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Abstracts
for Volume 65
Abstracts
> Vol 65, Issue 1
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Margaret
Ferguson |
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Feminism
in Time: An Introduction
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| Carla
Freccero |
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Queer
Nation, Female Nation: Marguerite de Navarre, Incest, and the
State in Early Modern France
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| Jeffrey
Masten |
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Material
Cavendish: Paper, Performance, "Sociable Virginity"
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| The
essay argues for a reexamination of the theoretical and methodological
models that have characterized the study of Margaret Cavendish's
writing, her writing and publication practices, and her model
of a feminist or "proto-feminist" writing subject. Taking
as its example the use of paste-on "cancel" slips used
to mark the participation of Cavendish's husband William in the
writing of her second volume of printed plays (1668), the essay
argues for a reintegration of the ways in which "material"
aspects of the printed text figure alongside more familiar discursive/textual
marks as performances of Cavendish's authorship and her collaboration
with her husband. As a method for rethinking "identity,"
hermetic authorship, and a writing subject on an "absolutist"
model, the essay suggests tracing authorial "identifications,"
including the complicated nexus of identifications and associations
within emergent seventeenth-century "companionate marriage,"
one of the rhetorics Cavendish deploys in describing her writing.
The essay thus seeks to provide a model for thinking about the
relation of bibliographic study, "the history of the book,"
and feminism in a particular time. |
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| Laura
Mandell |
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The First
Women (Psycho-) Analysts; or, the Friends of Feminist History
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| Enlightenment
feminism such as that produced by Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft
still contains some as yet unactivated political potential, offering
accurate accounts of women's oppression embedded in rhetorical
efforts to overcome that oppression. Insofar as those acts are
rhetorical, they were at the moment of their production unfinished
but can be completed in our moment. One way to do so is through
understanding the utopianism essential to feminism as a psychoanalytic
approach to history. Enlightenment philosophy is opposed to our
current psychoanalytically-inspired view that all reality, past
or present, bears the same relation to language as does trauma
- in other words, that history is fundamentally inaccessible.
Hays and Wollstonecraft are Enlightenment thinkers to the core:
implicitly gainsaying the trauma theory of reality, they attempt
to make use of transference as both psychoanalytic cure and method
for uncovering reality. For them, only partisan historical accounts
written by the friends of feminist history can give us a version
of reality that is undistorted by the sexist practices of their
culture. The friendship that they offer to us through rhetorical
performance recapitulates the psychoanalytic encounter, making
their historical reality available to us through analysis of transference.
Transference is, of course, nothing apart from the counter-transference:
reading for transference allows Hays and Wollstonecraft to analyze
us, revealing that one of the major forms taken by sexism at our
own moment is the tale of fatal attraction. |
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| Rachel
Blau DuPlessis |
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Marble
Paper: Toward a Feminist 'History of Poetry'
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| Angela
Leighton |
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In Time,
and Out: Women's Poetry and Literary History
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| This
essay explores the possibilities of defining a literary history
of women's poetry in relation to a particular genre of lyric which
seems to be almost exclusive to women poets: the lyric of 'being
dead'. Not exactly 'self-elegy', this form of poetry, which runs
through nineteenth and twentieth-century writing, from Christina
Rossetti to Heather McHugh, suggests, on the one hand, that a
distinctive literary history of women's poetry can be mapped,
and, on the other, that history, at least the biographical history
of the first person pronoun, is precisely the thing that women
poets are keen to escape. The essay thus suggests that lyric poetry
plays up the tension, latent in all literary writing, between
history and the aesthetic. The future of a feminist literary criticism
might, paradoxically, be found in just the place where history
and the aesthetic meet and find their limits. |
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| Joan DeJean |
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The Time
of Commitment: Reading 'Sapho 1900' Reading Sappho
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Those
of us who study the works and the careers of authors from earlier
periods to whom the adjective "feminist" can be applied
are always practicing a particular form of "feminism in time."
We are of necessity evaluating projects from other periods from
a contemporary vantage point. As a result, we are constantly obliged
to question the extent to which our reconstructions of their alliances
and commitments may have been colored by our knowledge of the
ways in which feminism has developed in our time.
In this essay, I consider a period during the first half of the
twentienth century and what seems a most unlikely alliance: between
a group of radical lesbians and several of the founders of the
field known today as Jewish Studies who were also among the most
vocal supporters of Alfred Dreyfus. I speculate on both the political
goals of this alliance and on how we might understand how it came
to be. The central piece of "evidence" upon which my
reconstruction is based is the most overtly sapphic edition of
Sappho ever published, which appeared in Paris just as that city
was liberated after the German occupation.
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| Robyn
Wiegman |
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On Being
in Time with Feminism
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| This
paper approaches current debates in academic feminism by critiquing
lines of inquiry that emphasize generational difference and exploring
instead non teleological understandings of feminism as a knowledge
project, historical entity, and social force. It focuses in particular
on the psychic aspects of sustaining an intellectual political
life by returning to the vexed relation between experience and
theory in feminist thought, and ends with a consideration of the
current psychic life of Women's Studies as an interdisciplinary
field. |
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| Jonathan
Culler |
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Feminism
in Time: A Response
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Abstracts
> Vol 65, Issue 2
| Articles |
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Aaron
Kunin |
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Other
Hands in Pepys' Diary
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| This
essay argues that reading, for Pepys, is a two-person activity,
and usually means reading to someone (his wife, his patron, or
a friend) or being read to (by his wife, a servant, or a friend).
Historians of reading have long recognized the crowdedness of
such scenes, but nonetheless have reduced them to one figure:
the man of letters achieving, as Roger Chartier puts it, "intimacy
with his book," while the servants who do the physical work
of reading and writing are written out of the history of reading
and writing. The essay focuses primarily on Pepys's reading of
pornographic novels and poems, and suggests that these scenes
may be collaborative rather than solitary. The essay finally raises
questions about the use of Pepys as a representative figure for
seventeenth-century history: why should Pepys be typical? |
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| Joep Leerssen |
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Literary
Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of
the Past
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| Paul
Gilmore |
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Mechanical
Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology
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"Mechanical
Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology"
argues against both New Critical and New Historicist readings
of Emerson's idealist aesthetics by contending that he conceived
of aesthetics less as a withdrawal into an ideal realm than an
attempt to transform society by challenging notions of the self
and the self's material relations to the world. In particular,
I trace Emerson's allusions to and metaphors of new technologies
to suggest how he attempted to figure aesthetic practice in terms
of the human capacity to re-make both the material world and consciousness.
Connecting this element of Emerson's thought to his anti-slavery
activity, I argue that his delineation of the power of aesthetic
experience in terms of technologies enables him to imagine aesthetics
both as detached from specific political causes and as essential
to liberatory practice.
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| Michael
Harrawood |
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Shakespeare
in the Caribbean: the Morant Bay Massacre, Jamaica, 1865
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| This
essay considers the ways in which commentaries on the West Indies,
specifically those by Thomas Carlyle and his literary executor
James Anthony Froude, used Shakespeare's plays and poetry to advance
colonial projects and the racial theories that fueled them. Carlyle's
literary aesthetics, which borrowed heavily from Kant, ran close
alongside his theories of labor and race, and provided the theoretical
foundation for the ideologies of empire in place at the time of
the peasant uprising at Morant Bay, Jamaica. Beginning in the
1820s, colonists in Jamaica had noted that lines from Shakespeare
plays were turning up in ritual slave "Joncanoe" performances,
an unauthorized and unexplained borrowing that provoked both amusement
and anxiety. At stake in these borrowings were colonial notions
of culture, representation and mimesis, all of which came together
in the way Shakespeare's plays were invested with their particular
cultural capital. The essay examines the cultural and political
force that was generated by Bardologists who thought of Shakespeare
as a figure of primordiality, silence and nature, the national
poet who both transcended and created history. |
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Abstracts
> Vol 65, Issue 3
| Articles |
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Barbara
Fuchs and David J. Baker |
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The Postcolonial
Past
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| Irad
Malkin |
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Postcolonial
Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization
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| John Dagenais |
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The
Postcolonial Laura
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| Lisa
Lampert |
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Race,
Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages
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In
recent years scholars have begun to explore issues of race and
racism in medieval texts and contexts. This essay approaches this
work from a new direction, investigating the informing role of
the medieval and more particularly of medievalism in the constitution,
representation and perpetuation of modern racism. The essay is
divided into three parts. The first examines treatments of the
medieval period in some influential general accounts of the history
of the concept of race. The second discusses the ways in which
two medieval romances, Parzival and The King of Tars,
illuminate the tangled relationships between "theological"
and "biological" notions of race both in the premodern
and modern eras. The essay concludes with an account of "neo-medievalism"
a trend among International Relations theorists and journalists
that relies upon a vision of a homogeneous medieval Europe to
attempt to describe current global tensions.
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| Roland
Greene |
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Colonial
Becomes Postcolonial
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| Mary
Louise Pratt |
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The Anticolonial
Past
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| This
essay examines how what are known as the rise of the west and
the spread of western modernity have been depicted by anti-colonial
and anti-imperial thinkers whose work is tied to demands for decolonization.
The essay will focus on four tropes that have been advanced as
correctives or counternarratives to the story of diffusion. These
are: interruption, digestion, substitution, and reversal. |
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| Robert
Markley |
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Gulliver
and the Japanese: The Limits of the Postcolonial Past
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| This
essay examines Gulliver's voyage to Japan in Book Three of Gullivers
Travels in the context of three important bodies of literature:
accounts of the short-lived English trading post in Hirado (1613-23);
histories of the expulsion of the Jesuits and the extirpation
of Catholicism in Japan; and narratives of Dutch merchants' willingness
to submit to the political ritual of trampling on Christian icons
in order to maintain their trading privileges in Japan. Gulliver's
encounters with the Japanese indicate that Swift knew this literature
and was well aware of the unsettling implications that Japan posed
for Eurocentric visions of trade, history, and theology. In their
combination of fantasy and realism, Gulliver's encounters with
the Japanese register profound anxieties about the limitations
of English economic power, national identity, and morality in
a world that until 1800 was dominated economically by the empires
of the Far East. |
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| Deepika
Bahri |
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Predicting
the Past
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| How
to read history as simultaneously synchronic and diachronic? How
to read the past and imagine the future without succumbing to
the specious charm of novelty? These questions organize the response
to the contributions in this special issue. "Predicting the
Past" evaluates the authors' challenge to traditional historical
divides and customary postcolonial tropes. It concludes by suggesting
that extending the time and space of colonial/postcolonial experience
is useful only within a larger plot that acknowledges the presence
of a necessitarian history alongside a recognition of utopian
and resistive elements within it. |
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Abstracts
> Vol 65, Issue 4
| Articles |
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Aimée
Boutin |
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Shakespeare,
Women, and French Romanticism
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| The
essay explores how writings from the 1820s and 30s on Shakespearean
heroines reveal the conflicting literary, political and gendered
ideologies of French Romanticism. Whereas the literary history
of Shakespeare in France has been mostly concerned with the contributions
of male Romantics, I examine how three women poetstwo of
whom pioneered French Romanticism's appropriation of Shakespeareresponded
to the idealization of the charms and purity of "English"
womanhood typical of Shakespearean character criticism, exemplified
in the compilation Galerie des femmes de Shakspeare. Marceline
Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu and Louise Colet imitated Shakespeare
in different ways, but each imitation underscores the poets' scholarly
and public voices at a time when women, like Shakespeare's heroines
themselves, were being sequestered in domesticity. |
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| Mary
Favret |
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War in
the Air
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| This
essay examines the metaphor of war as weather, and the implications
of imagining the sky and its meteorological fluctuations as a
register for history. Tracing on the one hand, changes in weather
science in the course of the long eighteenth-century, and georgic
models of prognostication and mediation, it argues that the emergence
of a global, aerial meteorology in late century allowed poets
(such as Cowper, Barbauld, and numerous popular poets publishing
in journals and newspapers) to turn to the skies to communicate
something affecting about distant, global war. |
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| Thomas
F. Haddox |
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Elizabeth
Spencer, the White Civil Rights Novel, and the Postsouthern
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| This
essay argues that the emergence of what I call the white civil
rights novel--a genre whose most famous example is Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)--in the 1940s and 1950s in
the U.S South should be understood as a mark of the new "postsouthern"
literary culture. While the monuments of southern modernist literature
of the 1920s and 1930s had characterized the South as an authentic
community, possessed of a tragic sensibility and metaphysical
depth, the newer postsouthern texts ironically deploy southern
tropes that are fast becoming simulacra. Using Lewis Simpson and
Michael Kreyling's theories of the postsouthern, I develop this
argument through a reading of one of the most important white
civil rights novels, Elizabeth Spencer's The Voice at the Back
Door (1956). Spencer's novel, like other white civil rights
novels, adopts a highly personalized politics of liberal gradualism
and mocks the drama and metanarrative gravity of southern identity
that earlier novels had celebrated. Yet precisely because its
ironic effect depends on familiarity with an earlier model of
southern identity, it does not mark a decisive break with the
southern past that some admirers of the postsouthern might wish
to see in it. Finally, through its depiction of Beckwith Dozer,
The Voice at the Back Door suggests that African-American
men possess whatever dignity, depth, and potential for agency
postsouthern culture may retain. |
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Review
Essay
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| Garrett
Stewart |
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Metallusion:
the Used, the Renewed, and the Novel |
| This
review-essay of Christopher Ricks's magisterial Allusion to
the Poets honors the critic's method by turning the lens of
verbal analysis on his own self-allusive style to draw out the
unspoken implications of its sometimes hermetic effects. Though
Ricks offers no term for the frequently treated allusion that
alludes to its own referencing within the orbit of canonical deference
and revision, a concept of "metallusion" lets us probe
further (according to an inevitably more Bloomian model) the implied
contest, rather than just testimony, of literary inheritance and
advance. The essay moves out from the center of Ricks's evidence,
culminating in Wordsworth and Tennyson, to the novels of George
Eliot as a way of exposing the power plays as well as homage of
cross-generic allusion. |
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