Farina 2017

Jonathan Farina. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in C19 Britain. Cambridge UP, 2017.

Reading Notes

Preface

• xi his keywords: turn, attention, as if, but, something, that sort of thing, particular, General—> character
• character as primary "vernacular aesthetic category", as an ethics "relating persons or things" (xii)
• Smiles & Darwin
• xii Characterization was a means of articulating meaningful superficiality:

Characters, as I describe them, thus produce the texture of prose as it implicates or addresses the reader and as it negotiates between its many subjects and objects. Characterization was a means of articulating meaningful superficiality.

• xiii again Amanda Anderson citation 7: The Powers of Distance
  • and Kurnick 8: Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel
  • Serres 9: Parasite, 8
  • Poovey on the fact integrates into systems of knowledge: A History of the Modern Fact, first chapter
• xiv Levine: no such thing as "naive realism," direct uncomplicated reference: The Realistic Imagination
  • "Each of my subsequent chapters details how a different everyday phrase - and its synonyms and variants - disavows the referential correspondence that writers have most consistently associated with the prosaic and with realism and instead installs a formal discrepancy between representation and referent, people and things, interiority and exteriority."
• xv:

Dazzlingly dissimulative personages such as Becky Sharp and Lizzie Eustace, or even Frankenstein's Creature, whose monstrous exterior and murderousness belie his potentially loving inner child, exemplify character precisely because character legitimated formal hypocrisy as a medium of moral and epistemic truth, whatever the morality of its contents. Realistic personages appear -- to others as to themselves -- differently than they prove to think or feel or otherwise be on the inside. Everyday words writ this irony small but distributed it throughout Victorian prose, affording all sorts of objects and abstractions a glimmer of the aesthetic interest of these personages.

• • the argument hinges on the disjunctive properties of cliche, of the words we overlook doing important epistemological work that is itself disjunctive. But what about when the cliche exterior matches up with the cliche interior, realist characters who aren't dissimulative, like Tom Tulliver or Jo the crossing sweep?
• Michael Mckeon: The Secret History of Domesticity
• xvi:

Victorian readers and writers tacitly adhered to an epistemology of character according to which character was produced by a repertoire of appropriate expressions, by the decorous treatment of subjects rather than by any innate or essential property of the subjects themselves.

• xvii unpacking method
• the history of reading is embedded in form— building on Dames 2007 29
• xviii My formal presentism with historical content shares Nietzsche's faith in slow philological reading as a moral, political, and enchanting practice requisite to an "age of 'work', that is, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste."
  • citation? read against Armadale (Collins, 1866)#Hensley Article on Benjamin?
• But I do not affect to expose or unveil some hidden identity. I aim to appreciate superficiality -- manners, style, the prosaic -- as mediums of an important, meaningful, moving form of knowledge that still affords us ways of negotiating a world that threatens to become too utilitarian and positivist.

V21 Collations

Source

Anna Clark

• "character, even in Victorian novels, is as much about richly superficial traits as it is about personhood."
  • anti-subjective turn (Elisha Cohn)
• romantic subjectivity as competing with other modes
• argues (persuasively) that Forster/Freud are longterm critical strawmen
• "interiority’s appositional status is embedded in its critical history."
• " Rather than thinking of interiority as a rejection of the external, or as a negation of public, performative identity, we might instead consider it party to the very “interface” Farina describes, animating forms of political agency and public thinking in the moments it comes into being."

Tara Menon

• agree: "This is, I think, a criticism of a straw man—proponents of DH approaches no longer, if they ever did, claim that graphs and statistics are the only respectable form of knowledge."
• l/u "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac

Daniel Wright

• "“everyday words are both utterly historical phenomena,” he insists, but simultaneously, “these same words remain altogether ordinary in the present” (212)."
• "We might say that Farina’s everyday words help us to understand prose in general, and novelistic prose in particular, as what Wittgenstein would call a “form of life” (§19)."