Revision as of 10:56, 13 September 2017

Discussion Notes

Day 1

• ideal vs material, holding them in tension in writing
  • "meeting in a time of ideal and material depletion"
• their chair offered medievalist/victorianist symposium at some point -- follow up
• V21: spontaneous formation of collectives
• Jesse Rosenthal, Good Form - l/u

Woloch & Gaskell

• writerliness of Gaskell: these 4 chapters
  • political life: how writing and political action feels
• parabola of action and inaction (Orwell) like the tension btwn narrative voice and Margaret's voice being in tension
• the explicit political action of MH jumping in front of Thornton
• political writing as art - Orwell - Gaskell?
  • is MH's gesture an allegory for writing? A writerly act?
• union: marriage and politics
• ending strange aesthetically, economically, politically
  • like Jane Eyre?
• layering of aesthetic, practice, society (Williams) in MH's gesture
• is N & S hard to talk about cos it's an explicitly political novel (like Orwell)?
• CLP reads it as a love novel, not that labor/social stuff is epiphenomenal but that it's secondary: the marriage plot does work (CLP)
  • Susan Orleans - Orchids - l/u
• "there's only so many ways you can build a novel" (Jesse)
• critique at time of facticity of women's writing in C19
• representation of working class that really works is really sparse - but why do we have a sense that it works? Not just where are they in Orwell or Gaskell: where are they in our writing and thinking at all?
• Orwell: ethical ideation and writerly propulsion
• Orwell's "poetics"? (Woloch)
  • cultural dynamics apart from linearity (CLP) - what people are looking for
  • Hillis Miller defines poetics as "understanding figurative language"
• different forms do different things (Woloch's "instrumental" formalism)
  • CLP's surf movie with love plot vs surf doc - "I need the football player!" - why do we need the football player? What work does he do? What work does the Thornton/Margaret marriage plot do?
    • cognitive narrative theory - why do we like novels? They work the way our mind works, therefore we need the football player to individuate him. Is the need for that individuating presence to generate narrative interest b/c we've read other novels and we're familiar with certain types of narrative possibility, or is it because it's how our minds work? Informaiton processing as critical part of novel reading: weighing different characteristics against each other - Susan Zunschein (Theory of Mind and Novel)
      • Natalie Philips: Austen and cognitive theory
• "Victorian poetry doesn't let you forget you're reading poetry, it's always showing off" - Gaskell isn't trying to remind you of form - in that way like Orwell
  • Trollope was the window pane writer (Hawthorne said so!), not Gaskell, in the period (Katherine) - using working class language to make it familiar to middle class, autoethnography (Buzard)
• hard now to demonstrate critical innovation by pointing to the unconscious - Woloch actually pointing out how hard surface reading is to do in a sophisticated way with Orwell - JLT pointing out the methodological implications of his argument (tho he doesn't speak to the surface people in this section)
• we don't talk about the conditions under which a critical essay was written - under Reagan, under Clinton, under trump
  • Woloch kind of demonstrates his consciousness forming in the Reagan years with 53: Orwell "radically skeptical of any final, stable, or permanent expression of political belief" - sounds a lot like deconstruction to me
• "it's not necessarily the most avowedly political writing that is the most politically effective" (JOT) - a case for reading novels this way, so this is part of the work the marriage plot is doing: getting you to engage with politics using that
  • sometimes being less explicit might be more effective
    • cli-fi: political but "not electorally political" (Adichie's Americanah is the latter)

Williams

• civilization as process in progress -- a failure in those terms
• philosophy of life and activity - Williams's vitalist Marxism
• dominant, residual, emergent -- go back and read
  • how does the dominant/hegemonic culture take control of the new? The emergent is radically new
• we know we are still living under capitalism because we only have the "six types of plots"
• any romantic theorist you name will have some investment in uniqueness of expression
• from medium to social practice - 158 - crit of new criticism siloing the work of art from its production - medium as form of social organization - "form can be so fuzzy because we've removed it from the flow that mediums are supposed to have, art is suspended rather than the vehicle of flow" (Molly)
  • "not good at reading contexts as themselves formal," i.e. history -- Woloch is good at this, the form of equality vs. inequality
    • One Vs Many - Eliot dramatizing competing pull of democracy vs inequality - misalignment between story and discourse as played out in rel btwn characters - Peter Brooks - Dickens - Wegg
  • physicalizing the medium: "the properties of 'the medium' were abstracted as if they defined the practice, rather than being its means"
• "The New Criticism was pedagogical gold"
• Williams isn't closing off new critical readings
  • he was where the new formalists are now in 1978
• Stuart Hall -- l/u - postcolonialism
• Read Felski.
• "uneasy communities" -- l/u
• "History repeating" - Anna K - l/u
• really go back to dominant residual emergent essay
  • like complex adaptive systems, AI, second order phenomena

Day 2

• Bleak Liberalism - Amanda Anderson - tell Sarah (from Katherine)
• "imagining myself as you gives me an entry into this fictional world" - why identification is, actually, of course, impt
• "we have not been as good at talking about mediation as we could be": the shorthand "Jane Eyre says" for "The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte says..."
  • strand of characterological study that's about "characters aren't human" but still about characters - "Rise of Fictionality" (Gallagher - but she still talks about character)
  • Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go - about literary character in a fundamental way
• Victorian Babylon - l/u
  • "Art historians aren't any better at understanding mediation than English" - Anna
• Williams: we've gotten confused about what "media" means: it's supposed to be transmission but it's become a suspension
• form(s): physical and literary, disambiguating between the two (can we? is "genre" what we want for "literary form")
• form and mediation inextricable for Hensley
  • his def: "form marks, for me, the capacity of literary ensembles to set ideas into motion in ways particular to their suite of affordances - ways that, by definition other modes of presentation cannot" (18)
• choice: how much does form become interpretable because it's made, because it's the result of decisions,
  • but the physical mediation is the result of decisions too - how the form design of the Electric and International Telegraph Company evolves and structures thought, its evolution as an enabling constraint
• affordances/form - we're not producing readings, not assigning intentionality, instead we're apprehending a kind of saturation of legalistic violence, of war, that floods a whole cultural/literary landscape: whether it's voluntary or choice is beside the point because it's saturated with that
  • Said 53 - "scarcely any dissent...the empire must be maintained" - resistance is unthinkable(?), nothing is outside it - they aren't deciding to be racist it's that nothing is outside that (Orientalism), not letting them off the hook but different than saying "they had a choice and made the racist one"
    • worth being skeptical - Kipling really was more racist than other people - back to Williams' hegemony that doesn't preclude individual agency
• H 23: "The reading I am offering seeks neither to uncover an obscured historical violence nor to ascribe that unmasking to the image itself. I am suggesting instead that the photograph should be seen to transform those very spatial (and ethical) figures of reading into its subject, turning "unmasking" itself into a conceptual problem"
  • ethics of care, curatorial (to care)
  • the residual still flows through the emergent: close reading still flows through symptomatic reading - we're still doing close reading, it just doesn't get talked about in the same way...but it still gets shut down at NAVSA conferences
• surface reading: let's talk about what lit can do rather than showing what it's doing without meaning to
  • difference between Jameson's reading of Lord Jim and Cannon Schmitt's -- the antagonistic relationship to the text that's in the Jamesonian type symptomatic, paranoid reading
• look up Nathan's work on "curatorial reading"
• imminent critique: object doing work of critic
  • tension between this and his celebration of literary criticism itself?
• "reclamation of the obvious" (CLP's flip description of Deirdre Lynch's reclamation of enjoyment)
• problem with affordances of form (Levine): form is the shape, but not getting into the messiness of "this seminar is a form" but it doesn't get into the affordances of concrete, you can only make certain things
  • this is an affordance (!) of material studies
• 30 "concretizing the metaphors that structure..." - what does this mean?
  • can you only read an object in its own terms? Jameson doesn't tell you how to read necessarily
• cultural object inside and outside history - different perspectives
  • what Henlsey is trying to do the tension btwn an object as historical and as lifted into a different line of sight; our responsibility of recognizing the flow between them, as a medium, a conduit that speaks in 2 different temporalities - we can't know what it meant in that moment but we kind of have to (Molly)
    • the agency of the work of art as a conduit, as opposed to an isolated thing
• the productivity of empire, not just that it's repulsive but that it generates aesthetically pleasing objects like Haggard and Kipling
  • it's easy to be disgusted with empire (and important), but working through the attraction to imperial texts
• asking what a text did is a valuable question, but asking what it does and what it continues to do is important too - "don't give up on a better past"
• Ricoeur - meaning is richer and cumulative than origins - read more

Dutt

• Dutt family lost caste when they converted to Christianity
• an interesting instance of a super high level of cultural hybridity: distant memories of childhood Hinduism
• she's in conversation with C19 European ballad tradition
• when empire creates wider global networks critics impose their own critical concepts on texts for which that is anachronistic or outright long; but when she writes in the sonnet form she's doing something quite different from that
• "native clime" - casuarinas and baboons - but super-Wordsworthian: visionary and "local pride", so therefore even more Wordsworthian
• "the easiness of the imperially-complicit Dutt reading" (JOT), easier than "look at what she's doing with Wordsworthian form, what it's like to be doubly exiled"
  • and does it need to be resistant, either? Only complicit or resistant is reductive; Dutt is of value *and* not resistant to imperial forces
  • the antagonistic relationship to the text: is this extending empire, which antagonized Dutt and people like her?
  • "what is made available by Dutt's choice of this form, given that people who have read Cowper and Wordsworth would understand it as a gesture performing specific work?" Hensley's reading practice might be more open to all of this than the "imperially-complicit" reading
• part of the point of the poem is that we don't have the symbolic register of the casuarina tree (vs. roses, yew trees)
• "C19 readers knew them some plants, we don't so much"

Reading Notes

Hensley, Forms of Empire

• 1 Marx wrote abt the Indian Mutiny for the NY Tribute in 1857
• 2 tracking a handful of C19 poets, novelists, as they stretched the boundaries of their thinking to account for the seeming paradox by which a project of universal modernization could unfold hand in hand with generalized killing.
• ...the years between 1837 and 1901 were characterized not just by salutary social progress, widening democracy, or mechanized enlightenment but also by ongoing war: extrajudicial killing as everyday life.
• [telegram abt uprising] Compressed into a kind of stylized poetry, the document, like all pieces of writing, conveys conceptuality and formalizes a theory of the world.
• 3 Progressive models could not admit that a modernity that was by definition pacific could also be an ongoing war... JS Mill opened...The Subjection of Women with the assertion that rule by force already "seemed to be entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's affairs"
  • can connect to Freedgood about fictions of displacement: we can't think imperial violence directly, we think it through (for example) Magwitch's tobacco
• 4 ...a still active critical tendency, both within and outside the field of Victorian Studies, to see liberal societies not just as "unfinished projects" but as opposed in some way to violence as such.
• 5 "Law"...brought the world to order with hands stained in blood.
• It was in the Empire, in other words, that Victorian progressive idealism came up against the most disorienting challenges to its core conceptual assumptions. Forms of Empire focuses on these moments of friction to show how certain C19 thinkers turned to the resources of literary form to negotiate with what I treat as the central impasse of Victorian modernity: the curious intimacy between legality and harm. As I work to show, the question of how this intimacy was to take concrete shape - how sovereign violence would be distributed and on whose bodies its touch would fall - depended on mechanisms of exclusion that separated the discounted from the counted, the vulnerable from the protected.
• 6 ...the Victorian state's structurally unfinishable war against uprising natives, antagonistic regimes, and other enemies of universal principles is best understood not as one topic within the broader field of Victorian Studies, but as the general fact subtending the entirety of domestic life and therefor cultural production in the period.... In this sense every artifact of Victorian culture is an artifact of Empire.
• 7 The writers I treat here required all the resources of literary form to comprehnd how the world's first liberal democracy might have the threat of death coiled at its very heart.
• Lauren Goodlad has recently noted that liberalism in particular has tempted scholars to hypostasize an internally disparate and often self-critical set of positions into an oversimplified straw man, a synthetic "liberal theory" or, still worse, a monolithic "logic, impulse or urge available for our later, allegedly more enlightened critique." As I show, the tendency of criticism to moralize on an (oversimplified) past itself replays the procedures of the Victorian progressive idealism whose internal crises I work here to track. In fact neither liberalism nor Empire obeyed laws of behavior that were given in advance; still less were they simplistic or univocal ideological constructions.
• [aiming to] trouble any comfortable sense that we have disentangled ourselves from the mixed legacies of that internally diverse tradition... [and] to locate in those prior forms raw materials that might help us rethink and thus remake the present.
• 9 ...authors I focus on in the following chapters...tested the boundaries of the liberal idealism that has become our common sense; they labored to devise figural and therefore conceptual languages adequate to what many of them viewed as their era's constitutive antinomy: the intimate, scandalous intertwinement of violence and law.
• 10 lyric poems, realist novels, sensation fictions, and adventure romances constitute highly mediated engagements with the limit condition of the liberal state, and so bear witness in slantwise fashion to the violence animating modern democracy.
• Yet even the most engaged cultural and political criticism in our moment continues to prove vulnerable to the lure of progressive schemes. Despite a robust debate aimed at querying just this methodological procedure, criticism continues to cast C19 texts as violent, racist, or otherwise blinkered others to our implicitly more enlightened ideational projects: they have ideology while we have theory.
• pick up notes here

Williams, Marxism and Literature

• base/superstructure: sum of relations of production --> superstructure, which is scaffolded on the base
  • superstructure: institutions
  • forms of consciousness which express class view
  • political and cultural practices: where awareness of economic conflict gets fought out
• 79: "according to the materialist conception of history the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life" - Engels
• why isn't book history more explicitly Marxist? In terms of intellectual genealogy and ideological politics it is but in explicit political terms it isn't
• determination: settling bounds, limits, exertion of pressures
  • not opposed to direct agency: "we make our history ourselves, but in the first place under very definitive assumptions and conditions" (Engels)
• 85: objectivities passage - fill in
• 87: society quote - good to relate to Gaskell N and S
• productive forces: any and all of the means of the production and reproduction of real life
  • qt on 93
• mediation vs reflection
  • mediation is in the object itself
• hegemony
  • state relations (classical) -- class relations (Marxism) - Gramsci: complex interlocking pol/soc/cultural forces based on distribution of power: dominance and subordination
  • beyond ideology: "not only the conscious system of ideas/beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings/values"
  • hegemony is "the whole body of practices and expectations...on shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world" & ff. on 110
  • Gramsci's solution: an alternative hegemony
• "grasp[ing] the hegemonic in its active and formative but also transformative processes" - unpack?
  • where cultural processes, e.g., works of art, actually do authentically break with hegemony - but what does that look like?
• 128 qt
  • think through the arg of "Structures of Feeling"
• 136: "now capitalist economic activity and cultural production are inseperable" -- they weren't in the C19, scale shifted earlier...
• implications of 137-8 direct for print culture studies
  • sociology of culture -> add study of forms (what does that entail here?)
• qt about forms on 190: unpack?
• 191 rehabilitating New Criticism formalism and updating its project

Woloch, Or Orwell