https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/studies_in_american_fiction/v037/37.2.hannah.pdf

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Characters in Balzac's La Comedie humaine seldom make it whole through a stint in Algeria. Philippe Bridau, the incurable reprobate of La Rabouilleuse (1842), joins the Algerian colonial campaign in search of a generalship--and gets decapitated for his troubles. The mediocre Oscar Husson of Un debut dans la vie (1842) finally returns to France after an Algerian career that costs him an arm. Johann Fischer, the naive instrument of Baron Hulot d'Ervy's Algerian machinations in La Cousine Bette (1846), commits suicide in an Oranian prison. These lives and body parts cut short evoke the status in the Comedie humaine of Algeria itself. An absent setting that never attracts the Balzacian narrator's famously topographic eye, the nascent colony nonetheless registers on what might be called the work's proprioceptive map--that is, on the narrative's internal sense of its own disposition in space. Algeria lingers there with the ontological strangeness of something missing but still felt: a phantom limb, as it were, and a big one. It is fitting that the only Balzac story set in Algeria, Le Programme d'une jeune veuve (c. 1843), should appear among the fragments linked to the Comedie humaine but ultimately abandoned by Balzac. Cut from the whole, and yet a part of the whole, this most sustained incarnation of Balzac's Algeria epitomizes the fate elsewhere reserved in the Comedie humaine for a colony whose perception by the text only ever suggests an excision. I say "colony" because Balzac was never interested in Algeria as anything else. And that, this essay will argue, has everything to do with the paradoxical nature of Algeria's place in the Comedie humaine. For all the critical ink spilled these last decades over the engagement with the colonial of the modern European novel, a vexed question remains: if without empire "there is no European novel as we know it" as Edward Said so provocatively declared (Culture and Imperialism 69), why are the colonies relegated to the margins in so many of the nineteenth century's great realist novels? Said himself proposed that the European novel, with its totalizing ambitions of spatial and narrative mastery, emanated from a same underlying impulse for mastery as the colonial project (69-71). This hypothesis impressively annexes even those texts in which the colonies do not appear: empire and the novel sharing a common psychosocial parentage, the novel could reinforce a colonial imperative without extensively figuring the colonies or even figuring them at all. Said partially subtracts France from his analysis on the grounds that for most of the nineteenth century empire enjoyed a tighter grip on the cultural imaginary in Britain than in France (71, 97-98). Yet Balzac's various assessments of France's Algerian project--more on these in a moment--suggest that, at least in the case of Algeria, France's destiny was for Balzac already bound up in substantive ways with colonial expansion. Still the question persists: whither Balzac's Algeria? Said's conjecture about the imperialist foundation of the novel's claims to spatial and narrative mastery--claims never more evident than in the Comedie humaine's epic intention to render the entirety of French life--would locate in the Comedie humaine's Algerian references merely the most visible sign, like the tip of an iceberg, of an imperialist posture looming everywhere beneath the surface. And yet, Algeria's status in the Comedie humaine hints less at a literary project ever-expanding in ambition than atone whose North African reach observed certain self-imposed limits. To be sure, Algeria's emergence as a dimension of the Comedie humaine in its later volumes represents an expansion of the cycle's geography. The expansion, however, doubles as contraction, insofar as Algeria eludes the cartographic precision with which the Comedie humaine usually integrated new locales. Understanding this ambiguous staging of the colonial is the task at hand--and one that clears a path, I think, for understanding the similar, century-long reticence by Balzac's realist inheritors to situate their novels in the colonies. …

Balzac's Algeria: Realism and the Colonial

In this paper I will discuss the possibility offered by the “linguistic turn” for narrative research in the realm of financial communication. I will propose three categories by which a narrative interpretive approach can be applied to financial communication: narrative-as-artifacts, narrative-as-practice and narrative-as-method. Such a constitutive communication approach challenges a mechanistic and functionalist view of communication as a tool to represent social realities in favor of an interpretive view that could remain sensitive to the production and reproduction of meaning by the actors involved.

A Narrative Lens for Financial Communication: Taking the “Linguistic Turn”

For readers of Hardy's poems or novels, the phrasing of history as the "twitching" of desire is so expected that it earns the status of a signature. In this instance, Hardy's Christian "God" is responding to the pagan "Goddess" who complains of a Gothic cathedral erected on the site of her "boiling" "springs." Invoking historical priority, the Goddess implores "Jove" to remove the Christian temple; and Hardy's "God" addresses the demand with the sober, resigned account of historical deities as the perpetual?and perpetually unstable?projec tions of desire: "we are images both?twitched by people's desires." The impermanence of faith is stressed from the outset, for the recorded exchange is not witnessed ("Nothing was seen"), but merely "over heard," the fading echo of "a song men yesterday sang." Compressed in these lines are issues present throughout Hardy's work concerning the demands of history and their consequences: the de mands placed upon history and the demands to historicize. These demands are more than thematic, for they comprise the very "problem atic" of Hardy's narrative and poetic project.1 The problematic is, moreover, doubly historical: throughout Hardy's work, history functions both as an object of representation and as the condition of representa tion itself. The double demand?and potential double bind?of history is marked in "Aquae Sulis" by deep uncertainty and ambivalence: the wayward and unpredictable course of desire, the fragility of the past, and the unstable status of the past as aesthetic object, as "song." This poetic exchange regarding the status of history and its inscrip tion in physical "sites" is as emblematic of Hardy's prose as it is his poetry; and it demonstrates that the attention to historical "sites'*

Demands of History: Narrative Crisis in Jude the Obscure

In New York in 1921, Man Ray made a short film of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, then forty, shaving her pubic hair. It was shot during the short-lived period of New York Dada and it had art written all over it. Exhibited exclusively to other New York bohemiens , mainly in the Walter and Louise Arensberg circle, it was a typical product of the hothouse culture of early modernism. The luminous starkness of the woman's careworn, but strangely vibrant, body affronted not only conventional morality, but also the conventional aesthetic academicism of, say, Adolph-William Bouguereau's blushing, heavily fleshed but weightless, nudes. At that time, Bouguereau's gravity-defying females appealed particularly to prosperous bankers and business tycoons. Although Man Ray's film is about a not-very-glamorous and aging woman shaving her pubic hair, it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about defining the space between avant-garde culture and ordinary society, what Andreas Huyssens calls the Great Divide between the avant-garde and mass society. In 1921, that distance was still visible. By the end of the twentieth century, it had almost entirely disappeared. Today Dada and ordinary life have more or less converged. Just look around you.

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Balzac's Algeria: Realism and the Colonial

A Narrative Lens for Financial Communication: Taking the “Linguistic Turn”

Demands of History: Narrative Crisis in Jude the Obscure

Modernism and the Culture of Market Society: Introduction The modernist avant-garde and the culture of market society