical ontology that asked what kinds of creatures humans were at home in both nature and their diverse cultures was at its height in the mid-nineteenth century and is only now returning after a century and a half of reductions to either nature or culture. From geneticists to meteorologists, scientists are looking at the ways in which culture interacts with the environment at both molecular and global levels. They write of onto-genetic or developmental niches in which nature is nurtured as the product of mutually influencing genes and environment. The terms they use are Emergence, post-genomics, and the new epigenesis.My contention is that cutting-edge science today is much closer to the pre-disciplinary sciences of the mid-nineteenth century than we have seen for 150 years and that when reading the Victorians we should celebrate their epistemic pluralism and diversity. We should celebrate the uneasy pleasures of knowing that we are both nature and culture, free, but only within limits. Dickens was characteristically knowledgeable of the science of his time, and his work shows the scope and limits of the human animal as conceived in the 1850s. I use Little Dorrit to demonstrate this because it is a novel about limits and constraints. I present my argument in the form of four theses on Nature, culture, technology, and hope, and I claim that these not only reflect the science of Dickens's time but also of our own.
7 citations
TL;DR: In contrast to the negative judgment of the city (God made the country, man made the town), Dickens represents the city as the default modern condition but not as a given: his city is in process of transformation, in its splendor as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Part of the pleasure of reading Dickens comes from the experience of movement through the city. The narrative voice guides the reader through the urban landscape of Dickens’s fiction in tandem with its characters — Kate and Nicholas moving with Mrs. Nickleby through London in search of a place to live; Amy Dorrit leaving the Marshalsea and traveling to Mrs. Clennam’s through a kaleidoscope of London (notably in the recent BBC adaptation; see Paganoni); or the narrator of Sketches seeing old clothes come to life on Monmouth Street, bringing their wearers to life through imagination that sets a model for reading. 1 The dynamic experience of reading generates a living cityscape 2 which yields complex vicarious emotions — the settling in of comfort as well as the surprise of fear, the excitement of a desired encounter, or the terror at the discovery of the stalker. These contradictory feelings often accompany the cognitive dissonance of the urban scene, which becomes both the condition for experience and expression of its multiplicities. Dickens moves the reader through events — psychic, political, social, or communal; his plots become the grammar of his urban language, his settings the syntax for bridging the divides of class, gender, age, and profession. It is no exaggeration to say (see, e.g., Schwarzbach, Sicher) that this dynamic city trope is the central character of his fiction. In contrast to the negative judgment of the city (“God made the country, man made the town”), Dickens represents the city as the default modern condition but not as a given: his city is in process of transformation, in its splendor
7 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy, walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers.
Abstract: This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers, Dickens fuses homo ludens with homo faber . The sheer pleasure of reading must be shown to be useful, yet the novel has not proven popular until recent years and its moral message does not wear will in a postmodern hedonistic culture. Nevertheless, imagination as means as well as metaphor must be tested by its success, and the author, like Mr Jupe, cannot afford to miss a trick.
6 citations
TL;DR: In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens uses physiognomy as an indirect way of portraying characters that observe their fellow-characters rather than as a direct means of portraying the characters observed.
Abstract: In Our Mutual Friend , Charles Dickens uses physiognomy as an indirect way of portraying characters that observe their fellow-characters rather than as a direct means of portraying the characters observed. This reading of faces often constitutes misinterpretation: Dickens links Our Mutual Friend to the issue of reading itself, providing models of reader response. Misreadings thus become morally and aesthetically relevant to the overall structure and effect of the novel.
5 citations
Abstract: Flannery O’Connor did not see herself as a political writer, and many critics perpetuate her self-image in their assessment of her work. She was, however, a keen observer of the politics of everyday conversation. By exploring the ritualized exchange of cliches between employer and hired help, particularly in “Revelation” (1964) and “The Displaced Person” (1954), this essay examines the ways in which O’Connor draws attention to the peculiar collective power of the cliche. The two stories demonstrate the politics of the cliche in her fiction, a phenomenon some critics overlook because they assume, as many of O’Connor’s characters do, that cliches are empty platitudes. “Revelation” dramatizes the politics of the cliche in a democratic setting, whereas “The Displaced Person” calls attention to the way in which cliches confirm and contest hierarchies of power in the master-servant relationship. In “Revelation,” the seemingly benign (and often hilarious) exchange of cliches between two key female characters serves to exclude a third party. The ritualization of their exchange, however, and the assumption that cliches are banal, mask this act of exclusion. “The Displaced Person” also stars two female characters who exchange cliches to exclude an outsider, and because cliches have the ability to echo unexpectedly across conversations, they function both inside and outside the women’s relationship. A variety of other speakers draw on a communal stock and recycle the same cliches. The regularities with which cliches and silences circulate in the conversations between the two key characters can thus be extrapolated to a network of other relationships within the story. Over time, a single act of exclusion on the part of two characters develops the potential to trigger escalating acts of aggression, verbal and physical. “The Displaced Person” suggests that cliches carry unexpected and potentially ever graver consequences in a collective context. “Revelation” and “The Displaced Person” enable O’Connor to explore issues of democracy in a new way; read in the context of each other, they highlight the political and ethical significance of cliches, in particular their relation to violence.
TL;DR: The authors argued that Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby contains a number of elements taken from Frances Trollope's anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Life of the Mississippi.
Abstract: The article argues that Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby contains a number of elements taken from Frances Trollope's anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Life of the Mississippi . In detaching Trollope's images and language from the setting of plantation culture, Dickens creates a story that is permeated with the feelings of abolitionist literature without being tied to a single political aim.
TL;DR: This article explored the relationship between fairy tale, language, and reality in Our Mutual Friend, and the way in which Dickens' language mediates between our "uneasy" sense that, on the one hand, we are reading a fairy tale or rather a set of interwoven fairy tales, and on the other hand, that the novel is, nevertheless, in some sense a work of "realism," though not at all concerned with "social reality" in any sense seriously analogous to, say, Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.
Abstract: This essay concerns the connection between literature and reality. It argues that the existence of such a connection is made possible by the dual role of social practice in founding, on the one hand, human reality (including character), and on the other, linguistic meaning. While an author is free to determine such matters as plot or imagery under the control of nothing stronger than general plausibility and verisimilitude, a far stronger constraint from the side of reality comes into play the moment he sets about deploying the resources of a natural language, which is not his private property but a public possession, whose possibilities of meaning stand before him independently of his wishes, already richly charged with references, both historic and contemporary, to the structures of practice constitutive of the social order from which it has emerged, and the complexities of whose daily intercourse on all levels it serves to mediate. In developing these themes, the essay explores the relationships between fairy tale, language, and reality in Our Mutual Friend , and the way in which Dickens' language mediates between our "uneasy" sense that, on the one hand, we are reading a fairy tale, or rather a set of interwoven fairy tales, and on the other hand, that the novel is, nevertheless, in some sense a work of "realism," though not at all concerned with "social reality" in any sense seriously analogous to, say, Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor . The title and the epigraph pick up a passage in Cynthia Ozick's early novel Trust : "here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they were always fiction."
TL;DR: Gomel and Erdinast-Vulcan as discussed by the authors argued that there can be no genuine ethical position without the rejection of deterministic models of thought, which is predicated upon a correct understanding of time as a real force for difference and heterogeneity.
Abstract: In their contributions to the forum on “The Ethics of Temporality” ( Partial Answers 8.1, 2009) Elana Gomel and Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan suggest that there can be no genuine ethical position without the rejection of deterministic models of thought. Such a rejection, they claim, is predicated upon a correct understanding of time as a real force for difference and heterogeneity — a force that remains irreducible to any totalizing discourse or meta-historical perspective. Taking its cue from that discussion, “Ethics of the Event” explores the paradoxes (ethical as well as epistemological) engendered by the modernist insight that time is real. In particular, the essay analyzes the strain that such an insight places upon the modern ideal of subjective self-determination. It then draws upon the work of Samuel Beckett to flesh out a literary model that is able to find some species of ethical freedom outside the framework of a fully self-determined subjectivity.
TL;DR: In this paper, Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the reader's hesitation, as central to the fantastic (and by extension the gothic genre), helps one understand Macardle's engagement with the sacrificial ideology of Irish nationalism.
Abstract: The article focuses on Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924), a collection of ghost stories composed by Dorothy Macardle, a prolific Irish author, historian, and political journalist. The article demonstrates how Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of the reader’s hesitation, as central to the fantastic (and by extension the gothic genre), helps one understand Macardle’s engagement with the sacrificial ideology of Irish nationalism. Macardle’s collection of stories of supernatural apparitions during the troubled 1920s makes Irish history the sphere of the fantastic. It makes the reader hesitate—not between the different approaches to the supernatural—but between the conflicting ideological positions presented in the text.
TL;DR: The authors examines the implications of Dickens's statement in the preface to the one-volume edition of Bleak House (September 1853) that in the novel he "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things." This claim, they argue, goes to the core of Dickens' art as a writer, an art that combines the presentation of disturbing news about the contemporary state of society with a skilful attempt to provide narrative pleasure, pleasure designed to ensure that the narrator retains his hold over readers for 67 chapters.
Abstract: This essay examines the implications of Dickens's statement in the preface to the one-volume edition of Bleak House (September 1853) that in the novel he "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things." This claim, I argue, goes to the core of Dickens's art as a writer, an art that combines the presentation of disturbing news about the contemporary state of society with a skilful attempt to provide narrative pleasure, pleasure designed to ensure that the narrator retains his hold over readers for 67 chapters. Dickens's achievement, I conclude, constitutes literary art of the highest order, one that instructs readers in social and ethical truths while also delighting them and holding their attention in the course of telling a compelling story.
TL;DR: The authors examines the question of death via juxtaposing Dickens's and Shakespeare's respective texts in a Kierkegaardian framework, and concludes that it is only the death of someone whom one loves most which reveals the meaning of death (and life).
Abstract: At the end of A Christmas Carol , the Last of the Spirits points its finger towards "One" gravestone, upon which Ebenezer Scrooge can read his own name. His vexing question is whether he has seen "the shadows of things that Will be" or "the shadows of Things that May be, only"; he takes a solemn oath that he will "sponge away the writing" on the stone. At the end of The Tragedy of King Lear , Lear appears howling, with the dead Cordelia in his arms. He puts a looking-glass to her mouth and declares that, if she lives, "[i]t is a chance which does redeem all sorrows" he has ever felt. At the beginning of his Sickness unto Death , Soren Kierkegaard claims that to be "sick unto death is, not to be able to die - yet not as though there were hope of life"; "when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die". This paper examines the question of death via juxtaposing Dickens's and Shakespeare's respective texts in a Kierkegaardian framework. Is it possible to face the death of one's self at all? Or is it only the death of someone whom one loves most which reveals the meaning of death (and life)? Is death a part of life, or does a "living death" permeate our whole life? How can watching people die in a tragedy be elevating? Or is it the muting of death, as in comedy, which liberates us to live?
TL;DR: The Medusa of Truth as mentioned in this paper is a kind of conflict between powers of impulsion/flux and arrest between two states of one and the same force, in a form of conflict that Gaultier and London shared, and which accounts for London's eureka response when Benjamin De Casseres first introduced him to the French philosopher's conception of reality ( le reel ) as a fact of opposition between two States of one-and-the same force.
Abstract: I first discussed the significance of Jules de Gaultier’s philosophy in Jack London’s work in my article “Jack London’s Medusa of Truth,” published by Philosophy and Literature in 2002 (26.1). This article offers a more systematic approach to the kind of dialectical philosophy that Gaultier and London shared, and which accounts for London’s eureka response when Benjamin De Casseres first introduced him to the French philosopher’s conception of reality ( le reel ) as “a fact of opposition between two states of one and the same force,” in a form of conflict between powers of impulsion/flux and arrest. Throughout his writing career, London had been articulating and negotiating the same kind of dialectical conflict, notably the tension between his radical nihilism, the “white logic” of naturalism, and his existential need for some vitalistic impulsion, a “Maya-Lie,” what Gaultier would term bovarysme and define as “the power given man to see himself other than what he is” (“le pouvoir departi a l’homme de se concevoir autre qu’il n’est”). Saddled with Nietzsche’s intellectual conscience, London would have to cope dialectically with the inherent contradictions and partial answers of his existential position, in terms of which any synthesis of transcendence must necessarily be precarious and intermittent.
TL;DR: The Men in the Green Tunics: The Order Police in Poland as mentioned in this paper was the first book published by Clendinnen, and it focused on the activities of the German police formations who were abruptly sent into Russia and Poland to clear pockets of partisan resistance, and to shoot civilians.
Abstract: Therefore I thank You for Your letter with perfect gratitude which is the more great because I know very well that only half of the book comes from the hand of the author — the other half is only to be found in the heart of some rare and precious reader 1 To know that You could read me is good news indeed — for one writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader 2 The seventh chapter of Inga Clendinnen’s impressive and disturbing book Reading the Holocaust (2005) is entitled “The Men in the Green Tunics: The Order Police in Poland,” and it focuses on the activities of the German police formations — “the regular, uniformed municipal and county police (militia-like regional units ) who were abruptly sent into Russia and Poland to clear pockets of partisan resistance, and to shoot civilians — whether Polish or Russian hostages, or Jews” (116–17) Clendinnen’s interest is in how men not trained for mass murder responded to the demand that they commit such atrocities, and she contrasts the very different studies of these men and their actions by Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning She suggests that in contrast to Daniel Goldhagen, Christopher Browning is concerned with process and alert for influences shaping the group sensibility Through close attention to temporal sequence he traces what looks like a process of “education” during that first brutal day, when a revulsion against killing civilians was overcome by a generalised notion of “duty” to one’s country and one’s comrades rather than by the invocation of a particular ideology (123) In developing her case, Clendinnen notes that Browning refers to “Ervin Staub’s chilling account of a US veteran recalling his initiation as a skyborne killer” during the Vietnam War, and she reproduces a passage quoted by Browning from Staub’s account: 1
TL;DR: The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James as mentioned in this paper argues that one distinctive feature of the transition from mid-Victorian cultural beliefs, as typified by the early novels of Dickens, to early modernist attitudes, here represented by the fiction of Henry James, is the progressive de-idealization of love and family life as a principal source of value and as the inevitable and desired point of termination (hence the play on the word “end” in his title).
Abstract: In The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James, Charles Hatten argues that one of the distinctive features of the transition from mid-Victorian cultural beliefs, as typified by the early novels of Dickens, to early modernist attitudes, here represented by the fiction of Henry James, is the progressive de-idealization of love and family life as a principal source of value and as the inevitable and desired point of termination (hence the play on the word “end” in his title) for nineteenthand early twentieth-century narratives of domesticity. Dickens celebrates family values, albeit ambivalently. Eliot calls them radically into question. James rejects sentimental courtship plots and conventional formulas of closure in favor of morally ambiguous endings that privilege aesthetic idealism over affirmations of domestic ideology. Increasing alienation from what Hatten calls “familialism” is a hallmark of modernist writing. Cast in this reductive form, Hatten’s argument may seem unremarkable, but such a summary fails to do justice to the complexity and subtlety of the detailed readings he provides of major texts by his three featured authors. Dickens receives the fullest attention. Two chapters, focused on Barnaby Rudge and Dombey and Son and on David Copperfield, take up a hundred pages of his book. Chapters on The Mill on the Floss and on Daniel Deronda occupy eighty pages. The chapter devoted to James, centered on The Wings of the Dove but with reflections on other novels and on the shorter fiction, receives forty pages. Hatten’s approach is historicist and thematic. He emphasizes gender issues, changing conceptions of marriage and divorce, shifts in demand and production within the literary marketplace, and the increasing commercialization of English society, especially as it affected ideas of authorship. He uses biographical information judiciously, but does not let it drive his argument, and he locates his primary texts skillfully within broader literary historical contexts: the influence of Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian on Barnaby Rudge, the importance for Eliot of George Sand’s The Miller of Angibault and Indiana, the presence of sensation novels and masculinist adventure fiction as a backdrop to novels written during the second half of the century, and the emergence of late Victorian aestheticism as both influence and adversary in James’s conception of the artist’s moral responsibility. The protagonist in Hatten’s foreshortened history of the transition from Victorian to modern representations of the family is clearly George Eliot. He implicitly endorses the critique in her 1856 essay on “The Natural History of German Life” of Dickens’s “complete inadequacy” (in Hatten’s paraphrase) in representing the inner emotional life of characters, especially women and the lower classes, and he gives a spirited defense of her originality and importance
TL;DR: This article explored the complex social and literary implications of Dickens's presentation of dance, especially in the fiction that he wrote during the 1840s, focusing on the ways in which Dickens's works of that period, primarily A Christmas Carol and The Battle for Life, depict dance as simultaneously a life-affirming activity and a deflection of the decade's more serious social, medical and economic ills.
Abstract: Dickens's depictions of dance are usually read as manifestations of the jovial fun-loving aspect of his fiction. In what is arguably the most famous depiction of dance in the early works, the Fezziwigs' ball in A Christmas Carol , Dickens not only uses the dance to suggest all the positive values associated with good feeling and sociability — the very things missing from Scrooge's life — but also allows his prose to echo the actual rhythm of the dance, so that sound and sense work together to convey the message to both the reader and Scrooge that dancing is a pleasurable, life-affirming, socially positive activity. This paper explores the complex social and literary implications of Dickens's presentation of dance, especially in the fiction that he wrote during the 1840s. While Dickens's juxtaposition of dancing and social misery antedates the 1840s, the paper concentrates on the ways in which Dickens's works of that period, primarily A Christmas Carol and The Battle for Life , depict dance as simultaneously a life-affirming activity and a deflection of the decade's more serious social, medical and economic ills.
TL;DR: A. R. Ammons as mentioned in this paper was one of the great walkers who could not keep his feet on the ground, despite being so peripatetic, but what makes him different from all the rest is that despite being a great walker, despite the fact that despite the ability of his feet to keep their feet on ground, he could not always keep their ground, in poem after poem he, or a stand-in protagonist, not only turns, spins and whirls, but rises, ascends, levitates.
Abstract: You can locate A. R. Ammons in a line of great walkers from Wordsworth to Frank O’Hara, but what makes him different from all the rest is that despite being so peripatetic, he could not keep his feet on the ground. In poem after poem he, or a stand-in protagonist, not only turns, spins, and whirls, but rises, ascends, levitates. Thereafter comes in due course a descent, sometimes an arduous or scarifying one, but which typically finds him the better off after his return to terra firma. Levity in the transferred sense – Ammons was a whimsical, voluble, unbuttoned humorist – proves useful in contending with the perilous consequences of his levitations. In addition to his drollery, Ammons sporadically employs a prophetic voice, meditates on philosophical issues, and delves expertly into phenomena privy to the natural scientist. The composite result is a style of levity entirely his own. The extent to which he may, as a consequence of his levity, or in spite of it, be enrolled in a transcendentalist tradition of the visionary sublime stretching back to Emerson, as Harold Bloom would have it, is debatable. Five poems examined very closely give a slant on the issues involved, “Moment,” “Transcendence,” “He Held Radical Light,” “Levitation,” and “Hymn.” Other Ammons poems are discussed briefly, and incidental comparisons are made to poems by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors take up Stewart's recent discussion of the ethical tempo of a rhetorical figure, syllepsis, in order to think through some temporal consequences of the moral turn.
Abstract: The essay takes up Garrett Stewart’s recent discussion ( Partial Answers 8.1) of the ethical tempo of a rhetorical figure, syllepsis, in order to think through some temporal consequences of the ethical turn.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room in terms of post-impressionist influences of Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell and demonstrate compositional similarities between Bell's painting Studland Beach and Woolf's novel.
Abstract: This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room in terms of post-impressionist influences of Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. It demonstrates compositional similarities between Bell’s painting Studland Beach and Woolf’s novel. Both works use formal design to elicit elegiac emotion in the audience. Jacob’s Room is Woolf’s first novel that exemplifies her attention to design as a vehicle for emotion, the idea to which she had been exposed by Vanessa Bell’s and other Post-Impressionist paintings since 1910.
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TL;DR: For instance, the authors pointed out that social criticism often intrudes on or disturbs aesthetic pleasure, and that the passages that grab our imagination, that get us involved as readers and give us pleasure, are inseparable from the social criticism.
Abstract: Is there an inherent tension between the aesthetic appeal and consciousness-raising effect of Victorian fiction? Social criticism is a central component of many Victorian novels, and almost all novelists hope to bring pleasure to their readers. Victorian writers often do not see a conflict between these two aims. Even Oscar Wilde, who castigates art that seeks to solve social problems — “the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem” (31) — argues that art is essentially in opposition to the existing social conditions: for artists, “it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish” (31). An unwillingness to accept “the existing conditions” is the essence of social critique. For the reader, in contrast, social criticism often intrudes on or disturbs aesthetic pleasure. While reading, we sometimes become aware of what seem to be competing purposes, and after a while we begin to distinguish between moments of aesthetic pleasure and social awareness. At the clumsiest level, the separability of one aim from the other is spatial: we note passages that a good editor might have deleted, as they too transparently serve one purpose while going against the grain of the other. More typically, the tension is temporal: we recognize a little belatedly a social critique that at first was masked by pleasures of reading, or come to recognize the aesthetic merit of the writing after its critical point has been assimilated or blunted. In this essay, I will suggest that Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864– 1865), while providing great pleasures of reading along with critical responses to contemporary social structures and mores, subverts attempts to differentiate between them. The social critique is thoroughly inmixed with aesthetic pleasures of description and narration. The passages that grab our imagination, that get us involved as readers and give us pleasure, are inseparable from the social criticism. The “unease” we feel is as much an aesthetic as a critical response. Many of the most remarkable passages in the book involve a confusion between person and thing, people and property, animate and inanimate, and it is the inability to easily