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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TL;DR: Moretti et al. as discussed by the authors claim that the development of modernity is primarily concerned with the maturation of youth, and that overcoming the dangers of adolescent aggression and sexual energy merely results in the necessity, the discipline, the sorrow of maturity, and so it must be overcome in the process of achieving a stable maturity.
Abstract: Collected in Sketches by Boz (1836), Charles Dickens’s melancholy story “Scotlandyard” chronicles “the advance of civilization” and “improvement” of the eponymous locale after the erection of a new bridge across the Thames in 1832 (88). White tablecloths appear at the neighborhood eating place, the fruit pie maker acquires the genteel moniker “pastrycook,” and the “loud song and the joyous shout” of the coal heavers no longer shakes the roof of the public house (89). Alongside this improvement in manners materialize more visible signs of progress: the boot-maker adds a first floor to his business, a jeweler sets up shop, and the once conservative tailor hires a coterie of uniformed assistants. Yet near the end of this sketch appears the figure of an old man: “Amidst all this change, and restlessness, and innovation, there remains but one old man. . . . Misery and want are depicted in his countenance; his form is bent by age, his head is gray with length of trial, but there he sits from day to day, brooding over the past; and thither he will continue to drag his feeble limbs, until his eyes have closed upon Scotland-yard, and upon the world together” (89–90). Set against the background of Scotland-yard’s bustle, the anonymous old man is Dickens’s way of representing that which has been left behind by the youthful narrative of development that modernizes the world around him. The old man endures alongside this meaningful development, asserting his own stubborn existence as proof that he is not only the excess of modernity but also that which exceeds it. Most critics assume that the developmental plots of modernity are primarily concerned with the maturation of youth. In what Franco Moretti identifies as a central means of understanding the “bewitching and risky process” of modernity, the bildungsroman relates the story of a youth who passes into adulthood amidst great struggle, eventually reintegrating into the society from which he or she has been alienated (5). In the English bildungsroman, “Youth acts as a sort of symbolic concentrate of the uncertainties and tensions of an entire cultural system,” and so it must be overcome in the process of achieving a stable maturity (Moretti 185).1 Reaching a very different conclusion, Patricia Meyer Spacks nevertheless claims that for Victorian novelists like Dickens “the adolescent . . . becomes a version of the self,” a point of “predominant wistful identification” (195). For Spacks the problem is that overcoming the dangers of adolescent aggression and sexual energy merely results in “[t]he necessity, the discipline, the sorrow of maturity” (217). Providing different accounts of the progression from youth to maturity, Moretti and
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TL;DR: The authors argued that the conditions of reading everyday life, and hence the new literariness, could emerge only under the strict orders laid down through these new disciplines like Orientalism and, behind them, by the coercive structures of colonial governance.
Abstract: This essay critically interrogates Jacques Ranciere’s claim that the modern idea of literature found its own being when it became conscious of the “democratic petrification” of literariness in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I make two related points vis-a-vis Ranciere’s argument: first, I demonstrate that he insufficiently imagines the knowledge paradigms informing this allegedly democratic petrification of literature and ignores vital shifts in history; and second, I argue that because of this initial poverty of imagination, Ranciere fails to address the most crucial impediment to the regime’s reliance on reading as a “universal” strategy—i.e., colonial history and racial difference. While the metropolitan culture yields its innermost secrets to the hermeneutic eye of everyday literariness, the colonial other, shrouded in racial alterity, remains mysterious, illegible, and even invisible. Instead, I show through close readings of Honore de Balzac’s novel La Peau de chagrin (1831), which also functions as the central text for Ranciere’s theory, that the conditions of reading everyday life, and hence the new literariness, could emerge only under the strict orders laid down through these new disciplines like Orientalism and, behind them, by the coercive structures of colonial governance. My wager is that the new condition of readability was distributed beyond any one culture or one nation. Hence, the proper context for the emergence of the new idea of literature could only be described as early discussions and reflections on that typically supranational concept of the nineteenth century—i.e., world literature.
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: In the great surge of utopian writing that was produced during the fin de siecle, Edward Bellamy, William Morris and H. G. Wells among others imagined utopias that were global in scale and located in the future.
Abstract: In the great surge of utopian writing that was produced during the fin de siecle , Edward Bellamy, William Morris and H. G. Wells among others imagined utopias that were global in scale and located in the future. They made a radical shift in utopian thinking by drawing a historical trajectory between their own time and that of utopia. A contemporaneous text that might seem to have little in common with these “historical utopias” is E. A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). This article shows how closely its ideas can bring into focus those of the specifically utopian texts being written alongside it. Flatland breaks the conventions of utopian narrative by removing the reader from the narrative plane and situating us instead in the “impossible” third dimension. The “leap of faith” necessary for scientific or religious revelation is simultaneously invoked as the route to utopia.
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