The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel
09 Feb 2009-
About: The article was published on 2009-02-09. It has received 315 citations till now.
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01 Apr 2017
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the problem with too few cases is that we will miss the suffering that happens on a vast scale, and the realist novel demands that we recognize the impossibility of knowing large numbers in any adequate way while still taking up the ethical and sometimes political responsibility to try to cognize experience at a massive scale.
Abstract: This essay contends that the most canonical realist novelists refused both close and distant reading. The realist novel seems to go out of its way to avoid statistics, but at the same time it insists that we must move beyond attending to a few exceptional examples. The problem with too few cases is that we will miss the suffering that happens on a vast scale. But the problem with numbers is that they actually condense and compress affective experience. Thus the realist novel demands that we recognize the impossibility of knowing large numbers in any adequate way while still taking up the ethical and sometimes the political responsibility to try to cognize experience at a massive scale. The solution the realist novel develops is a discursive strategy that this essay calls the “enormity effect.”
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that Dickens writes his characters' individual bodies so that they continually dramatize their unique compositions of multiform capital (economic, cultural, and social) and they create their most idiosyncratic, signature characters through their disproportionate forms of different types of capital.
Abstract: Abstract:While critics of Charles Dickens’s novels have long noted his unusual, hyper-memorable characters, Dickens’s method of creating and vivifying his fictional individuals has been comparatively undertheorized. Reading A Christmas Carol (1843) and Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital,” this article argues that Dickens writes his characters’ individual bodies so that they continually dramatize their unique compositions of multiform capital—economic, cultural, and social. I theorize that Dickens creates his most idiosyncratic, signature characters through their disproportionate forms of different types of capital—like the Carol’s famous Ebenezer Scrooge, who has a large amount of economic capital and such a lack of social capital. Furthermore, I contend that Dickens’s “major” characters are determined not by the amount of readerly attention the narrative directs their way, but rather their levels of consciousness and savvy about how to convert between different forms of capital.
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72), Eliot seeks to kindle a desire for local political institutions and to promote, in J. S. Mill's words, the capacities moral, intellectual, and active required for working them.
Abstract: Situating George Eliot within mid-Victorian debates over central versus local government, this article contests the widespread presupposition that Eliot rejected official politics in favor of cultural mediation. Specifically, I argue that in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), Eliot seeks to kindle a desire for local political institutions and to promote, in J. S. Mill's words, “the capacities moral, intellectual, and active required for working” them. Using the representative protocols of the local press, Eliot portrays Middlemarch's public health institutions as both opaque and transparent. While the public health work of Tertius Lydgate is essential to the novel's bildung plots and the town's cholera response, it is only represented obliquely through narrative paralipsis. In contrast, Eliot stages local council debates theatrically in scenes whose typography mimics the local press's treatment of council meetings. Eliot then supplements these protocols with the realist novel's networked form, which compels readers to supply characterological depth to the elided labors of Lydgate and the dramatic representations of council meetings. In thus depicting local representative government, Eliot prompts a desire for local political institutions and trains her readers in the cognitive skills needed to participate within them.
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors studied the relationship between character construction and ethics in Samuel Beckett's fiction, focusing on Molloy and "The Calmative" and found that anxiety is the main affect capable of either creating or destroying another person's humanity in the observer's eyes.
Abstract: I study the relationship between character construction and ethics in Samuel Beckett's fiction, focusing on Molloy and "The Calmative." I ask what narrative strategies give Beckett's characters their seeming precarious sentience and show what these strategies tell us about his texts' ethical framework. Beckett creates his characters out of outward territories of power. He then keeps shifting and multiplying these territories. This narrative structure reproduces the experience of seeing a person anxiously. Moreover, it singles out anxiety as the main affect capable of either creating or destroying another person's humanity in the observer's eyes—suggesting that Beckett's ethics is grounded not in a rational axiomatic system, but in the choice and management of the affect through which we decide to make ethical judgments. This philosophically unusual relationship between affect and ethics raises questions both for theories of character construction and for more general philosophies of cognition.
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines literary representations of the African-Iranian presence, and provides a critique of race and slavery in twentieth-century Iran, focusing on black women Qadam-Kheyr and Sorur.
Abstract: Focusing on black women Qadam-Kheyr and Sorur in Mahshid Amirshahi’s novel Dadeh Qadam-Kheyr (1999), this article examines literary representations of the African-Iranian presence, and provides a critique of race and slavery in twentieth-century Iran. In light of the history of the Iranian slave trade until 1928, and the reconstruction of race and gender identities along Eurocentric lines of nationalism in Iran, the novel under scrutiny is a dynamic site of struggle between an “Iranian” literary discourse and its “non-Persian” Others. The “aesthetics of alterity” at the heart of the text is, therefore, the interplay between the repressed title-character Qadam-Kheyr and the resilient minor character Sorur, each registering Amirshahi’s artistic intervention into a forgotten corner of Iranian history.
8 citations