Insofar as the reading of literary artworks is increasingly limited to literary criticism, any study of reading of such works is a study of critical, that is, close reading. Yet even within ...criticism, close reading has been rejected by distant reading, which enables, precisely by way of this rejection, both the reading of uncanonised texts, neglected by close reading, anda new reading of the canon itself. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Supplanting the Sword: Reading the Rise of U.S. Imperial Medicine, 1898-1955 explores how writers of transnational literature have reimagined the terms of U.S. imperial medicine from the turn of the ...twentieth century up through the early Cold War. The project builds on fields of American literary studies, critical race theory, and the medical humanities to examine closely the political imperatives and social contingencies of modern health. Drawing from a diverse cast of writers (Sinclair Lewis, Carlos Bulosan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison), I piece together how the meteoric rise of early twentieth-century medical science became constitutive of and conditional on the rise of U.S. colonialism and neocolonialism: when Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War (1898), subsequent pushes for hygiene reform and battles against tropical disease helped legitimize America’s growing empire under the banner of humanitarian aid; the nation’s expansionism, in turn, helped provide the requisite territories and populations for the advancement of scientific knowledge. With this conjuncture in mind, I explore public health crossings in Pacific Asia, Central and South America, and the mainland U.S. to connect the active feedback loop that tied health interventions at the imperial periphery to those at its center. Along the way, I call into question long-held assumptions about literature and its place within the medical humanities through various comparative and transnational approaches. Whereas scholars of imperial medicine have tended to view literary fiction as a mere reflection of historical evidence, my study pays careful attention to what the novel form, in particular, can tell us about American medicine’s contentious and contradictory past. I take seriously the capacity for literature to resist the generalizations of positivistic discourses like medical science, and my work brings into sharp relief how imaginative writing can not only formalize struggles against health injustice but envision unauthorized strategies for healing the body and mind otherwise – what I call instances of counter-convalescence. Combined with extensive archival research, this commitment to literary analysis enables me to listen for stories seldom heard in the medical-historical record, pushing beyond more traditional, less narratively focused debates in the medical humanities.
Exiles in the Grey Area Goodwin, Jonathan
James Joyce quarterly,
01/2014, Letnik:
51, Številka:
2/3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Exiles is a play about the artist as a speculator. This essay uses Franco Moretti's interpretation of Henrik Ibsen as the dramatist of the "grey area" of finance capitalism to read Richard Rowan's ...ethical manipulation of the play's other characters. The play's estrangement techniques, which are documented in its stage directions, Joyce's preparatory notes, and Richard's speculative ethical experiments, demonstrate this other dimension of Ibsenite affinity.
This article sketches out a possible solution to Franco Moretti's problem of explaining the phenomenon of devices that preclude conscious perception and at once boost sales. By analyzing Moretti's ...example of Conan Doyle's clues as subjectivizing signifiers, and their enthusiastic early reception as a practice of a subjective fidelity to an artistic event, I see a properly scientific stance in Moretti's reluctance to give a proposed scientistic account of this subjectivation. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Between clandestine meetings with intelligence agents, Maureen Hattrup wrote a series of such delicately composed, diplomatic emails for her colleagues in the office that we hope to publish an edited ...collection of them and organize a book review forum around that collection. Stephanie Koscak, Book Review Editor and Chief Chalkboard Cover Mockup Master, departs for a year full of fellowships and research as she completes both her dissertation on visual representations of the British monarchy and the pilot of a sitcom based on her time in the VS office.
Analyzing French literature, travel photography and writing from the 1830s to 1860s, this dissertation, entitled Imagination, Mimesis, and Style: Nineteenth-Century French Realism, Travel Narratives ...and Photography, examines how Orientalism directly influenced the early realist and modernist works of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, and Charles Baudelaire. This dissertation underscores how the development of nineteenth-century realism and modernism is greatly indebted to French transcultural contact and overseas history and challenges the literary historical notion that realism and modernism were nationally bound genres. In the chapters that follow, considering the foreign or exotic beyond its role as providing ornamental diversity and diversion in European texts—and as actually participating in the development of form—this dissertation, in its methodology, departs from a nationalist understanding of nineteenth-century artistic and literary development. Responding to a current lacuna in recent research that privileges how Romanticism contributed to orientalist imagery, this study will show how what have been considered orientalist modes of approaching the world in travel documentation functioned not merely as an “other” to realistic and modern modes of representation, but rather that the construction of these modern forms of literary and visual representation was instrumental in making “realism” realist and “modernism” modern. The first two chapters focus on how Orientalism played a central role in Balzac’s and Flaubert’s first successful novels, La Peau de chagrin and Madame Bovary, respectively, while the third chapter concerns how Maxime Du Camp employed romantic travel tropes to realistically portray the Orient. If the first three chapters show how Orientalism informed realism, then the fourth chapter turns to the modernism of Baudelaire’s travel poetry in order to elaborate how post-romantic cultural expressions in France grappled with the same questions of representation and reference as posed by Orientalism in the nineteenth century.
My dissertation "Bildung" and Rebellion. Youth in German Literary and Philosophical Texts from Johann G. Herder to Friedrich Nietzsche concerns itself with questions of ideology, subject formation, ...as well as theories of literary production and history. In it I trace the revaluation of youth in 18th and 19th century German literature and philosophy and discuss it in relation to theories of genius and originality in the texts of Herder, Goethe and Nietzsche. My dissertation is motivated by the desire to explore youth as a literary, cultural and philosophical concept, rather than as a biologically determined period of life. My readings of these literary and philosophical texts consider youth as a response to the crisis imposed by the political and social changes of modernity, the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalist bourgeoisie. Youth comes to the fore as the problem of becoming a subject, and the question of what type of processes subject formation entails, how subject formation fails and results in forms of rebellion. Within the German sociopolitical context of this time youth relates to discussions of how to become a nation, form a Nationalliteratur, and create a national public sphere or Öffentlichkeit. I read literature's preoccupation with youth in connection to concepts of genius and originality that signal the creation of a phantasm, the possibility of creating something "new" and "original".
The new literary form created by the English writers of that period strikes one as radically innovative both because of its literary qualities and because of its social function. Since the new genre ...was capable of recording the significant socio-cultural changes of the time, the novel, according to Watt, emerged not only as a literary genre, as one form of art among others, but as a privileged cultural product. Since the imaginary world created by the novel reflects and reproduces the modern social condition, that is, the image of personhood as a selfenclosed subjectivity, the question is what type of narrative literature would be capable of resisting the novel and providing a viable alternative to it.
...the BBC and Channel 4 spent £10.3 million on the production of Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, a far from small sum on two plays which critique the medium through which they were screened. Working from ...a Freudian standpoint, he argues that an unmitigated return of images from the unconscious in literature would negate its aesthetic qualities, rendering texts and plays unbearable to assimilate. ...the signs of any literary genre (the term 'sign' in this article includes the visual codes of film and the small screen) need to function as filtering devices for expressing contemporary cultural anxieties. The central visual code of the play, the disembodied head fed by tubes and external agencies, is a sign of passive acceptance of the matter being fed into it. ...one reading of the sign is as a warning to avoid such quiescent immobility of mind-set and to think independently in the way that Daniel, under desperate circumstances, strives to do. Since Potter's death in 1994, the mass television audiences for Reality TV and spin-off programmes from Big Brother confirm that in Cold Lazarus the plans of Masdon and Siltz to display private thoughts, feelings and fantasies as voyeuristic entertainment were, in 1994, a plausible projection into the future.
During the Progressive Era, literary writers such as Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman engaged with ideas emerging from the newly consolidated educational profession about ...art's capacity to mediate between individual and social development. These ideas varied widely in their philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications, but all reinforced the authority of professional educators at the expense of democratically elected boards of education. Novels working through these ideas can be usefully theorized as Bildungsromane if the definition of the Bildungsroman is refined to be more sensitive to the wide range of educational philosophies that can inform it, and to the range of attitudes, from critical to worshipful, that it can assume toward these philosophies. This reimagining of the genre opens up the possibility that the Bildungsroman, and the Bildung idea more broadly, can have a more positive political valence than most scholars have acknowledged. In particular, a viable project of aesthetic education can be discerned in the philosophy of John Dewey, although it lacks a clear literary corollary.
