V21 Summer 2018

Seminar notes

• centering Seacole (for 19c lit)
• how does reading her help us reimagine canonical realism?
• the fact that MC's narrative takes the form that it does is result of certain forces
• her compression of marriage plot reframing Dickens
• Lowe: intimacy of circulation
• Seacole critiquing the marriage plot?
• genres it touches on and does something generically different: slave narrative, travel narrative, Augustinian biography, almost spy fiction
• her own disinterest in the bureaucracy that enables her movement
• Seacole's individual agency is foregrounded more than the determination of empire
• Said: dense specificity of the estate of Mansfield Park but the estate in Antigua is never brought before our eyes: where does an author put her details?
• l/u Ian Malcolm on slave trade
• how much weight do we give literature? Do we have to write about a lot of other things in order to write about history?
• symptomatic reading is a losing game b/c if it's the bulk of the field it doesn't give you a reason to read novels, symptoms of culture that's kind of skewed
• "maybe the good thing from new historicism would be to actually be historians"
• new historicism: novels make people (Nancy Armstrong)
• Hack is all about contextualizing vs. the authors he's looking at who are remaking -- texts as tools
• African American authors interested in reappropriation even though it could be antagonistic to them - in Balzac the collapsing of selling people under one rubric (wage labor for Marxists, slavery for postcolonialism)
• constitutive relation between liberalism and "various forms of awfulness": the imperfect extension of the rights of man, the exclusionary nature of it is constitutive. Why couldn't you have abolition without importing Chinese labor, or Obama without drone warfare? Is various forms of awfulness constitutively inherent or has it historically just happened that way?
• putting Seacole on a syllabus well would create a very different sense of the space of the 19th century, not a constitutive outside but just plain constitutive of the way the world functions in the c19 (Enoch Arden -- you don't know when someone is gone what happened to them), the narrative conditions of possibility that literature creates
• the way literature teaches us to keep track of details, "keeping track of keeping track"
• collapsing the "modern division of knowledge" into the shape of the archive loses a lot of stuff
• why track the development of the Silver Fork novel over time in a distant reading way if a Silver Fork novel in itself isn't interesting? It could get us past presentism, and around the arguing about history from the evidentiary value of 5 novels. Might be a rationale for single-author study: you CAN know enough about Eliot.
• the high stakes of African American studies (drilling into the different resonances of blackness over periods of time, why it's fought about, and is there progress toward treating black people as fully human): what's at stake for close reading Vic lit at a distance is not at stake for the former
• Hack too inclined to foreground the Victorian rhetorically and in citation practice
• Du Bois literary-historical sabotage of Carlyle by quoting him with no attribution
• better on literary mobility than on race
• l/u De Certeau, Reading as Poaching: readerly agencies that are not reducible to the ideologies of the text
• the agent and the object of study are the same, the chunk of Bleak House that gets pulled out, not Dickens and/or Douglass
• we haven't gotten to the project of "how can African-American scholarship help us understand Victorian literature"
• forget about whether you're saying something new and put the genealogy of your argument in the footnotes

Seminar 2

• Swinburne
• "Hymn" in Jude the Obscure
• 1866 - appears on the scene as enfant terrible
• "Anactoria" homoerotic into sadomasochism pretty quickly
• Prins, Victorian Sappho -- it's all literary, not actual practice, celebrating the confluence of sex and pain in a literary way
• the erotics of pain
• makes grotesques like Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" look less grotesque when he comes on the scene (right before Ring and the Book makes him god next to Tennyson)
• can you imagine "Anactoria the historical novel" in 1866 - what difference genre makes? Could it show up in the mid-Vic novel?
• an SM-y novel like Wuthering Heights and the difference with Swinburne getting tagged a sexual deviant
• will and power links E Bronte and Swinburne
• the blasphemy 155-188 all second draft, "let me add this whole passage about how god loves suffering, too, or else we wouldn't be who we are"
• it's a poem about him mastering you and you can't get out of reading it
• it's not more embodied but it is more explicitly sexual than, say, Mill on the Floss -- there are a lot of somatic sensations in fiction
• the tie to setting that limits the ability to jump from image to image
• Burne Jones Perseus cycle
• poetry vs the novel or realism vs other registers? There's realism in novels and painting but not applied to poetry
• Realism also an important epistemological category: observation in naturalism and in Ruskinian aesthetics, unmediated ideal (that has a long history in poetry)
• Eliot: Aurora Leigh is a decent novel and a tremendous poem
• what is it about poetry that makes realism a non-productive category?
• in the c19 we have to be careful about using the word "novel" which can be an anachronistic term that Victorians would have used terms like "romance" or "history" (Marshall) (policing language can be taken too far)
• Eliot in "Natural History of German Life": "How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as well as by our political and social theories."
• erotics of religious life -- he was quite alive to this

• Wright
• opposite of Hack's project: I'm gonna show you an archive that you don't know about, vs I'm gonna talk to you about something you know in a new way
• finding a compelling order for the reader not just in the order of chapters
• how does he mark desire?
• a different vision of the novel as not just a disciplinary apparatus (bottom of 15 and 16) -- building out from looking at the novel as non-mimetic (Kornbluh)
• he's less interested in the content of desire
• language and desire and their cooperation trying to get past the "it's actually saying this" to get at what's unburied, past symptomatic/paranoid reading

• Sedgwick
• "masturbator" still isn't a sexual identity: why?
• "productivity" is the problem -- also a queer sexuality issue, not procreative (Lee Edelman)
• something fruitful will be applied, but literary study has no application
• Marxist critique wants to say that it does have application (in revolution, etc.)
• the good of literature is a real aim, the experience of literature is a sufficient good
• the history of masturbation and the history of reading share a methodological problem: they are unrecorded acts (but there are different registers to talk about them through)
  • questions of the autoerotic and of policing that
• her essay on Tennyson's "The Princess"
• problem of evidence: 1881 text not real, not local, and not chronologically appropriate
• "Critic as Artist" thing: making something that Austen never could have come up with
• presentist: look at the payoff what I'm doing now has
• literature has little evidentiary value, but that's not why we read it: a novel is a tool to think with and unlike history it moves. So is the 1881 treatise beside the point?
• lesbianism and onanism are sexual ids that have deep genealogy unlike hetero/homosexual
• are the erotics of Sense and Sensibility what we need?
• Uriah Heep as a masturbator article
• an argument about evidence in that you don't need evidence, it doesn't need to be productive: "This is what I think of when I read Austen"
• the different work that Tennyson can do in an argument about extinction, or what Jane Austen can do in an argument about masturbation
• helps us make the masturbating girl visible, a sexual identity that's hard to see
• looking for women's relationships to their own sexuality in novels in a way that's not about their attractiveness to men
• the excerptability of a scene and its evidentiary use

Seacole

• the ```intimacy``` of her narrative: a way to bring together he way it thinks about narration and the way it things about empire, the affective economy of empire
• autobiography and Bildungsroman -- shared form, shared values of progress and disinterestedness? Indicated in Seacole saying her slow and gradual development need not be discussed? (15)
• 21 anti Americanism because of slavery
• 24 the way her perspective knits together the liminal spaces of empire and international capitalism, from Cruces in Panama to Sebastapol in Ukraine
• 26 "sympathizing reader": how dos she rhetorically create that space for reception?
• the difference in civilization of people inbound and outbound from California -- feels like the way Conrad describes far flung imperial experience clinging to his characters
• 58 epidemic deaths from yellow fever in Jamaica described as a battle with an inhospitable climate
• 63 meeting someone in Panama and becoming "more connected" elsewhere in the world -- that epigram from Daniel Deronda about probability requiring that a lot of improbable things happen
• 67 again her shadiness about america's imperial designs on Panama -- the sense that not all empires are alike
• 74 saying she had no more idea about what the Crimea was like than the "home authorities" did: so perceptive about the improvisation of imperial and martial efforts
• 98 interesting on the Turkish pasha going "western" in camp at Balaclava
• 154 emergent community with British pastimes in Sebastopol after victory -- 157 racing imitating that at Ascot
• 162 glad to hear of peace even though it will ruin her hotel and store, like shopping in the green zone during the Iraq War

• CLP seminar notes
  • Seacole's experience of warfare, "that strange excitement which I do not remember on future occasions" -- watching the "pretty proceedings" is over once we get to WWI, no watching "pretty tanks"
  • Nightingale doesn't make nursing glorious, she makes it women's work
  • N's hospital was back in Istanbul, Seacole was on the front
  • humor functioning to make her acceptable given her racial difference, her matronliness and her humor
  • self-fashioning in memoir, like Frederick Douglass
    • positioning her race, distinguishing herself from "black" ("yellow"), other confiugrations
    • it does rhetorical work but herself-conception does seem genuinee
  • also not as religious as Nightingale

Lowe

• writing really repetitive: core claim, here's Williams, core claim, here's Berlant
• clear articulation of claim at start
• 2 liberal philosophy commensurate with slavery, capitalism, empire -- refer back to Chakrabarty
• following Amanda Anderson: what can we redeem about the liberal imagination?
• 3 and esp 4 the archive's implication in these systems, the methodological intervention (is it? Isn't it pretty standard Foucauldian practice?) of reading the cultural and philosophical archive of liberalism along with the official state archive
• 5 okay but how should an archive work? It identified the imperatives of an archive but not its own lack of neutrality
• 7 the identity of the development of modern liberalism and of modern conceptions of race
• 16 forms of liberal politics alongside forms of appropriation and removal
• 19-20 good definition in Williams's terms, emergent intimacies from residual processes and eclipsed by narratives of liberal individuality
• 23 using the archive of colonial management to push against the liberal teleological narrative of the antislavery movement
• 30 we must situate affective and sexual liberal intimacy "within the material conditions of colonial relations" -- how/where does this push beyond the political claim of Said's essay about Austen?

• 39 nice little potted claim summary: freedom constituted by forgetting these relations
• 40 the ethics of a history trying to stay close to the losses of the past before moving on to new narratives

• From Amanda Anderson
  • first, generally, the liberal ideal of detachment/disinterestedness: "According to this model, after a process of intellectual bildung or growth, a cultivated mind will be prepared to review controversies, and indeed to rearticulate and respond to them in writing , with conviction but without partisanship. C19 liberalism was much more than this, of course: it was a loosely organized set of political, economic, and personal principles that included negative freedom (that is, freedom from interference from others), scientific rationalism, support for gradual social improvement in a capitalist economy through private charity and limited state intervention, and what Amanda Anderson has called 'a set of pratices of the self, ranging from stoicism to cosmopolitanism to dandyism." (Behlman and Longmuir 295)
  • "Thus while I expose hierarchies and exclusions where they occur -- and to the extent that they are visible to me -- I resist those modes of analysis that too uniformly or precipitously discredit the very attempt to elaborate an ideal of critical distance"
  • "When I refer to the cultivation of detachment, I am referring to the aspiration to a distanced view."

Hack

• Alex McCauley discussion leader
• (Notes on paper)

Swinburne

"Anactoria"

• CLP discussion leader
• image clusters: blood, fire, ashes, leaves, fruit, flowers (lilies), the color blue, eyes (esp 39-44),
• epigram is mistranslated (says Broadview— by whom?) from Sappho: "Of whom by persuasion hast thou vainly caught love?" Should be "Whom shall I make to give thee room in her heart’s love?"
• monologue from Sappho’s lover’s POV? Sappho herself.
• 17-22 Sappho’s jealousy
• 45-60 counterpoint of heroic couplet forward motion with the cycles of images that recur and change slightly
• 56 also the shift from 1 ("my life is bitter with thy love") to "Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love"
• 75-6 the bitter reality under the Shakespearean rhetoric of poetic immortality: "thy body is the song, / thy mouth the music; thou art more than I, / though my voice die not til the whole world die" (again 122, ambivalent 201-4)
• persistent anxiety about time
• shift to heavy enjambment 155
• the way central image clusters develop cyclically and through different figurations: literal flowers become metaphorical flowers become metonymic sails becomes an allusion to the Lotus at the end
• from 225 really kind of a monologue imagining what poetic immortality would feel like, as if she were conscious of the workings of literary history and the way she’s put in language

Wright

• Katherine V discussion Leader
• wonderful qt from Wilde to situate whole argument
• 2 4 types of bad logic to "give form to the formless thing that is erotic desire": contradiction (self-evident falsity), tautology (self-evident truth [I am what I am]), vagueness, generality
• 6 Wilde De Profundis qt
• 7 desire idiosyncratic, logic impersonal, but ethics we think of as bound to both: again the Victorian ethic of disinterestedness

Sedgwick

• Claire discussion leader for "Masturbating Girl"

Program Notes

• forming new collectives to think about pressing political issues as people who also think a lot about the Victorian period
• time flexible: don’t need to stay whole time, spend an hour on each text and if we haven’t transitioned naturally bring up the next with guiding questions
• informality
• tweeting: #v21summer
• being down my own rabbit hole it was refreshing to come up into the diversity of other primary texts and methodologies
• intros: working on, favorite thing you read this summer