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The American Counterfeit
Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture
Mary McAleer Balkun
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Fakery, authenticity, and identity in American literature and culture at the turn of the 20th century
 
Focusing on texts written between 1880 and 1930, Mary McAleer Balkun explores the concept of the “counterfeit,” both in terms of material goods and invented identities, and the ways that the acquisition of objects came to define individuals in American culture and literature. Counterfeiting is, in one sense, about the creation of something that appears authentic—an invented self, a museum display, a forged work of art. But the counterfeit can also be a means by which the authentic is measured, thereby creating our conception of the true or real.
 
When counterfeiting is applied to individual identities, it fosters fluidity in social boundaries and the games of social climbing and passing that have come to be representative of American culture: the Horatio Alger story, the con man or huckster, the social climber, the ethnically ambiguous.
 
Balkun provides new readings of traditional texts such as The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The House of Mirth, as well as readings of less-studied texts, such as Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and Nella Larsen’s Passing. In each of these texts, Balkun locates the presence of manufactured identities and counterfeit figures, demonstrating that where authenticity and consumerism intersect, the self becomes but another commodity to be promoted, sold, and eventually consumed.
 
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Apology to Apostrophe
Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain
James D. Fernandez
Duke University Press, 1992
Who writes "I"? To whom are autobiographies addressed? What kinds of readers are inscribed in autobiographical narratives? In Apology to Apostrophe, James D. Fernández's offers a lucid and powerful meditation on the nature of autobiographical writing through his investigation of the historical conditions and literary stagings of autobiographical writing in Spain.
As Fernández demonstrates, recent developments in critical theory provide new and fruitful approaches to autobiographical works that have long been neglected, misunderstood, or, in some cases, virtually unknown. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on nineteenth-century Spain, Fernández exposes a rhetorical tension that often occurs in autobiographical discourse, between self-justification, or "apology," and the transcendence of this worldly impulse, or "apostrophe." This tension, he argues, is of particular interest in the case of Spain, but not peculiar to that nation, and his attention to the theoretical nature of autobiography leads to insightfl considerations of many canonical European autobiographies, including those of Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Saint Teresa, and Cardinal Newman.
Considering Spanish autobiography in the context of first-person narrative in Europe and in the terms of current debates on the relationship between writing and selfhood, Apology to Apostrophe marks a significant advance in our historical understanding and critical discussion of the genre. The book will be of great value not only to Hispanists but also to those interested in autobiography and cultural history.
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Architexts of Memory
Literature, Science, and Autobiography
Evelyne Ender
University of Michigan Press, 2005
In this impressively interdisciplinary study, Evelyne Ender revisits master literary works to suggest that literature can serve as an experimental laboratory for the study of human remembrance. She shows how memory not only has a factual basis but is inseparable from fictional and aesthetic elements. Beautifully written in accessible prose, and impressive in its scope, the book takes up works by Proust, Woolf, George Eliot, Nerval, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Sigmund Freud, getting to the heart of essential questions about mental images, empirical knowledge, and the devastations of memory loss in ways that are suggestive and profound. Architexts of Memory joins a growing body of work in the lively field of memory studies, drawing from clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology as well as literary studies.

"An important, cogently argued, subtle and rich study of a topic of great interest."
--Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam

"A work of literary studies positioned at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Evelyne Ender's book brings fashionable cultural concerns to bear on traditional literary texts-her superb pedagogical skills lure and guide the reader through the most difficult psychoanalytical concepts."
--Nelly Furman, Cornell University

Evelyne Ender is Professor of French Studies, University of Washington. She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria.
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The Author as Hero
Self and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov
Justin Weir
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Justin Weir develops a persuasive analysis of the complex relationship between authorial self-reflection and literary tradition in three of the most famous Russian novels of the first half of the twentieth century: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and Nabokov's The Gift. With Weir's innovative interpretation, and its compelling historical, cultural, and theoretical insights, The Author as Hero offers a new view of an important moment in the evolution of Russian literature.
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Black Queer Flesh
Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel
Alvin J. Henry
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A groundbreaking examination of how twentieth-century African American writers use queer characters to challenge and ultimately reject subjectivity 
 

Black Queer Flesh reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of Black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names “Black queer flesh”—a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the Black queer past. 

Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters—characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity—escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison’s archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel’s many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting Black queer flesh—a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past.

Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to Black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more. 

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The Body of Poetry
Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self
Annie Finch
University of Michigan Press, 2005
The Body of Poetry collects essays, reviews, and memoir by Annie Finch, one of the brightest poet-critics of her generation. Finch's germinal work on the art of verse has earned her the admiration of a wide range of poets, from new formalists to hip-hop writers. And her ongoing commitment to women's poetry has brought Finch a substantial following as a "postmodern poetess" whose critical writing embraces the past while establishing bold new traditions. The Body of Poetry includes essays on metrical diversity, poetry and music, the place of women poets in the canon, and on poets Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, Sara Teasdale, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Hacker, and John Peck, among other topics. In Annie Finch's own words, these essays were all written with one aim: "to build a safe space for my own poetry. . . . [I]n the attempt, they will also have helped to nourish a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry's heart."

Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, Eve, and Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.

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Canonical States, Canonical Stages
Oedipus, Othering, and Seventeenth-Century Drama
Mitchell Greenberg
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Canonical States, Canonical Stages was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In the crucible of seventeenth-century Europe, a new kind of subjectivity formed, private and interior. Perversely, the new private subject made its most spectacular appearance on the public stage-an appearance that, as Mitchell Greenberg amply demonstrates, also marked the emergence of absolutism in Europe. What these two phenomena had to do with one another, and how they were elaborated in the theater of the seventeenth century, is the subject of Greenberg's book, a masterful critical work that relates the dramatic construction of modern subjectivity and absolutist culture to the formation of the Western literary canon.

In particular, Canonical States, Canonical Stages shows how the Oedipus myth, reinterpreted on various stages at the end of the Renaissance, served the purposes of the emerging culture by replaying the founding moment of absolute rule. Working with models of genealogical criticism, psychoanalysis, and a certain Continental feminism, Greenberg reads plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Corneille, and Racine to show how, as symptomatic texts staged within the confines of familial scenarios, they combine a dynamics of politics with a conflicting "private" desire shown to be inimical to the dominant ideology. This analysis reveals how scenarios of sacrifice and transcendence are brought into play to normalize and naturalize inchoate and threatening forces of social change by appealing to preexisting cultural models such as the myth of Oedipus. A fascinating integration of texts from political theory, psychoanalysis, history, and literature, Canonical States, Canonical Stages offers a powerful interpretation of the interrelated representation of subjectivity and absolutism on the seventeenth-century stage.

Winner of the 1995 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies

Mitchell Greenberg is chair of the Department of French and Italian at Miami University in Ohio. He is the author of, among other books, Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (1992).

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A Choice of Inheritance
Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost
David Bromwich
Harvard University Press, 1989

For the last two centuries, literature has tested the authority of the individual and the community. During this time, in David Bromwich’s words, “A motive for great writing…has been a tension, which is felt to be unresolvable, between the claims of social obligation and of personal autonomy. That these had to be experienced as rival claims was the discovery of Burke and Wordsworth. Our lives today and our choices are made in a culture where any settlement of the contest for either side is bound to be provisional. There is nothing to approve or regret in such a situation; it is the way things are; and in a time like ours, it is what great writing lives on.”

With a historical as well as an interpretative emphasis, Bromwich explores this tension. He shows why the public-mindedness of the eighteenth century is as limited a model for readers now as the individualism of the nineteenth century. Calling attention to the ambivalence of the great writers, he cites Emerson’s sense of the conflict between “spirit” and “commodity” and Burke’s conviction that human nature is at once given and chosen. Elsewhere, he describes the attenuation of social concern even in the truest modern followers of the romantics as in the conscious turn away from Wordsworth’s morality in poems by Stevens and Frost. Other topics include Keats’s politics, Whitman’s prose, William Cobbett’s journalism, and the standards of the Edinburgh Review.

In some widely discussed general essays, Bromwich addresses such issues as the uses of biography, the idea that authors create their own worlds, and the political ambitions of recent literary theory. His own criticism is powerfully eclectic, combining history, philosophy, biography, and a subtle awareness of how literature performs its work of implication. He brings to the task an authentic understanding of intellectual culture and the ability to leap from textual detail to cultural observation with an understated grace.

As in his other writing, Bromwich aims to join aesthetic theory and moral thought. He rethinks the relationship between genius and talent, and defines genius in terms of its capacity to bring about change, rather than simply its quality of inward and spiritual uniqueness. His sustained defense here of that conception, and his elegant argument for a new approach to criticism generally, make this thoughtful book a controversial one as well.

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Costly Monuments
Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry
Barbara Leah Harman
Harvard University Press, 1982

In recent years George Herbert’s poetry has been analyzed by some of our most distinguished literary critics. Offering close readings of central poems, and insights derived from contemporary literary theory, Barbara Leah Harman takes her place in their company.

She begins by surveying the critical tradition on Herbert’s work in our century—from George Herbert Palmer to Stanley Fish. In this penetrating assessment Harman explores the relationship between critical practice and belief.

The impulse toward self-representation is, she argues, a powerful one in Herbert’s work, and it is also an impulse thwarted and redesigned in extraordinary ways. In poems Harman calls fictions of coherence and “chronicles of dissolution,” speakers both protect and dismantle their own narratives, and because they do they raise questions about the values we attach to stories and about the difficulties we undergo when stories fail to represent us in traditional ways.

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Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography
Heidi L. Pennington
University of Missouri Press, 2018
This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions.

Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.
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Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre
Robert J. Andreach
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

Combining his skills as both a professional reviewer of theatre and a literary critic, Robert J. Andreach finds himself in a unique position to provide coherence to what most observers perceive as an unrelated welter of contemporary theatrical experiences. Exploring the theatre from the 1960s to the present, he shows the various ways in which the contemporary American theatre creates a personal, theatrical, and national self.

Andreach argues that the contemporary American theatre creates multiple selves that reflect and give voice to the many communities within our multicultural society. These selves are fragmented and enclaved, however, which makes necessary a counter movement that seeks, through interaction among the various parts, to heal the divisions within, between, and among them.

In his examination of the contemporary theatre, Andreach demonstrates that the plays and the performance art of the feminist, African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and Native American theatres are equal to the works created within the dominant Eurocentric culture.

He then turns to comparable works created within the culture of what performance artist Karen Finley calls the "one male god," works that reflect the breakup of an old order. He discusses the experimental theatre, which turns to the imagination to reveal the nature of the self, and concludes with an examination of recent American works, pointing out in each either the presence or absence of resolution within the divisions of self.

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D H LAWRENCE
SELF AND SEXUALITY
JAMES C. COWAN
The Ohio State University Press, 2003

D. H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality is a psychoanalytic study of D. H. Lawrence’s life and writings. James Cowan relies most notably the methods of Heinz Kohut, psychoanalytic “self psychology,” and employs as well the object relation theories of D. W. Winnicott and others. This work also examines sexual issues in Lawrence’s work from a literary and critical perspective, employing authoritative medical and psychoanalytic sources in human sexuality. Lawrence’s work, which was early read in traditional Freudian terms, has only recently been considered from other psychoanalytic perspectives. In this self psychological study, Cowan provides a new and path-breaking analysis of Lawrence.

Turning to several problematic issues of sexuality in Lawrence, the author first discusses a number of Lawrence’s sexual fallacies, and personal and cultural issues. Cowan also considers contrasting idealized and negative presentations of Mellors and Sir Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the theme of the “loss of desire” sequence of poems in Pansies.

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Discerning The Subject
Paul Smith
University of Minnesota Press, 1988
"Smith's prose is filled with rich insights and original thinking...with informed, cogent arguments capable of altering the course of disciplinary thinking. this ability to affirm and encourage internal heterogeneity and contradiction while simultaneously struggling for external solidarity in maintaining a strong social and political conscience could serve as an exemplary identity for the future of English studies." John Clifford, College English "Smith has brought together and scrutinized a wide range of issues and arguments in an intellectually and politically challenging way." Thomas E. Lewis, MMLA Journal "Paul Smith expertly treats the status of the 'subject' in critical and political discourse, and carefully explores possibilities for individual initiative, resistance, and social change as these are articulated by major literary and cultural theorists." William E. Cain, The South Carolina Review "Discerning the Subject will set the standard for discussions in 'theory' for some time to come. Books with the range and sophistication of Smith's perform a powerful promise for the future of theoretical discourse and practice in the humanities." Alan Kennedy, Dalhousie Review
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Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self
Yuri Corrigan
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. 

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The IdiotDemons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche.

Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.
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Dying in Character
Memoirs on the End of Life
Jeffrey Berman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
In the past twenty years, an increasing number of authors have written memoirs focusing on the last stage of their lives: Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, for example, in The Wheel of Life, Harold Brodkey in This Wild Darkness, Edward Said in Out of Place, and Tony Judt in The Memory Chalet. In these and other end-of-life memoirs, writers not only confront their own mortality but in most cases struggle to "die in character"—that is, to affirm the values, beliefs, and goals that have characterized their lives.

Examining the works cited above, as well as memoirs by Mitch Albom, Roland Barthes, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Art Buchwald, Randy Pausch, David Rieff, Philip Roth, and Morrie Schwartz, Jeffrey Berman's analysis of this growing genre yields some surprising insights. While the authors have much to say about the loneliness and pain of dying, many also convey joy, fulfillment, and gratitude. Harold Brodkey is willing to die as long as his writings survive. Art Buchwald and Randy Pausch both use the word fun to describe their dying experiences. Dying was not fun for Morrie Schwartz and Tony Judt, but they reveal courage, satisfaction, and fearlessness during the final stage of their lives, when they are nearly paralyzed by their illnesses.

It is hard to imagine that these writers could feel so upbeat in their situations, but their memoirs are authentically affirmative. They see death coming, yet they remain stalwart and focused on their writing. Berman concludes that the contemporary end-of-life memoir can thus be understood as a new form of death ritual, "a secular example of the long tradition of ars moriendi, the art of dying."
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Echo Chambers
Figuring Voice In Narrative
Patrick O'Donnell
University of Iowa Press, 1992

 Echo Chambers provides an illuminating discussion of the representation of “voice” in novels by Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, Lowry, and Gaddis. Focusing on the paradoxes of “voice” as an indication of how different authors understand the contradictions of “identity,” O'Donnell charts the recent history of subjectivity as reflected in the development of modern fiction. With strong theoretical underpinning—O'Donnell skillfully utilizes the theories formulated by Bakhtin, Derrida, Bersani, De Man, Deleuze, and Guattari, among others, and the semiotics of voice put forth by Julia Kristeva—Echo Chambers shows how identity is inherently contradictory, conflicted, and multiple.

This insightful volume compellingly demonstrates that “voice” is a revealing (because contradictory and heterogeneous) site where language, the body, culture, and subjectivity meet. Echo Chambers makes an important contribution to the study of modern literature, the semiotics of identity, and cultural poetics as they are informed by the projections of voice in modern narrativ

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Embodied
Victorian Literature and the Senses
William A. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

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Emerson in His Sermons
A Man-Made Self
Susan L. Roberson
University of Missouri Press, 1994

Ralph Waldo Emerson is universally recognized as one of America's most influential authors and thinkers.  Before achieving eminence as lecturer, essayist, and poet, though, he was a Unitaarian preacher.  Emerson in His Sermons is the first major study of the sermons since the publication of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Susan Roberson examines Emerson's ministerial career from 1826 to 1832, shedding new light on those early, crucial years in Emerson's personal and intellectual development.

Treating the sermons extensively as an autobiographical text, Roberson establishes that Emerson's years in the pulpit were pivotal and that his sermons are key texts in revealing the essential development of his thought.  Central to Roberson's explication of the sermons is Emerson's conception of self-reliance, his invention of a new hero for a new age, and his merging of his own identity with that heroic idea.

Roberson focuses on Emerson's reaction to what was perhaps the most signifcant event in his personal life:  the death of his young wife, Ellen, of tuberculosis in 1831, after only sixteen months of marriage.  Roberson's correlation of the sermons written during that time with the complexity of Emerson's emotional and intellectual response to the tragedy of Ellen's illness and death is the most detailed and sophisticated treatment of that material to date.

Roberson understands Emerson's emergence from the ministry as his rejection of ready-made institutions and sytems of thought.  Through her careful readings of the sermons, Roberson finds that Emerson's objective was less the translation of his life into writing than the translation of his life through writing.  By considering the sermons in this way, Roberson is able to enrich our understanding of the private and passionte impulses of this seminal thinker.

Emerson in His Sermons offers the first real look at how the sermons fit into Emerson's own development and will have a far-reaching impact on Emerson scholarship.  Anyone concerned with the cultural and religious history of America will find this book invaluable.

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The Fate of the Self
German Writers and French Theory
Stanley Corngold
Duke University Press, 1994
Much recent critical theory has dismissed or failed to take seriously the question of the self. French theorists—such as Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste, Foucault, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss—have in various ways proclaimed the death of the subject, often turning to German intellectual tradition to authorize their views. Stanley Corngold’s heralded book, The Fate of the Self, published for the first time in paperback with a spirited new preface, appears at a time when the relationship between the self and literature is a matter of renewed concern. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), the book examines the poetic self of German intellectual tradition in light of recent French and American critical theory. Focusing on seven major German writers—Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger—Corngold shows that their work does not support the desire to discredit the self as an origin of meaning and value but reconstructs the allegedly fragmented poetic self through effects of position and style. Offering new and subtle models of selfhood, The Fate of the Self is a source of rich insight into the work of these authors, refracted through poststructuralist critical perspectives.
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From Copyright to Copperfield
The Identity of Dickens
Alexander Welsh
Harvard University Press, 1987

In this engaging analysis of a crucial period in Dickens's life, Alexander Welsh corrects our picture of the novelist's development and advocates a new approach to biographical criticism. Welsh centers our attention on an early crisis in Dickens's life and writing. His starting point is 1842, when the thirty year-old established writer (already author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop) traveled in America advocating international copyright. Welsh argues that the frustration and chagrin Dickens felt on this trip—when the American press accused him of hypocritical self-interest—had a demonstrable impact on his creative development. New powers of characterization are evident in the novels published in the decade that followed: Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield, books named for heroes who became progressively more like projections of the author himself.

In these novels Dickens also asserts his kinship with Moliere, Milton, and Shakespeare. Playing boldly on Tartuffe, Paradise Lost, and King Lear, he lays claim to his own identity as a writer. Welsh shows that as much weight should be given to such literary concerns as to Dickens's recollection—in this same stage of his career—of the childhood trauma memorably inscribed in Copperfield.

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The Given and the Made
Strategies of Poetic Redefinition
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 1995

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.

How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.

Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate.

Compelling for its insights into the work of four notable poets, this book by a leading critic of poetry is also invaluable for what it has to tell us about the poetic process--about how art copes with the obdurate givens of life, and about the conflict in art between the whim of fate and the artist's will to choose.

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Imagining a Self
Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England
Patricia Meyer Spacks
Harvard University Press, 1976

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Imagining Monsters
Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England
Dennis Todd
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to seventeen rabbits. Deceiving respected physicians and citizens alike, she created a hoax that held England spellbound for months. In Imagining Monsters, Dennis Todd tells the story of this bizarre incident and shows how it illuminates eighteenth-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.

Mary Toft's outrageous claim was accepted because of a common belief that the imagination of a pregnant woman could deform her fetus, creating a monster within her. Drawing on largely unexamined material from medicine, embryology, philosophy, and popular "monster" exhibitions, Todd shows that such ideas about monstrous births expressed a fear central to scientific, literary, and philosophical thinking: that the imagination could transgress the barrier between mind and body.

In his analysis of the Toft case, Todd exposes deep anxieties about the threat this transgressive imagination posed to the idea of the self as stable, coherent, and autonomous. Major works of Pope and Swift reveal that they, too, were concerned with these issues, and Imagining Monsters provides detailed discussions of Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad illustrating how these writers used images of monstrosity to explore the problematic nature of human identity. It also includes a provocative analysis of Pope's later work that takes into account his physical deformity and his need to defend himself in a society that linked a deformed body with a deformed character.
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Impersonality
Seven Essays
Sharon Cameron
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one’s voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous.

“To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.

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Impressionist Subjects
Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England
Tamar Katz
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Exploring the intersection of ideas about woman, subjectivity, and literary authority, Impressionist Subjects reveals the female subject as crucial in framing contradictions central to modernism, particularly the tension between modernism's claim to timeless art and its critique of historical conditions. Against the backdrop of the New Woman movement of the 1890s, Tamar Katz establishes literary impressionism as integral to modernist form and to the modernist project of investigating the nature and function of subjectivity. Focusing on a duality common to impressionism and contemporary ideas of feminine subjectivity, Katz shows how the New Woman reconciled the paradox of a subject at once immersed in the world and securely enclosed in a mysterious interiority. Book chapters feature discussion of modernists including Walter Pater, George Egerton, Sarah Grand, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf.

Sophisticated and tightly argued, Impressionist Subjects is a substantial contribution to the reassessment and expansion of the modernist fiction canon.

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The Improbability of Othello
Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood
Joel B. Altman
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Shakespeare’s dramatis personae exist in a world of supposition, struggling to connect knowledge that cannot be had, judgments that must be made, and actions that need to be taken.  For them, probability—what they and others might be persuaded to believe—governs human affairs, not certainty. Yet negotiating the space of probability is fraught with difficulty. Here, Joel B. Altman explores the problematics of probability and the psychology of persuasion in Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespeare’s theater.

Focusing on the Tragedy of Othello, Altman investigates Shakespeare’s representation of the self as a specific realization of tensions pervading the rhetorical culture in which he was educated and practiced his craft. In Altman’s account, Shakespeare also restrains and energizes his audiences’ probabilizing capacities, alternately playing the skeptical critic and dramaturgic trickster. A monumental work of scholarship by one of America’s most respected scholars of Renaissance literature, The Improbability of Othello contributes fresh ideas to our understanding of Shakespeare’s conception of the self, his shaping of audience response, and the relationship of actors to his texts.

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IN THE PRESENCE OF AUDIENCE
THE SELF IN DIARIES AND FICTION
DEBORAH MARTINSON
The Ohio State University Press, 2003

As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer’s tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself.

In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing’s fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather, their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author’s male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain “male censorship” which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself, making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self.

Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primarily private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.

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Interior States
Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States
Christopher Castiglia
Duke University Press, 2008
In Interior States Christopher Castiglia focuses on U.S. citizens’ democratic impulse: their ability to work with others to imagine genuinely democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. Castiglia contends that citizens of the early United States were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent and conflicted interiors of their own bodies. He describes how the human interior—with its battles between appetite and restraint, desire and deferral—became a displacement of the divided sociality of nineteenth-century America’s public sphere and contributed to the vanishing of that sphere in the twentieth century and the twenty-first. Drawing insightful connections between political structures, social relations, and cultural forms, he explains that as the interior came to reflect the ideological conflicts of the social world, citizens were encouraged to (mis)understand vigilant self-scrutiny and self-management as effective democratic action.

In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, as discourses of interiority gained prominence, so did powerful counter-narratives. Castiglia reveals the flamboyant pages of antebellum popular fiction to be an archive of unruly democratic aspirations. Through close readings of works by Maria Monk and George Lippard, Walt Whitman and Timothy Shay Arthur, Hannah Webster Foster and Hannah Crafts, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Castiglia highlights a refusal to be reformed or self-contained. In antebellum authors’ representations of nervousness, desire, appetite, fantasy, and imagination, he finds democratic strivings that refused to disappear. Taking inspiration from those writers and turning to the present, Castiglia advocates a humanism-without-humans that, denied the adjudicative power of interiority, promises to release democracy from its inner life and to return it to the public sphere where U.S. citizens may yet create unprecedented possibilities for social action.

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Introspection and Contemporary Poetry
Alan Williamson
Harvard University Press, 1984
In this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experiment—from the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montage—like methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W. S. Merwin to the radical plainness of Frank Bidart. Williamson examines these and other poets from a psychological perspective, giving an especially striking reading of Sylvia Plath.
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Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend
The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction
James T. Jones
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

In the only critical examination of all of Jack Kerouac's published prose, James T. Jones turns to Freud to show how the great Beat writer used the Oedipus myth to shape not only his individual works but also the entire body of his writing.

Like Balzac, Jones explains, Kerouac conceived an overall plan for his total writing corpus, which he called the Duluoz Legend after Jack Duluoz, his fictional alter ego. While Kerouac's work attracts biographical treatment—the ninth full-length biography was published in 1998—Jones takes a Freudian approach to focus on the form of the work. Noting that even casual readers recognize family relationships as the basis for Kerouac's autobiographical prose, Jones discusses these relationships in terms of Freud's notion of the Oedipus complex.

After establishing the basic biographical facts and explaining Freud's application of the Oedipus myth, Jones explicates Kerouac's novels of childhood and adolescence, focusing on sibling rivalry. Supporting his contention that the Beat writer worked according to a plan, Jones then shows how Kerouac revised The Town and the City (1950), his first published novel, in Vanity of Duluoz, the last novel published in his lifetime, to de-emphasize the death of the father. He treats three versions of Kerouac's road novel—including On the Road—as versions of Oedipus's fateful journey from Corinth to Thebes. And he argues that Pic, often considered peripheral to the Duluoz Legend, replicates the Oedipal themes.

Jones demonstrates that Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, and Tristessa share a form that results from Kerouac's unresolved rivalry with his father for the love of his mother. He discusses Kerouac's replacement of the destructive brother figures in On the Road and Visions of Cody with the constructive hero of The Dharma Bums. He also shows how the Oedipal structure of the Duluoz Legend applies to Kerouac's nonfiction.

In the penultimate chapter, Jones explains how Big Sur, Kerouac's story of his alcohol-induced nervous breakdown, actually marks the climax of the Duluoz Legend. The alcoholism, Jones insists, is not the cause but a symptom of a breakdown brought on by his attachment to his mother. He shows how Kerouac's obsession with his family repeats Oedipal themes throughout the Duluoz Legend. Finally, he deals with Oedipal themes in Kerouac's nonnarrative work, including Old Angel Midnight, Some of the Dharma, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and several poems.

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Lost in the Customhouse
Authorship in the American Renaissance
Jerome Loving
University of Iowa Press, 1993
In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century’s canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society.
From Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson to Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, James, Chopin, and Dreiser, Loving finds the American literary tradition filled with narrators who keep waking up to the central scene of the author’s real or imagined life. They travel through a customhouse of the imagination in which the Old World experience of the present is taxed by the New World of the utopian past, where life is always cyclical instead of linear and ameliorative.
Loving celebrates, enjoys, and experiences these awakened and reborn writers as he challenges the notion that American literature is preponderately “cultural work.” In the epilogue, he packs up his own carpetbag—the American ego—and passes through the European customhouse to find that American writers are more readily perceived as literary geniuses outside their culture than within it.
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Male Call
Becoming Jack London
Jonathan Auerbach
Duke University Press, 1996
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves.
Jonathan Auerbach shows that London’s personal identity was not a basis of his literary success, but rather a consequence of it. Unlike previous studies of London that are driven by the author’s biography, Male Call examines how London carefully invented a trademark “self” in order to gain access to a rapidly expanding popular magazine and book market that craved authenticity, celebrity, power, and personality. Auerbach demonstrates that only one fact of London’s life truly shaped his art: his passionate desire to become a successful author. Whether imagining himself in stories and novels as a white man on trail in the Yukon, a sled dog, a tramp, or a professor; or engaging questions of manhood and mastery in terms of work, race, politics, class, or sexuality, London created a public persona for the purpose of exploiting the conventions of the publishing world and marketplace.
Revising critical commonplaces about both Jack London’s work and the meaning of “nature” within literary naturalism and turn-of-the-century ideologies of masculinity, Auerbach’s analysis intriguingly complicates our view of London and sheds light on our own postmodern preoccupation with celebrity. Male Call will attract readers with an interest in American studies, American literature, gender studies, and cultural studies.
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Mark Twain on the Loose
A Comic Writer and the American Self
Bruce Michelson
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
Can we rediscover the wildness in Mark Twain's humor? Can we understand how that wildness helped make him a national legend and a key figure in the expression of an American self? Bruce Michelson writes about Twain as a body of literature, as a public personality, and as a myth. He shows that many of Twain's most ambitious and memorable works, from the very beginning to the end of his career, express a drive for absolute liberation from every social, psychological, and artistic limit.

The outrageous and anarchic sides of Twain play a vital role in his art. But these traits are undervalued even by his admirers, who often favor clean shapes and steady affirmations in Twain's writing - not the dangerous comic outbreak, or the deep yearning to free the self from every definition and confinement.

Reviewing works from a wide range of Twain's writings, Michelson brings to light those wild dimensions, their literary consequences, and their cultural importance.
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Melancholy, Love, and Time
Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature
Peter Toohey
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Ancient literature features many powerful narratives of madness, depression, melancholy, lovesickness, simple boredom, and the effects of such psychological states upon individual sufferers. Peter Toohey turns his attention to representations of these emotional states in the Classical, Hellenistic, and especially the Roman imperial periods in a study that illuminates the cultural and aesthetic significance of this emotionally charged literature. His probing analysis shows that a shifting representation of these afflicted states, and the concomitant sense of isolation from one's social affinities and surroundings, manifests a developing sense of the self and self-consciousness in the ancient world.
This book makes important contributions to a variety of disciplines including classical studies, comparative literature, literary and art history, history of medicine, history of emotions, psychiatry, and psychology.
Peter Toohey is Professor and Department Head of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada.
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The Monstered Self
Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction
Eduardo González
Duke University Press, 1992
Viewing stories and novels from an ethnographic perspective, Eduardo González here explores the relationship between myth, ritual, and death in writings by Borges, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Roa Bastos. He then weaves this analysis into a larger cultural fabric composed of the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Benjamin, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Poe, and others.
What interests González is the signature of authorial selfhood in narrative and performance, which he finds willfully and temptingly disfigured in the works he examines: horrific and erotic, subservient and tyrannical, charismatic and repellent. Searching out the personal image and plot, González uncovers two fundamental types of narrative: one that strips character of moral choice; and another in which characters' choices deprive them of personal autonomy and hold them in ritual bondage to a group. Thus The Monstered Self becomes a study of the conflict between individual autonomy and the stereotypes of solidarity.
Written in a characteristically allusive, elliptical style, and drawing on psychoanalysis, religion, mythology, and comparative literature, The Monstered Self is in itself a remarkable performance, one that will engage readers in anthropology, psychology, and cultural history as well as those specifically interested in Latin American narrative.
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Monumental Anxieties
Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19-th Century U.S. Literature
Derrick, Scott S
Rutgers University Press, 1997

Scott Derrick has written an original book that contributes significantly to current revisions of the nineteenth-century American literary tradition's representation of gender and sexuality. His interpretation of feminist, lesbian-feminist, and gay issues in nineteenth-century American literature as complementary enlarges our historical understanding and helps build the coalition politics needed in these areas."-John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine

Recent gender-based scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature has established male authors' crucial awareness of the competition from popular women writers. And critical work in gay studies and queer theory has stressed the importance in canonical American literature of homoerotic relations between men, even before "homosexuality" became codified at the end of the century. Scott Derrick draws on these insights to explore the ways in which male authors struggle to refigure literature-historically devalued as feminine-as a masculine and heterosexual enterprise. Derrick focuses on scenes of compositional crisis that reveal how male identity itself is at risk in the perils and possibilities of being a male author in a feminized literary marketplace.

He suggests that traditionally valued texts by Hawthorne, Poe, James, Sinclair, and Crane have at their core combustible four-sided conflicts between feminine identifications and masculine distancings, homoerotic longings and homophobic dreads, conflicts which are largely determined by domestic ideals of male and female roles within the nineteenth-century family. The negotiation of such conflicts is controlled by the nature of fiction writing, which both frees the imagination to explore forbidden fantasies and harnesses the imagination to public understandings of the proper form and content of fiction. Thus Monumental Anxieties also contributes to recent debates about the social shaping of contemporary homosexuality and to the history of American masculinity.

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My Dark Room
Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England
Julie Park
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Examines spaces of inner life in eighteenth-century England to shed new light on interiority in literature and visual and material culture.

In what kinds of spaces do we become most aware of the thoughts in our own heads? In My Dark Room, Julie Park explores places of solitude and enclosure that gave eighteenth-century subjects closer access to their inner worlds: grottos, writing closets, landscape follies, and the camera obscura, that beguiling “dark room” inside which the outside world in all its motion and color is projected. The camera obscura and its dreamlike projections within it served as a paradigm for the everyday spaces, whether in built environments or in imaginative writing, that generated the fleeting states of interiority eighteenth-century subjects were compelled to experience and inhabit.

My Dark Room illuminates the spatial and physical dimensions of inner life in the long eighteenth century by synthesizing material analyses of diverse media, from optical devices and landscape architecture to women’s intimate dress, with close readings of literary texts not traditionally considered together, among them Andrew Marvell’s country house poem Upon Appleton House, Margaret Cavendish’s experimental epistolary work Sociable Letters, Alexander Pope’s heroic verse epistle Eloisa to Abelard, and Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Park also analyzes letters and diaries, architectural plans, prints, drawings, paintings, and more, drawing our attention to the lively interactions between spaces and psyches in private environments. Park’s innovative method of “spatial formalism” reveals how physical settings enable psychic interiors to achieve vitality in lives both real and imagined.
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Narrative Structures and the Language of the Self
Matthew Clark
The Ohio State University Press, 2010

Narrative Structures and the Language of the Self by Matthew Clark offers a new way of thinking about the interrelation of character and plot. Clark investigates the characters brought together in a narrative, considering them not as random collections but as structured sets that correspond to various manifestations of the self. The shape and structure of these sets can be thought of as narrative geometry, and various geometries imply various theories of the self. Part One, “Philosophical Fables of the Self,” examines narratives such as The Talented Mr. Ripley,A Farewell to Arms,A Separate Peace, and The Master of Ballantrae in order to show successively more complex versions of the self as modeled by Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and Mead. Part Two, “The Case of the Subject,” uses Case Grammar to extend the discussion to additional roles of the self in narratives such as The Waves,The Great Gatsby,Fifth Business, and Howards End as examples of the self as experiencer, the self as observer, the instrumental self, and the locative self. The book ends with an extended analysis of the subject in Hartley’s The Go-Between. Throughout, the discussion is concerned with practical analysis of specific narratives and with the development of an understanding of the self that moves beyond the simple dichotomy of the self and the other, the subject and the object.

 
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Never Say I
Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust
Michael Lucey
Duke University Press, 2006
Never Say I reveals the centrality of representations of sexuality, and particularly same-sex sexual relations, to the evolution of literary prose forms in twentieth-century France. Rethinking the social and literary innovation of works by Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Colette, Michael Lucey considers these writers’ production of a first-person voice in which matters related to same-sex sexuality could be spoken of. He shows how their writings and careers took on political and social import in part through the contribution they made to the representation of social groups that were only slowly coming to be publicly recognized. Proust, Gide, and Colette helped create persons and characters, points of view, and narrative practices from which to speak and write about, for, or as people attracted to those of the same sex.

Considering novels along with journalism, theatrical performances, correspondences, and face-to-face encounters, Lucey focuses on the interlocking social and formal dimensions of using the first person. He argues for understanding the first person not just as a grammatical category but also as a collectively produced social artifact, demonstrating that Proust’s, Gide’s, and Colette’s use of the first person involved a social process of assuming the authority to speak about certain issues, or on behalf of certain people. Lucey reveals these three writers as both practitioners and theorists of the first person; he traces how, when they figured themselves or other first persons in certain statements regarding same-sex identity, they self-consciously called attention to the creative effort involved in doing so.

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The Old Formalism
Character and Contemporary American Poetry
Jonathan Holden
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
Our appreciation of American poetry is as influenced by the personas presented in the poems as by public perception of the poets themselves. Emily Dickinson peeking from behind a doorway with large dark eyes is an indelible image superimposed over her spare, enigmatic poems. The grand gestures of Walt Whitman's voice have much to do with our reading of "Song of Myself." And we cannot hear "Mending Wall" or "Mowing" without thinking of the image of the rustic, sly farmer-poet that Robert Frost so carefully cultivated. The moral authority of the poet reveals itself through the poems as well, and it is crucial to the meaning of the poem, Holden argues, if art is to elevate life. Part 1 of The Old Formalism,"The Practice," is a close study of some of the conventions and developments in contemporary American poetry, with such topics as "sex and poetry" "rhetoricity," and "sensibility." Holden shows lucidly how character—or lack of it—is revealed in poetry. In "Personae," the second part, he gives a studied reading of a group of several admired poets, such as Richard Hugo, Mary Kinzie, Ted Kooser, and William Stafford. Holden uses biographical references and personal contacts with the poets to strengthen the notion of character revealed in poetry. This book takes a decided stand in the ongoing debate of the past two decades about the relationship of American poetry to American culture. In an age when image dominates word, and the business of poetry is nearly as celebrity-laden as Hollywood, Holden takes us past the media glitz, backstage where the poems are waiting to be read. Quite simply, in a clear, incisive manner, he teaches us how to read well again.
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On Not Being Someone Else
Tales of Our Unled Lives
Andrew H. Miller
Harvard University Press, 2020

“To be someone—to be anyone—is about…not being someone else. Miller’s amused and inspired book is utterly compelling.”
—Adam Phillips


“A compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been…Swept up in our real lives, we quickly forget about the unreal ones. Still, there will be moments when, for good or ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities.”
New Yorker

We live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children—every decision precludes another. But what if you’d gone the other way?

From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe consider the roads not taken, the lives we haven’t led. What is it that compels us to identify with fictional and poetic voices tantalizing us with the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all of these, revealing the beauty, the allure, and the danger of sustaining or confronting our unled lives.

“Miller is charming company, both humanly and intellectually. He is onto something: the theme of unled lives, and the fascinating idea that fiction intensifies the sense of provisionality that attends all lives. An extremely attractive book.”
—James Wood

“An expertly curated tour of regret and envy in literature…Miller’s insightful and moving book—both in his own discussion and in the tales he recounts—gently nudges us toward consolation.”
Wall Street Journal

“I wish I had written this book…Examining art’s capacity to transfix, multiply, and compress, this book is itself a work of art.”
Times Higher Education

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One Kind of Everything
Poem and Person in Contemporary America
Dan Chiasson
University of Chicago Press, 2007

One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking on one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. In five extended, scholarly essays—on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O’Hara, and Louise Glück—Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry in the United States. Regardless of form, Chiasson argues that recent American poetry is most thoughtful when it engages most forcefully with autobiographical material, either in an effort to embrace it or denounce it.

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Opacity and the Closet
Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol
Nicholas de Villiers
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Opacity and the Closet interrogates the viability of the metaphor of “the closet” when applied to three important queer figures in postwar American and French culture: the philosopher Michel Foucault, the literary critic Roland Barthes, and the pop artist Andy Warhol. Nicholas de Villiers proposes a new approach to these cultural icons that accounts for the queerness of their works and public personas.

Rather than reading their self-presentations as “closeted,” de Villiers suggests that they invent and deploy productive strategies of “opacity” that resist the closet and the confessional discourse associated with it. Deconstructing binaries linked with the closet that have continued to influence both gay and straight receptions of these intellectual and pop celebrities, de Villiers illuminates the philosophical implications of this displacement for queer theory and introduces new ways to think about the space they make for queerness.

Using the works of Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol to engage each other while exploring their shared historical context, de Villiers also shows their queer appropriations of the interview, the autobiography, the diary, and the documentary—forms typically linked to truth telling and authenticity.

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Passionate Doubts
Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction
Patrick O'Donnell
University of Iowa Press, 1986
This absorbing new study discusses theories of interpretation and construction of the self in six important contemporary novels. In semiotic analyses of John Barth's LETTERS, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, John Hawkes' Travesty, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser, and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Patrick O'Donnell argues that contemporary fiction takes interpretation as its subject and as the very impetus for its making.

In an introductory dialogue and a closing chapter on the reader in contemporary fiction, O'Donnell shows that the formation of the reader's self, like character, plot, or any other element in fiction, is also part of the experience of the text, requiring a distinctive conception of interpretation. Calling upon a wide assemblage of modern theorists including Foucault, Derrida, Serres, Binswanger, Geertz, and Gadamer, O'Donnell elicits a broad range of interpretive possibilities—philosophical, psychological, archaeological, and linguistic—which speak to each novel's central concern with the act of reading as a form of signification.

While Passionate Doubts is broadly a hermeneutic study of contemporary fiction, the heart of this intriguing work resides in the close scrutiny of six modern novels which so richly evoke the very elements from which theories derive: language, form, and impulse. It is this specific application of theory that sets Passionate Doubts apart from other works in the field, yielding a series of important insights on the subject of language, sign, and the self in modern literature.
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PERFORMING THE VICTORIAN
JOHN RUSKIN AND IDENTITY IN THEATER, SCIENCE, AND EDUCATION
SHARON ARONOFSKY WELTMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is the first book to examine Ruskin’s writing on theater.
            In works as celebrated as Modern Painters and obscure as Love’s Meinie, Ruskin uses his voracious attendance at the theater to illustrate points about social justice, aesthetic practice, and epistemology. Opera, Shakespeare, pantomime, French comedies, juggling acts, and dance prompt his fascination with performed identities that cross boundaries of gender, race, nation, and species. These theatrical examples also reveal the primacy of performance to his understanding of science and education.
            In addition to Ruskin on theater, Performing the Victorian interprets recent theater portraying Ruskin (The Invention of Love, The Countess, the opera Modern Painters) as merely a Victorian prude or pedophile against which contemporary culture defines itself. These theatrical depictions may be compared to concurrent plays about Ruskin’s friend and student Oscar Wilde (Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Judas Kiss). Like Ruskin, Wilde is misrepresented on the fin-de-millennial stage, in his case anachronistically as an icon of homosexual identity. These recent characterizations offer a set of static identity labels that constrain contemporary audiences more rigidly than the mercurial selves conjured in the prose of either Ruskin or Wilde.
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Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings
Don Florence
University of Missouri Press, 1995

In Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings, Don Florence explains that Samuel Clemens did more than use the borrowed name of Mark Twain to sign his writings. He also developed a separate identity, or persona, becoming "a literary personality in his own right."

Challenging mainstream Twain criticism on many fronts, Florence focuses exclusively on Twain's early writings. He demonstrates how Twain evolved in his early narratives into the "Mark Twain" we now recognize. Florence maintains that this process was evolutionary: Although Twain might have been dependent on Clemens for the initial experiences, they become Twain's experiences, necessary for his development as a persona. Traditionally, critics of Twain have been preoccupied with dualities, but Florence sees this emphasis upon polarities as an oversimplification. He argues that much of Twain's humor strives to shape more and more of the world, giving Twain multiple narrative voices and letting him be inclusive, not exclusive.

Finally, this study asserts that there is more continuity to Mark Twain's career than has been generally recognized. Many Twain scholars have argued that Twain's later writings are radically different from his earlier writings because of their emphasis upon illusion and dream. Florence argues that the preoccupation with illusion and fantasy is scarcely new. Whether Twain's mood is exuberant or dark, he emphasizes subjectivity over objectivity, the dominance of fantasy, the creative powers of humor, and his ability as persona to determine what we consider "reality." Florence contends that Twain's early writings show Mark Twain gradually evolving into a masterfully comic persona.

Jargon-free and eloquently written, Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings provides a fascinating look at Mark Twain's developing genius and will be a welcome addition to Twain literature.

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Poetic Relations
Intimacy and Faith in the English Reformation
Constance M. Furey
University of Chicago Press, 2017
What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God.

As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions. The same early modern writers who bequeathed to us the modern distinction between self and society reveal here a different way of thinking about selfhood altogether. For them, she argues, the self is neither alone nor universally connected, but is forever interactive and dynamically constituted by specific relationships. By means of an analysis equally attentive to theological ideas, social conventions, and poetic form, Furey reveals how poets who understand introspection as a relational act, and poetry itself as a form ideally suited to crafting a relational self, offer us new ways of thinking about selfhood today—and a resource for reimagining both secular and religious ways of being in the world.
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The Poetics of Impersonality
T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
Maud Ellmann
Harvard University Press, 1987

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound dominated English poetry and criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. At the center of their practice is what Maud Ellmann calls the poetics of impersonality. Her examination yields a set of superb readings of the major poems of the modernist canon. Eliot and Pound mounted attack after attack on nineteenth-century poetry from Wordsworth to Swinburne, poetry they believed nurtured an unhealthy cult of the self. They wanted poetry to be a transparent medium that gives its readers access to reality and meaning. Poetry, they argued, should efface itself, because writing that calls attention to itself calls attention to the distinctive personality of the writer. Ellmann convincingly shows that their arguments are self-contradictory and that their efforts to eliminate personality merely reinstate it in a different guise.

After an initial section on Eliot’s relation to Bergson, Ellmann goes on to analyze Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and the later After Strange Gods, the early poems, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets; she then turns to Pound’s Personae, particularly “Mauberley,” and the Cantos. Ellmann looks for the contradictions inherent in modernist literary ideology and deftly teases out their implications. Her writing is stylish in the best sense and, in terms of its theoretical vocabulary and assumptions, impeccable. This book marks the debut of a major literary critic.

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Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840
Jonathan Lamb
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed.

Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.
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Privacy
Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self
Patricia Meyer Spacks
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity.

In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.

Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.
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PROBLEM NOVELS
VICTORIAN FICTION THEORIZES THE SENSATIONAL SELF
ANNA MARIA JONES
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating “invisibly” in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative. In other words, one of the stories that the Victorian novel tells, over and over again, is the story of what novels do to readers. This story occurs in moments that call attention to the reader’s engagement with the text.
 
In chapters on Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith, Jones examines “problem novels”—that is, novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally imbedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize, paradoxically, a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. And, Jones argues, it is this paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject that re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists’ attachments to critical “detective work” closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers.
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The Problematic Self
Approaches to Identity in Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, and Malraux
Elizabeth Brody Tenenbaum
Harvard University Press, 1977

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Reflections of Romanity
Discourses of Subjectivity in Imperial Rome
Richard Alston and Efrossini Spentzou
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
Reflections of Romanity: Discourses of Subjectivity in Imperial Rome, by Richard Alston and Efrossini Spentzou, challenges and provokes debate about how we understand the Roman world, and ourselves, by engagement with the early imperial literature of the mid-first to early second-century CE. Alston and Spentzou explore Roman subjectivity to illuminate a society whose fragmentation presented considerable challenges to contemporary thinkers. These members of the elite and intellectual classes faced complex ideological choices in relation to how they could define themselves in relation to imperial society.
 
Reflections of Romanity draws on present-day reflections on selfhood while at the same time uncovering processes of self-analysis, notably by tracing individuals’ reactions to moments of crisis or uncertainty. Thus it sets up a dialogue between the ancient texts it discusses, including the epics of Lucan and Statius, the letters of the Younger Pliny, Silius Italicus’ Punica, and Tacitus’ historical writings, and works of the modern period. Given the importance of classical thinking about the self in modern thought, this book addresses both a classical and a philosophical/literary critical audience.
 
 
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Renaissance Self-Fashioning
From More to Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence.

"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz
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Renaissance Self-Fashioning
From More to Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 1983
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence.

"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz
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Rimbaud’s Theatre of the Self
James Lawler
Harvard University Press, 1992

In a new interpretation of a poet who has swayed the course of modern poetry--in France and elsewhere--James Lawler focuses on what he demonstrates is the crux of Rimbaud's imagination: the masks and adopted personas with which he regularly tested his identity and his art.

A drama emerges in Lawler's urbane and resourceful reading. The thinking, feeling, acting Drunken Boat is an early theatrical projection of the poet's self; the Inventor, the Memorialist, and the Ingénu assume distinct roles in his later verse. It is, however, in Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer that Rimbaud enacts most powerfully his grandiose dreams. Here the poet becomes Self Creator, Self-Critic, Self-Ironist; he takes the parts of Floodmaker, Oriental Storyteller, Dreamer, Lover; and he recounts his descent into Hell in the guise of a Confessor.

In delineating and exploring the poet's "theatre of the self" Lawler shows us the tragic lucidity and the dramatic coherence of Rimbaud's work.

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The Russian Memoir
History and Literature
Beth Holmgren
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Throughout the development of modern Russian society, the memoir, with its dual agendas of individualized expression and reliable reportage, has maintained a popular and abiding national genre “contract” between Russian writers and readers. The essays in this volume seek to appreciate the literary construction of this much read, yet little analyzed, form and to explore its functions as interpretive history, social modelling, and political expression in Russian culture.
The memoirs under scrutiny range widely, including those of the “private person” Princess Natalia Dolgorukaia, sophisticated high culture writers (Nikolai Zabolotskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky), cultural critics and facilitators (Lidiia Ginzburg, Avdot’ia Panaeva), political dissidents (Evgeniia Ginzburg, Elena Bonner), and popular artists (filmmaker El’dar Riazanov). The contributors examine each memoir for its aesthetic and rhetorical features as well as its cultural circumstances. In mapping the memoir’s social and historical significance, the essays consider a wide range of influences and issues, including the specific impact of the author’s class, gender, ideology, and life experience on his/her “witnessing” of Russian culture and society. These essays also investigate how the memoir is shaped, conceptually and formally, by contemporary notions of history and the individual’s role in making and relaying it.
Overall, this volume shows how the Russian memoir specifically compares with and complements the writing of Russian fiction and Russian history, helping readers to appreciate and interpret the most popular form of authoritative “nonfiction” in modern Russian society.
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Saying I No More
Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett
Daniel Katz
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In recent criticism, Samuel Beckett's prose has been increasingly described as a labor of refusal: not only of what traditionally has made possible narrative and the novel but also of the major conventional suppositions concerning the primacy of consciousness, subjectivity, and expression for the artistic act. Beginning from the premise that Beckett never betrays his belief in "the impossibility to express," Saying I No More explores the Beckettian refusal. Katz posits that the expression of voicelessness in Beckett is not silence, that the negativity and negation so evident in the great writer's work are not simply affirmed, but that the valorization of abnegation, emptiness, impotence, or the "no" can all too easily become itself an affirmation of power or an inverted imposition of force.
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The Self as Mind
Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats
Charles J. Rzepka
Harvard University Press, 1986

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A Self Made of Words
Crafting a Distinctive Persona in Nonfiction Writing
Carl H. Klaus
University of Iowa Press, 2013
Confident or fretful, solemn or sassy, tough or tender, casual or formal: the self you project in writing—your persona—is the byproduct of numerous decisions you make about what to say and how to say it. Though any single word or phrase or sentence might make little difference within the scope of an entire essay or book, collectively they create an impression of who you are or seem to be—an impression that’s sure to influence how readers respond to your work. Thus it’s essential to take charge of how you come across on the page, to craft an appropriate persona for whatever you’re writing, whether it’s a personal essay, a blog, a technical report, a letter to the editor, or a memoir. In this wise and ingenious little guide, noted essayist Carl Klaus shows you how to adapt your self to the needs of such varied nonfiction, by varying his own persona to illustrate the distinctive effect produced by each aspect and element of writing.

Klaus divides his book into two parts: first, an introduction to the nature and function of a persona, then a survey of the most important elements of writing that contribute to the character of a persona, from point of view and organization to diction and sentence structure. Both parts contain exercises that will give you practice in developing a persona of your choice. Challenging and stimulating, each of his exercises focuses on a distinctly different aspect of composition and style, so as to help you develop the skills of a versatile and personable writer. By focusing on the most important ways of projecting your self in nonfiction prose, you can learn to craft a distinctive self in your writing.
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Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
Valerie Smith
Harvard University Press, 1987
In this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in African-American writing, Valerie Smith argues that black writers—from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists—affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy by telling the stories of their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and on the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, Smith demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the African-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.
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Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies
Law and Distributed Selfhood
Kevin Curran
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices.
 
At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts.
 
The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource. 
 
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Sincerity’s Shadow
Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Deborah Forbes
Harvard University Press, 2004

In a work of surprising range and authority, Deborah Forbes refocuses critical discussion of both Romantic and modern poetry. Sincerity's Shadow is a versatile conceptual toolkit for reading poetry.

Ever since Wordsworth redefined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," poets in English have sought to represent a "sincere" self-consciousness through their work. Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed by staging its own failures. Self-representation never achieves final sincerity, but rather produces an array of "sincerity effects" that give form to poetry's exploration of self. In essays comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Forbes reveals unexpected convergences of poetic strategy. A lively and convincing dialectic is sustained through detailed readings of individual poems. By preserving the possible claims of sincerity longer than postmodern criticism has tended to, while understanding sincerity in the strictest sense possible, Forbes establishes a new vantage on the purposes of poetry.

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The Story of All Things
Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry
Marshall Grossman
Duke University Press, 1998
In The Story of All Things Marshall Grossman analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action. To explore these conceptions of the self, Grossman focuses on the narrative poetry in the English Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Relating subjectivity to the nature of language, Grossman uses the theories of Lacan to analyze the concept of the self as it encounters a transforming environment. He shows how ideological tensions arose from the reorganization and "modernization" of social life in revolutionary England and how the major poets of the time represented the division of the self in writings that are suspended between lyric and narrative genres. Beginning with the portrayals of the self inherited from Augustine, Dante, and Petrarch, he describes the influence of historic developments such as innovations in agricultural technology, civil war and regicide, and the emergence of republican state institutions on the changing representation of characters in the works of Spenser, Donne, Marvell, and Milton. Furthering this psychoanalytic critique of literary history, Grossman probes the linguistic effects of social and personal factors such as Augustine’s strained relationship with his mother and the marital disharmony of Milton and Mary Powell. With its focus on these and other "literary historical events," The Story of All Things not only proposes a new structural theory of narrative but constitutes a significant challenge to New Historicist conceptions of the self.
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The Text is Myself
Women's Life Writing and Catastrophe
Miriam Fuchs
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
    Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last monarch of Hawai‘i, was forced to abdicate and faced the annexation of her homeland. American poet H.D. wrote through the London blitz and during the years of less regular bombing. Italian novelist and art critic Anna Banti lost the manuscript of her novel about Artemisia Gentileschi but survived the war devastation to Florence to rewrite it. German-Jewish novelist Grete Weil fled to Holland, but her husband was arrested there and murdered by the Nazis. Chilean novelist Isabel Allende fled her country after her uncle Salvador Allende was assassinated and she later lost her daughter to disease.
    In The Text Is Myself, Miriam Fuchs analyzes the impact of catastrophe on the lives and writings of these five women. She shows that, however much the past may be shaped into a discernible storyline, it is the uncertain present that preoccupies these writers. Using a feminist and comparative approach to the texts, Fuchs links the women in creative and insightful ways and displays their many profound connections, despite the differences in their cultural and geographic backgrounds.
    Fuchs argues convincingly for a new genre within life writing—the narrative of catastrophe, defined by the writing process that occurs during catastrophic events. Two narratives are being told, and two levels of representation, literal and figurative, are present.
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Theater and Integrity
Emptying Selves in Drama, Ethics, and Religion
Larry D Bouchard
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Four decades ago Tom F. Driver brought theater into discussion with religion and modern theology. It has been a rich ongoing dialogue, but one that now demands a bold new engagement. In Theater and Integrity, Larry D. Bouchard argues that while the “antitheatrical prejudice” regards theater as epitomizing the absence of integrity, theater’s ways of being realized in ensembles, texts, and performances allow us to reenvision integrity’s emergence and ephemeral presence. This book follows such questions across theatrical, philosophical, and theological studies of moral, personal, bodily, and kenotic patterns of integrity. 

It locates ambiguities in our discourse about integrity, and it delves into conceptions of identity, morality, selfhood, and otherness. Its explorations ask if integrity is less a quality we might possess than a contingent gift that may appear, disappear, and perhaps reappear. Not only does he chart anew the ethical and religious dimensions of integrity, but he also reads closely across the history of theater, from Greek and Shakespearean drama to the likes of Seamus Heaney, T. S. Eliot, Caryl Churchill, Wole Soyinka, Tony Kushner, and Suzan-Lori Parks. His is an approach of juxtaposition and reflection, starting from the perennial observation that theater both criticizes and acknowledges dimensions of drama and theatricality in life.
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Towards Reading Freud
Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud
Mark Edmundson
University of Chicago Press, 2007
When most critics were using Freudian theories to study literature, Mark Edmundson read Freud’s writings as literature alongside the works of poets grappling with the heady issues of desire, narcissism, and grief. Towards Reading Freud weighs the psychoanalyst’s therapeutic directives against his more visionary impulses in a magisterial comparative study of such writers as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Keats. Cross-fertilizing psychological doctrine with the literary canon, this richly informed volume forges a new understanding of Freud’s writings on the self.
 
“Marvelous. . . . Edmundson’s book offers an extraordinary challenge both to practicing analysts and to a scholarly community which all too uncomplainingly inhabits and reinforces the Freudian paradigm of interpretation. Edmundson reinvents an adventurous and dissident Freud as an antidote to . . . weary psychoanalytic commonplaces.”—Malcolm Bowie, Raritan
 
“This book takes a distinguished place in the ongoing effort to recontextualize Freud by stressing the literary, rather than the scientific roots and character of his theory.”—Virginia Quarterly Review
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Tudor Autobiography
Listening for Inwardness
Meredith Anne Skura
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. But Tudor Autobiography investigates eleven sixteenth-century English writers who used sermons, a saint’s biography, courtly and popular verse, a traveler’s report, a history book, a husbandry book, and a supposedly fictional adventure novel to share the secrets of the heart and tell their life stories.
            In the past such texts have not been called autobiographies because they do not reveal much of the inwardness of their subject, a requisite of most modern autobiographies.  But, according to Meredith Anne Skura, writers reveal themselves not only by what they say but by how they say it. Borrowing methods from affective linguistics, narratology, and psychoanalysis, Skura shows that a writer’s thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language. Rejecting the search for “the early modern self” in life writing, Tudor Autobiography instead asks what authors said about themselves, who wrote about themselves, how, and why. The result is a fascinating glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experience that challenges assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.
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The Turning Key
Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800
Jerome H. Buckley
Harvard University Press, 1984

A noted scholar considers here a broad range of English autobiographical writing since 1800. Jerome Hamilton Buckley discusses not only autobiographies proper but also novels and poems animated by the subjective impulse. Drawing from time to time on American and Continental European writers, he focuses on British autobiographers, especially those, like Wordsworth, concerned with a larger psychological or spiritual dimension to their personal experience. With economy and grace, he examines the work of Darwin, Ruskin, Mill, Newman, C. S. Lewis, Bertrand Russell, and Edwin Muir. He discusses also the roleplaying and self-creation of Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Henry Adams. Variations in the autobiographical novel are described, with special attention to Dickens, George Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce. Buckley concludes by exploring the differences between the principal Victorian poets and the confessional poets of today in their attitudes toward subjectivity.

Buckley reaffirms traditional notions—that the self exists and persists through its vicissitudes, that autobiography, for the most part, reflects or represents a pre-existing self rather than creating it, and that the self is rooted in history and in the objective social and physical world. No other book has attempted to place autobiography in a similar perspective, and none combines analysis of specific autobiographies with a regard for the function of subjectivity and a concern for its cultural consequences.

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The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry
Janet Goodrich
University of Missouri Press, 2001

In this fresh approach to Wendell Berry's entire literary canon, Janet Goodrich argues that Berry writes primarily as an autobiographer and as such belongs to the tradition of autobiography. Goodrich maintains that whether Berry is writing poetry, fiction, or prose, he is imagining and re- imagining his own life from multiple perspectives—temporal as well as imaginative.

Through the different vocations that compose his being, Berry imaginatively shapes his experience into literary artifice. Goodrich identifies five of these vocations—the autobiographer, the poet, the farmer, the prophet, and the neighbor—and traces them in the body of Berry's work where they are consistently identifiable in the authorial voice and obvious to the imagination in fictive characterizations. Berry's writings express these "personae" as they develop, and it is this complexity of perspective that helps to make Berry vital to such a range of readers as he writes and rewrites his experience.

Goodrich's book is organized thematically into five chapters, each examining one of Berry's imaginative voices. Within each chapter, she has proceeded chronologically through Berry's work in order to trace the development in each point of view. By acknowledging the relationships between these different themes and patterns of language in the texts, Goodrich avoids reducing Berry as she helps the reader appreciate the richness with which he writes his life into art.

Whereas others have categorized Berry according to just one of his many facets, The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry takes account of his work in all its complexity, providing a coherent critical context and method of study. Reconciling the sometimes contradictory labels pinned on Berry, this vital study of his poems, stories, and essays from 1957 to 2000 offers an enriching and much needed new perspective for Berry's growing, diverse readership.

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The Vanishing
Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture
Christopher Pye
Duke University Press, 2000
In The Vanishing Christopher Pye combines psychoanalytic and cultural theory to advance an innovative interpretation of Renaissance history and subjectivity. Locating the emergence of the modern subject in the era’s transition from feudalism to a modern societal state, Pye supports his argument with interpretations of diverse cultural and literary phenomena, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, witchcraft and demonism, anatomy theaters, and the paintings of Michelangelo.
Pye explores the emergence of the early modern subject in terms of a range of subjectivizing mechanisms tied to the birth of a modern conception of history, one that is structured around a spatial and temporal horizon—a vanishing point. He also discusses the distinctly economic character of early modern subjectivity and how this, too, is implicated in our own modern modes of historical understanding. After explaining how the aims of New Historicist and Foucauldian approaches to the Renaissance are inseparably linked to such a historical conception, Pye demonstrates how the early modern subject can be understood in terms of a Lacanian and Zizekian account of the emerging social sphere. By focusing on the Renaissance as a period of remarkable artistic and cultural production, he is able to illustrate his points with discussions of a number of uniquely fascinating topics—for instance, how demonism was intimately related to a significant shift in law and symbolic order and how there existed at the time a “demonic” preoccupation with certain erotic dimensions of the emergent social subject.
Highly sophisticated and elegantly crafted, The Vanishing will be of interest to students of Shakespeare and early modern culture, Renaissance visual art, and cultural and psychoanalytic theory.

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Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self
Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse
Yasmin Syed
University of Michigan Press, 2005

Now in Paper!

As the most widely read Roman poem in antiquity, the Aeneid was indelibly burned into the memories of generations of Roman school children. In this book, author Yasmin Syed analyzes the formative influence the poem exerted on its broad audience of educated Romans. Syed analyzes Roman pedagogy and reading practices as well as ancient beliefs about the powerful influence of poetry. Her study considers these cultural components together with the aspects of identity that define the Aeneid’s characters. By doing so, Syed shows how Vergil’s ancient audiences saw themselves—their experiences, goals, and values—reflected in the poem and guided by it. In particular, Syed’s treatment of gender and ethnicity brings to light the key role of Vergil’s poem in the formation of Romanness.

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We Are Three Sisters
Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontës
Drew Lamonica
University of Missouri Press, 2003
While biographers have widely acknowledged the importance of family relationships to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë and to their writing processes, literary critics have yet to give extensive consideration to the family as a subject of the writing itself. In “We Are Three Sisters,” Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontës’ fictions of personal development, exploring the ways in which their writings recognize the family as a defining community for selfhood.
 
 
Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontës’ novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology that held the family to be the principal nurturer of subjectivity. Using a sociohistorical framework, “We Are Three Sisters” shows that the Brontës’ novels display a heightened awareness of contemporary female experience and the complex problems of securing a valued sense of selfhood not wholly dependent on family ties.
 
 
The opening chapters discuss the mid-Victorian “culture of the family,” in which the Brontës emerged as voices exploring the adequacy of the family as the site for personal, and particularly female, development. These chapters also introduce the Brontës’ early collaborative writings, showing that the sisters’ shared interest in the family’s formative role arose from their own experience as a family of authors. Lamonica also examines the seldom-recognized influences of Patrick and Branwell Brontë on the development of the sisters’ writing.
 
 
        Of the numerous studies on the Brontës, comparatively few consider all seven novels, and no previous study has undertaken to examine the Brontës’ writing in the context of mid-Victorian ideas regarding the family—its relationships, roles, and responsibilities. Lamonica explores in detail the various constructions of family in the sisters’ novels, concluding that the Brontës were attuned to complexities; they were not polemical writers with fixed feminist agendas.
The Brontës disputed the promotion of the family as the exclusive site for female development, morality, and fulfillment, without ever explicitly denying the possibility of domestic contentment. In doing so, the Brontës continue to challenge our readings and our understanding of them as mid-Victorian women. “We Are Three Sisters” is an important addition to the study of these fascinating women and their novels.
 
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William Blake on Self and Soul
Laura Quinney
Harvard University Press, 2009
It has been clear from the beginning that William Blake was both a political radical and a radical psychologist. In William Blake on Self and Soul, Laura Quinney uses her sensitive, surprising readings of the poet to reveal his innovative ideas about the experience of subjectivity.Blake’s central topic, Quinney shows us, is a contemporary one: the discomfiture of being a self or subject. The greater the insecurity of the “I” Blake believed, the more it tries to swell into a false but mighty “Selfhood.” And the larger the Selfhood bulks, the lonelier it grows. But why is that so? How is the illusion of “Selfhood” created? What damage does it do? How can one break its hold? These questions lead Blake to some of his most original thinking.Quinney contends that Blake’s hostility toward empiricism and Enlightenment philosophy is based on a penetrating psychological critique: Blake demonstrates that the demystifying science of empiricism deepens the self’s incoherence to itself. Though Blake formulates a therapy for the bewilderment of the self, as he goes on he perceives greater and greater obstacles to the remaking of subjectivity. By showing us this progression, Quinney shows us a Blake for our time.
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Women Reading Women Writing
Ann Louise Keating
Temple University Press, 1996

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Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics
The Art and Psychology of Self-Representation
Leon Waldoff
University of Missouri Press, 2001

Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics explores the identity, role, and subjectivity of the speaker in Wordsworth's finest and best-known longer lyrics—"Tintern Abbey," "Resolution and Independence," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and "Elegiac Stanzas." Because Wordsworth is the most autobiographical poet of the Romantic period, and perhaps in the English language, readers naturally take the speaker to be the poet himself or, as Wordsworth says in his prefaces and essays, "the poet in his own person."

Some readers allow for a fictional dimension in the characterization of the speaker and refer to him as a persona; others treat him as a biographical self, defined in literary, political, historical, or cultural terms. Leon Waldoff examines the critical issues posed by these different understandings of the speaker's identity and argues for a conception of Wordsworth's lyrical "I" that deals with the dramatic and psychological complexities of the speaker's act of self-representation.

Taking concepts from Freud and Winnicott, this book presents a psychoanalytic model for defining the speaker and conceptualizing his subjectivity. Waldoff suggests that the lyrical "I" in each poem is a transitional self of the poet. The poem offers, in the suspended moment and cultural space of lyrical form, a self-dramatization in which the speaker attempts to act out, in the sense of both performing and attempting to achieve, a reconstitution and transformation of the self.

In a series of close readings that provide formalistic and psychological analysis, the book shows that the major lyrics contain compelling evidence that Wordsworth devoted much of his poetic art to each speaker's act of self-dramatization. The various strategies that each speaker employs and the self- dramatizing character of his utterance are theorized and assimilated into an understanding of the subjectivity he represents.

Waldoff concludes that Wordsworth's lyrical "I" requires a conception of subjectivity that gives greater recognition to its individual, psychological dimensions and to the art of self-representation in each poem than recent Wordsworth criticism has provided. This important new work will be appreciated by anyone interested in Wordsworth or in Romantic poetry.

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