Empty houses Kurnick, David
2012., 20111205, 2011, 2012-01-01
eBook
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. Empty Houses challenges this consensus by reexamining the genre's ...development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly--the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin--writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies--this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, David Kurnick reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms.
Communities in Fiction Kurnick, David
Victorian Studies,
09/2016, Letnik:
59, Številka:
1
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
The book's titular rubric organizes the argument only in the loosest sense, and Miller frequently has to remind the reader, in the midst of an engaging tangent about the difficulties of taking notes ...in an electronic book or the Supreme Court's recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act, that he is coming back to the topic of fictional communities. The mild and familiar world of Barsetshire, for example, is rendered weird by Miller's startling observation that Trollope's characters have an eerie insight into their neighbors' states of mind, a clairvoyance that makes his novels into "a species of fantasy or science fiction" (92).
This essay claims first that literary study's recent "method" conversations follow a binary structure (depth vs. surface reading, post-critique vs. critique, paranoid vs. reparative reading) more ...appropriate to a moralized struggle between good and bad kinds of readers than to debates over interpretation, and second that a disavowal of queer literary studies has had a determining but opaque role in some of the influential interventions in that conversation (by Sedgwick, Best and Marcus, and Felski). I argue that the moralism of the conversation depends on forcefully forgetting queer literary study's investment in speaking truth, and that recalling that investment is necessary to an adequate historical sense, and defense of, the seriousness of both queer theory and literary study.
This essay argues first that we understand fictional characters as covertly “famous”: that is, known (via the distribution of print or other mass media) to cohorts of people far larger than the usual ...scale of human acquaintance. Second, it claims that there is an erotic component to this secret fame, one that reaches an unlikely pinnacle of self-aware power in Jane Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion. I argue that the novel’s love plot derives much of its power from the way it allegorizes its media condition: because the heroine’s desire for her suitor resembles an ambition to become visible to her many readers, and because the suitor’s desire for her resembles those readers’ ambition to reach into the fictional universe, an identification with either side of this love plot involves readers in an eroticized apprehension of our mass status. The interpretation aims to put Austen in a line of literary pioneers of impersonal eroticism, and to reorient our thinking about nineteenth-century literature’s relation to population-thinking. Where powerful recent work has shown the extent to which the nineteenth century understood the human aggregate in terms of biopolitical anxieties around rampant sexuality and (over)-reproduction of the species, this essay highlights other ways numbers, crowds, and masses signify erotically in the period’s literature: as intensifiers of sexual feeling, as objects of vibrating excitement in their own right, as calls to solidarity and belonging that radiate with erotic energies only tangentially, if at all, related to conjugality and the reproduction of the species.
Roberto Bolaño’s work repeatedly asks readers to compare various entities (continents, national literatures, ethnicities, the realms of culture and politics). The essay reads this obsessive ...comparativism as the first step in a totalizing aesthetic project, one tied to Bolaño’s preoccupation with the twentieth century’s supreme comparand of state crime, National Socialism. Bolaño’s seeming promotion of Nazism to mythical status in fact serves the more urgent geopolitical project of mapping a continental American history with US political power firmly at its center.
The essays reads Bolaño’s fascist preoccupation—visible from early works like the coauthored
(Advice from a Morrison disciple to a Joyce fan) and
in terms of Erich Auerbach’s elaboration of
, the mode of medieval exegesis according to which Old Testament events lose none of their historical validity once they are interpreted as figures for New Testament events to come. Bolaño’s employment of this arcane hermeneutic device records the insistent geopolitical closure that has been registered across a variety of cultural realms under the name of globalization. This obscurely but palpably unified world is Bolaño’s subject in
, which locates an Auerbachian interpretive provocation on the geopolitical ground of the US-Mexico border (one of the most spectacularly visible dividing lines between global North and South). Bolaño’s spatializing of Auerbachian
offers a potent model for a contemporary comparative practice, one that recognizes the necessity of mapping totality precisely in recording the geopolitical obstacles to doing so.
Empty houses Kurnick, David; Kurnick, David
2012.
eBook
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. Empty Houses challenges this consensus by reexamining the genre's ...development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly--the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin--writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies--this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, David Kurnick reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms.
