Difference between revisions of "Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)"

Revision as of 12:01, 13 July 2017

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Pub. 1865. Ed. Adrian Poole. Penguin: World's Classics, 1997. Print.

Overall

• meditation on commodification (Wegg's leg, the supply chain severing final product from what went into it) as an extension of Dickens's lifelong meditation on the use value of literature, the dignity of literature (vs. Thackeray in the 1850s)

General

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

Materiality

Shakespeare References

Seminar Notes 5/16 (Taylor Anthroposcene)

• Tension between particulars and overarching geography
• Pairings with Bleak House
  • system novels: large scale entities (Dombey too) - in this case, the economy
• Central character is London
  • large scale corresponds with our focus on large scale human agency and the apprehension of one character (or one reader)
  • moving away from focus on human characters
    • divide btwn human, animal, and object troubled [cf. Taylor 2016 for more]
• the trauma of Staplehurst train accident as he was writing OMF: extratextual crisis reverberating in the novel
  • which number?
• "In these times of ours"
  • written during the Thames embankment (pre embankment setting - the waterfront culture of the Hexams destroyed)
  • also in the anthroposcene
  • jump from East London slum to West End Veneerings
    • Veneerings part of new economy of finance
  • Ch 3: Lightwood and Wrayburn going back W to E
    • "Two Londons": cab ride stitching them together
      • Franco Moretti: Map of Euro Novel
  • moral and literal sewage: dust is partly shit
  • How are all these ostensibly different existences connected?
    • geography, class, sanitation, meterological maps - reading strategy
      • this is actually a really tightly constructed novel (unlike the sprawling BH)
• commodities
  • objectification of everything
  • the subject is self aware, awareness of human object status (Bella comparing herself to spoons)
• is Wegg's leg a commodity?
  • epitome of a commodity fetish (abstracted from use value), or opposed
  • a literary man with a part made out of the same stuff (?)
  • buying his leg back
  • separating exchange value from use value
    • severing final product from what went into it (supply chain)
• Dickens and Marx are writing about the same synchronic place (London 1860s)
  • all these commodities abstracted from original purpose and Wegg can't afford his own leg (alienated labor)
    • commodification of labor - purchasing of life
  • or the opposite: scalar shift in how visible some of these things are - Wegg and his leg are reunited
    • if it's compensating for a lack it's Freudian fetishism - recovering manhood and gentility
    • magical quality in either case (Freudian or Marxist)
  • if it's not exchangeable it's not a commodity - Wegg wants his leg not a leg (presto-chango into a better leg)
    • the truly commoditized consciousness wouldn't want to see the difference: would Wegg know the difference?
• Worth being careful about using Marx to explain Dickens: parts don't fit
  • they may not agree on the same phenomena
  • we read theory as mobile and literature as local: why not use Dickens as a theory of commodities and objects, Marx as a novelist?
  • Dickens much more into stuff than Marx, messy particularity troubling theory - intractable materiality
• Figuring humans as animals (Jenny Wren, etc) playing with figuration's unstable relationship to the referent - literalized metaphors
  • what's literal about figurative language?
  • "a big ass poem": it's the play that's important
• The sense of Dickens being interested in the same things as Jane Bennett and (?) Connolly
  • emergent patterns intersecting
  • new materialist turn
• if one of the concerns is social stratification, does the aesthetic of overabundance cutting across become a problem? Flattening social distinctions?
  • does interconnection imply sameness?
  • in the scene with Tulliver and the Mill there's a serious engagement with difference, but you take anything seriously in Dickens at your peril (?)
  • they're all in London, but not in the same way
• What does Dickens think of wealth? He bites into capitalist economy but this had more ads than any other book he'd written
  • it sucks to be poor, but ethically and politically it's harder to say how he feels about wealth
  • to what degree is the economy presented as natural or not? Where are the places where it maps out double internality (Jason Moore) - capital consuming nature, nature consuming capital
    • people used Darwin to naturalize capital