Difference between revisions of "Taylor 2016"

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Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: the London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Virginia: UP, 2016. Print.

Intro

• 5: Nature in the Anthroposcene exists in a state of perpetual withdrawal, a state of affairs that I have taken to calling "abnatural". The prefix ab- means both "away from" and "derived from." Thus, "abnatural" speaks to both nature's absence and its uncanny persistence.... Abnatural characterizes those moments in which nature appears other to itself, beside or outside itself.

Ch. 1: Bleak House

• 21: [Esther and Guppy coming into a "London particular"] What does it mean to imagine a manufactured climate? How do we dwell, meaningfully and coherently, in an abnatural world? These are questions of urgent, twenty-first-century significance, but they are also questions that we share with the Victorians.... Treating Victorian literature as Anthroposcene literature offers a paradoxically new perspective on the present, reminding us that we inhabit the future: we live after the end of the world to which our bodies, appetites, and ideas are adapted, in a state of perpetual withdrawal from the world we once called home, even as many of the species with which we cohabit the planet disappear entirely.
• 23: Drawing a correlation between realist fiction and the glasshouse suggests that we understand Victorian realism as a distinct participation in "environmentalism," in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, which James Winter has described as "an interpretative framework: the proposition that crucial aspects of human life and history are determined by distinct physical settings." Instead of expressing explicit concern about the vulnerability of the natural world, environmentalism offered the Victorians a mechanism for understanding the relationship between the human species and its habitat in dynamic interaction.
• 25 The artificial climate of the glasshouse offered a paradoxically more natural habitat than the soot-laden London fog. The city had become a space in which nature could be sustained only through artifice, sheltered from the toxic atmosphere outside the glass.
• 27 BH's query, "What connexion can there be?," is the prototypical question of anthropogenic climate change.
• [distributed agency of anthropogenic climate change - Jane Bennett -> Deleuze/Guattari] The assemblage thus offers a useful mechanism for understanding not only the distributed, multispecies, multisubstance agency of communities, corporations, cities, power grids, ecosystems, and storms but also the composition of complex organisms themselves. A whale ship is an assemblage; so is a whale.
  • Cites Bennett Vibrant Matter 24
  • cross ref. with Rhizomes and assemblages stuff
• 27-8 The distributed agency of assemblages provides a useful conceptual rubric for reevaluating the weird, abnatural realism of Charles Dickens. In literary terms, distributed agency and vicarious causation are closely aligned with metonymy, which is to say association by proximity[.] Dickens, a "master metonymyst," inscribes people, animals, objects, and language itself in vast recursive networks of cause and effect, woven out of what Elaine Freedgood [on 16] calls "the vagrant processes...of the metonymic imagination." In so doing, he reinscribes agency as a property of those distributed, adjacent, mediated interactions. Dickens's fiction abounds with textured materiality such that the imagined reality exceeds any grounding in mimetic accuracy. In the process, his novels do not represent a world aspiring to mimetic verisimilitude. Instead, they create an explicitly fictive world that renders legible otherwise invisible dynamics at work in the vast assemblage of Victorian London. Dickens was not simply a novelist in the usual sense but a media theorist experimenting with the technologies by which reality becomes virtual - and that is why he provides a useful point of departure for wrestling with the imaginative challenges of the Anthroposcene.
• The novel as a climate model depends not only on resemblance or descriptive [29] accuracy but also on the potential for the novel to make visible otherwise invisible truths about the world, not in spite of its fictive status but because of it.... The novel itself does not simply represent the world as a separate entity; it participates in that world and helps bring it into being. The "real" city of London is in part Dickensian, and not only because Dickens's novels depict the city in which they were written and read. But more profoundly, the novels constitute part of the city itself, just as Dickens's house, grave, and favorite pubs have become landmarks in it (as have the locations of key events in his fiction). The metropolis is built not only of bricks and mortar but also of words and stories.
• 29 The always vexing debates over the extent to which realism (or even language itself) provides an accurate representation of the world in the sense of a realistic copy elide the fact that what it actually does is stage a performance of that world, thereby revealing constitutive dynamics within it that may not be otherwise visible. Metaphor and metonymy are models, too: technologies that dramatize relationships between discontinuous entities in order to produce concepts that would not be possible without them. As Laura Otis puts it, "metaphors do not 'express' scientists' ideas; they are the ideas."