This essay explores what it means to read Spenserian allegory in the company of W. E. B. Du Bois, and especially his description in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) of living as a Black man in early twentieth-century America behind a “Veil” of cultivated prejudice. Du Bois’s rhetorical mode is frequently allegorical, in ways that resonate with Spenser’s Faerie Queene and raise crucial questions: When does allegory conceal or make endurable what it shouldn’t? And when does it reveal to us truths we must confront about ourselves? I suggest that for Du Bois—and, in very different ways, for Spenser—allegory points to the disproportionate burden that an exploitative capitalist system places on certain racialized groups. But while the two writers offer veiled—and not-so-veiled—critiques of this system, Spenser is careless of the racial implications of his allegory, implications that Du Bois describes—and lives through—in Souls.
{"title":"Beyond the Allegorical Veil: Spenser with W. E. B. Du Bois","authors":"Hannah J. Crawforth","doi":"10.1086/723160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723160","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores what it means to read Spenserian allegory in the company of W. E. B. Du Bois, and especially his description in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) of living as a Black man in early twentieth-century America behind a “Veil” of cultivated prejudice. Du Bois’s rhetorical mode is frequently allegorical, in ways that resonate with Spenser’s Faerie Queene and raise crucial questions: When does allegory conceal or make endurable what it shouldn’t? And when does it reveal to us truths we must confront about ourselves? I suggest that for Du Bois—and, in very different ways, for Spenser—allegory points to the disproportionate burden that an exploitative capitalist system places on certain racialized groups. But while the two writers offer veiled—and not-so-veiled—critiques of this system, Spenser is careless of the racial implications of his allegory, implications that Du Bois describes—and lives through—in Souls.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87651492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes discusses textual production as a source of pleasure; in his influential account, both writing and reading are seen to have a certain erotic charge. While Spenser might seem an unlikely choice for this kind of discussion, this essay argues that in Amoretti 75 and 80 Spenser considers writing and its relation to both love and time. Barthes turns out to be a fitting companion for an examination of Spenser’s textual production in the sequence. With its focus on both the writer and the reader, sonnet 75 is particularly well suited to being placed in conversation with The Pleasure of the Text. In addition, Barthes’s focus on the reader allows me to consider my own pleasure as a reader of both Barthes and Spenser.
{"title":"“With a second hand”: Spenser with Roland Barthes","authors":"Stephen Guy-bray","doi":"10.1086/722433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722433","url":null,"abstract":"In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes discusses textual production as a source of pleasure; in his influential account, both writing and reading are seen to have a certain erotic charge. While Spenser might seem an unlikely choice for this kind of discussion, this essay argues that in Amoretti 75 and 80 Spenser considers writing and its relation to both love and time. Barthes turns out to be a fitting companion for an examination of Spenser’s textual production in the sequence. With its focus on both the writer and the reader, sonnet 75 is particularly well suited to being placed in conversation with The Pleasure of the Text. In addition, Barthes’s focus on the reader allows me to consider my own pleasure as a reader of both Barthes and Spenser.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84558699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines the poet-speaker’s performances of helplessness and pitifulness in Spenser’s Amoretti as an example of Sianne Ngai’s conceptualization of the minor aesthetic category of “cuteness.” In reading Amoretti with Sianne Ngai’s work, this essay argues that Spenser employs a cute poetics to create more proximity between the poet-speaker and his beloved than is typical of other contemporary sonnets. This essay also considers the cuteness of Amoretti as a material object and how the sequence’s paratexts similarly employ cute poetics in managing affective relationships between Spenser, his patrons, and his readers. In reading Amoretti as a collection of poetically cute works and as a cute commodity, this essay ruminates on what critique study of Spenser offers to Ngai’s arguments about cute aesthetics and emotional responses to cute objects.
{"title":"“Weak powres of passions”: Spenser with Sianne Ngai","authors":"Patrick Aaron Harris","doi":"10.1086/722427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722427","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the poet-speaker’s performances of helplessness and pitifulness in Spenser’s Amoretti as an example of Sianne Ngai’s conceptualization of the minor aesthetic category of “cuteness.” In reading Amoretti with Sianne Ngai’s work, this essay argues that Spenser employs a cute poetics to create more proximity between the poet-speaker and his beloved than is typical of other contemporary sonnets. This essay also considers the cuteness of Amoretti as a material object and how the sequence’s paratexts similarly employ cute poetics in managing affective relationships between Spenser, his patrons, and his readers. In reading Amoretti as a collection of poetically cute works and as a cute commodity, this essay ruminates on what critique study of Spenser offers to Ngai’s arguments about cute aesthetics and emotional responses to cute objects.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85348336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Embedded in Eric Langley and Luke Prendergast’s essay on Spenser and Derrida is a defense of the humble literary and critical practice of juxtaposition. “Placing disparate things side by side,” they write, “inevitably reveals surprising resemblances between them”—a reliable principle, then, of literary criticism that can be used to disrupt what we think we know about a text and its habitual companions. But is a resemblance still surprising if its discovery is inevitable? Joe Moshenska has written of the “delirious paranoia that The Faerie Queene is capable of inducing,” the sense that its allegory’s atmosphere of global meaningfulness, at theminute level and themacrocosmic, pervades not just the text but everything and anything else you might be reading or thinking of at the same time. Moshenska’s contingent reading was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—a match for Spenser at least in terms of scale and ambition, as well as in the allegorical habits of synthesis and sublation. But the principle holds everywhere. In his great final essay “Of Experience,”Montaigne—after giving full voice to the anxiety of variety, the fear that difference is so universal a quality that no abstracted knowledge can be possible—acknowledges that, though “no event and no shape is entirely like another, so none is entirely different from another. . . . All things hold together by some similarity; . . . we fasten together our comparisons by some corner.” There is always some awkward joint of “as” or “like” or simile, by which we can make different things belong together. This is a principle at once inevitable and unpredictable,
{"title":"Bizarre Numerousness: A Response to “Companions and Doubles”","authors":"Kathryn Murphy","doi":"10.1086/723529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723529","url":null,"abstract":"Embedded in Eric Langley and Luke Prendergast’s essay on Spenser and Derrida is a defense of the humble literary and critical practice of juxtaposition. “Placing disparate things side by side,” they write, “inevitably reveals surprising resemblances between them”—a reliable principle, then, of literary criticism that can be used to disrupt what we think we know about a text and its habitual companions. But is a resemblance still surprising if its discovery is inevitable? Joe Moshenska has written of the “delirious paranoia that The Faerie Queene is capable of inducing,” the sense that its allegory’s atmosphere of global meaningfulness, at theminute level and themacrocosmic, pervades not just the text but everything and anything else you might be reading or thinking of at the same time. Moshenska’s contingent reading was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—a match for Spenser at least in terms of scale and ambition, as well as in the allegorical habits of synthesis and sublation. But the principle holds everywhere. In his great final essay “Of Experience,”Montaigne—after giving full voice to the anxiety of variety, the fear that difference is so universal a quality that no abstracted knowledge can be possible—acknowledges that, though “no event and no shape is entirely like another, so none is entirely different from another. . . . All things hold together by some similarity; . . . we fasten together our comparisons by some corner.” There is always some awkward joint of “as” or “like” or simile, by which we can make different things belong together. This is a principle at once inevitable and unpredictable,","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90170932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scholarship on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene often attends to Duessa in her villainous dimensions, such as her part in the moral of Book I and alignment with Mary Queen of Scots. But what of the Duessa who is later stripped and shown to be partially nonhuman, with her eagle’s talons, fox’s tail, and bark-like skin? How does her amalgamative identity affect Faerieland’s knights, such as Fradubio’s translation into a tree and Redcrosse into a liquid body? This article reads Duessa alongside ecofeminist scholar Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, particularly her concept of continuity, to address these questions. In so doing, it conceptualizes how, when read as companionate texts, Plumwood’s work allows readers to consider Duessa as an agent of continuity—or interconnection with nature—who creates this change in others. Further, it considers how, in the current moment of climate crises, she offers contemporary readers a template for relating to the environment.
{"title":"“Lyke a faire Lady, but did fowle Duessa hyde”: Spenser with Val Plumwood","authors":"Courtney A. Druzak","doi":"10.1086/723158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723158","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene often attends to Duessa in her villainous dimensions, such as her part in the moral of Book I and alignment with Mary Queen of Scots. But what of the Duessa who is later stripped and shown to be partially nonhuman, with her eagle’s talons, fox’s tail, and bark-like skin? How does her amalgamative identity affect Faerieland’s knights, such as Fradubio’s translation into a tree and Redcrosse into a liquid body? This article reads Duessa alongside ecofeminist scholar Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, particularly her concept of continuity, to address these questions. In so doing, it conceptualizes how, when read as companionate texts, Plumwood’s work allows readers to consider Duessa as an agent of continuity—or interconnection with nature—who creates this change in others. Further, it considers how, in the current moment of climate crises, she offers contemporary readers a template for relating to the environment.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90542894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
hat does it mean for an early modern literary critic to think with another thinker, in particular with a thinker who is modern and explicitly philosophical? Well, imagine two contrasting scenes. Begin by imagining a meeting of Renaissance scholars, where you, the speaker, are talking about a play we all know—say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To mention Bottom is, even before you make your point, to make many of us smile and glance at one another happily. We, your audience, are reminded of what we hold in common: our shared knowledge of this delightful character and, to some extent, our shared knowledge of what critics have said about him. By saying the word “Bottom,” you appear to be about to tell a story that we all know—in this context, a family story. But now imagine, in contrast, that at this same meeting of Renaissance scholars you begin your presentation by launching into an account of an idea of Theodor W. Adorno’s or Roland Barthes’s or Jacques Rancière’s. You may encounter a quite different response. At your first mention of the theorist’s name, you may find yourself afloat on a sea of largely flat stares; you may encounter a frown or two. You may
{"title":"Companionable and Uncompanionable Thinking: A Response to “Styles of Companionship”","authors":"Rachel Eisendrath","doi":"10.1086/723531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723531","url":null,"abstract":"hat does it mean for an early modern literary critic to think with another thinker, in particular with a thinker who is modern and explicitly philosophical? Well, imagine two contrasting scenes. Begin by imagining a meeting of Renaissance scholars, where you, the speaker, are talking about a play we all know—say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To mention Bottom is, even before you make your point, to make many of us smile and glance at one another happily. We, your audience, are reminded of what we hold in common: our shared knowledge of this delightful character and, to some extent, our shared knowledge of what critics have said about him. By saying the word “Bottom,” you appear to be about to tell a story that we all know—in this context, a family story. But now imagine, in contrast, that at this same meeting of Renaissance scholars you begin your presentation by launching into an account of an idea of Theodor W. Adorno’s or Roland Barthes’s or Jacques Rancière’s. You may encounter a quite different response. At your first mention of the theorist’s name, you may find yourself afloat on a sea of largely flat stares; you may encounter a frown or two. You may","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82633036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. D. E. Ynard, Spenser with, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
This essay makes a case for a reassessment of The Faerie Queene in light of Adorno’s philosophical thinking about dissonance. Focusing on Book II, I analyze Spenser’s productive use of dissonant elements at the different levels of narrative and style, which produce a similar effect to the alienating techniques that Adorno praises in literary and musical forms of expression. I then consider Adorno’s discussion of dissonance as an essential aspect of late style and bring it to bear on Spenser’s poetic practice in the conclusive Mutabilitie Cantos of the epic. I suggest that this comparative analysis may not only open up new avenues for interpreting Spenser’s epic but also help us to reassess the significance of Adorno’s more neglected discussions of dissonance in his minor works of literary criticism, which gesture toward the importance of this concept as a tool for textual analysis.
{"title":"On Dissonance and Late Style: Spenser with Theodor W. Adorno","authors":"J. D. E. Ynard, Spenser with, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno","doi":"10.1086/722432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722432","url":null,"abstract":"This essay makes a case for a reassessment of The Faerie Queene in light of Adorno’s philosophical thinking about dissonance. Focusing on Book II, I analyze Spenser’s productive use of dissonant elements at the different levels of narrative and style, which produce a similar effect to the alienating techniques that Adorno praises in literary and musical forms of expression. I then consider Adorno’s discussion of dissonance as an essential aspect of late style and bring it to bear on Spenser’s poetic practice in the conclusive Mutabilitie Cantos of the epic. I suggest that this comparative analysis may not only open up new avenues for interpreting Spenser’s epic but also help us to reassess the significance of Adorno’s more neglected discussions of dissonance in his minor works of literary criticism, which gesture toward the importance of this concept as a tool for textual analysis.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72822047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Edmund Spenser was a foundational apologist for European colonialism, while Kwame Anthony Appiah is among the most forceful anticolonialist thinkers of our present era. The ethical theories offered by these ideological and intellectual antitheses converge, however, on the notion that counterfactual representations play a crucial role in imagining and actively shaping our moral and political lives. Reading Spenser’s ethical poetics through the taxonomy of counterfactual thought described in Appiah’s As If: Idealizations and Ideals (2017) clarifies the various forms and functions assumed by what Appiah would call “strategic untruths” in The Faerie Queene’s moral allegory. The centrality of counterfactual thinking to Spenser’s writing is evident in the poet’s use of it in the Gardens of Adonis, which is the cosmogonic apex of the 1590 Faerie Queene, and in his representations of slander, the paradigmatic social ill in Spenser’s ethical imagination. For both Spenser and Appiah, counterfactual reasoning and representation are crucial tools for moral self-formation and, more largely, for articulating moral societies in a mutable world marked by historical and cultural transformations.
{"title":"“But were it not … ”: Spenser with Kwame Anthony Appiah","authors":"Andrew Wadoski","doi":"10.1086/723164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723164","url":null,"abstract":"Edmund Spenser was a foundational apologist for European colonialism, while Kwame Anthony Appiah is among the most forceful anticolonialist thinkers of our present era. The ethical theories offered by these ideological and intellectual antitheses converge, however, on the notion that counterfactual representations play a crucial role in imagining and actively shaping our moral and political lives. Reading Spenser’s ethical poetics through the taxonomy of counterfactual thought described in Appiah’s As If: Idealizations and Ideals (2017) clarifies the various forms and functions assumed by what Appiah would call “strategic untruths” in The Faerie Queene’s moral allegory. The centrality of counterfactual thinking to Spenser’s writing is evident in the poet’s use of it in the Gardens of Adonis, which is the cosmogonic apex of the 1590 Faerie Queene, and in his representations of slander, the paradigmatic social ill in Spenser’s ethical imagination. For both Spenser and Appiah, counterfactual reasoning and representation are crucial tools for moral self-formation and, more largely, for articulating moral societies in a mutable world marked by historical and cultural transformations.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78007417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay reads Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) in conversation with Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007). I examine the imperial objective that shapes dynastic destiny in The Faerie Queene, locating it within Spenser’s chronicles of British history and prophesies of British empire and Britomart’s rescue of Artegall from Radigund and restoration of male rule. What Spenser’s racial and colonial project shares with Serano’s theorization of transmisogyny is that both seek to transmute cacophony into ordered hierarchy, whether of innocence or injury. Putting a sixteenth-century Protestant colonial administrator and a twenty-first-century trans writer and activist into transhistorical conversation, I propose, yields new insights into the practices of early modern trans studies. How can we as scholars respond to a record of European violence while remaining cognizant that our own critical practices may inadvertently reproduce the colonial mindsets and racial erasures we consciously repudiate?
{"title":"Colonial Cacophony and Early Modern Trans Studies: Spenser with Julia Serano","authors":"Melissa E. Sanchez","doi":"10.1086/723161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723161","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reads Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) in conversation with Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007). I examine the imperial objective that shapes dynastic destiny in The Faerie Queene, locating it within Spenser’s chronicles of British history and prophesies of British empire and Britomart’s rescue of Artegall from Radigund and restoration of male rule. What Spenser’s racial and colonial project shares with Serano’s theorization of transmisogyny is that both seek to transmute cacophony into ordered hierarchy, whether of innocence or injury. Putting a sixteenth-century Protestant colonial administrator and a twenty-first-century trans writer and activist into transhistorical conversation, I propose, yields new insights into the practices of early modern trans studies. How can we as scholars respond to a record of European violence while remaining cognizant that our own critical practices may inadvertently reproduce the colonial mindsets and racial erasures we consciously repudiate?","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82607004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Z adie Smith’s “Meet the President!” is the story of two children who briefly keep company with one another: Aggie Hanwell, eight, long without parents and recently deprived of a sister, after a drone struck down twelve-year-old Maud for the crime of public depravity, and Bill Peek, fourteen, also motherless, with a father high up in the Incipio Security Group, whose methods of population surveillance and law enforcement include drone strikes against little girls. The two meet on a pier in Felixstowe, England, where Aggie lives and where Bill is joining his father on an inspection. To Bill, Aggie appears “local, typically stunted, dim,” whereas he is “simply global,” or, in Aggie’s words, “from nowhere.” He objects to her description, explaining that social belonging in the real world, his world, depends on being mobile: “If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere. ‘Capital must flow.’ ” Aggie is headed to her sister’s laying out, but she doesn’t know the way. She is so local, it seems, that she cannot navigate even familiar paths. Melly Durham, Aggie’s informal guardian, had been guiding her (“No one knows town like Melly. She’ll say, ‘This used to be here, but they knocked it down,’ or, ‘There was a pub here with a mark on the wall where the water rose.’ She’s memoried every corner”), but now Aggie has to rely on Bill, after being spontaneously left by Melly in his care. Bill is passing the time until his father is finished at work by playing a game on a hand-me-down AG 12,
{"title":"“Do but encave yourself”: A Response to “Companionable Spaces”","authors":"Emily Vasiliauskas","doi":"10.1086/723526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723526","url":null,"abstract":"Z adie Smith’s “Meet the President!” is the story of two children who briefly keep company with one another: Aggie Hanwell, eight, long without parents and recently deprived of a sister, after a drone struck down twelve-year-old Maud for the crime of public depravity, and Bill Peek, fourteen, also motherless, with a father high up in the Incipio Security Group, whose methods of population surveillance and law enforcement include drone strikes against little girls. The two meet on a pier in Felixstowe, England, where Aggie lives and where Bill is joining his father on an inspection. To Bill, Aggie appears “local, typically stunted, dim,” whereas he is “simply global,” or, in Aggie’s words, “from nowhere.” He objects to her description, explaining that social belonging in the real world, his world, depends on being mobile: “If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere. ‘Capital must flow.’ ” Aggie is headed to her sister’s laying out, but she doesn’t know the way. She is so local, it seems, that she cannot navigate even familiar paths. Melly Durham, Aggie’s informal guardian, had been guiding her (“No one knows town like Melly. She’ll say, ‘This used to be here, but they knocked it down,’ or, ‘There was a pub here with a mark on the wall where the water rose.’ She’s memoried every corner”), but now Aggie has to rely on Bill, after being spontaneously left by Melly in his care. Bill is passing the time until his father is finished at work by playing a game on a hand-me-down AG 12,","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82904013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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