Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060447
Ambereen Dadabhoy
{"title":"Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race","authors":"Ambereen Dadabhoy","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060447","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140458792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060495
Anastasia Eccles
This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. Working across four central cases (Samuel Richardson’s “man of feeling” Sir Charles Grandison, Charlotte Smith’s self-effacing protagonist Lionel Desmond, Walter Scott’s “mediocre heroes,” and Jane Austen’s “creepmouse” heroine Fanny Price), the essay describes witness-protagonists as characters with an uncertain relation to the novel as a whole. Straddling the functions of narrator and character, witness and agent, they pose at once a formal problem (of where to place the character in relation to the story) and a political one (of who can participate in the life of the collective) that had particular salience in the era of emergent mass politics.
{"title":"On the Origins of the Witness-Protagonist","authors":"Anastasia Eccles","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060495","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. Working across four central cases (Samuel Richardson’s “man of feeling” Sir Charles Grandison, Charlotte Smith’s self-effacing protagonist Lionel Desmond, Walter Scott’s “mediocre heroes,” and Jane Austen’s “creepmouse” heroine Fanny Price), the essay describes witness-protagonists as characters with an uncertain relation to the novel as a whole. Straddling the functions of narrator and character, witness and agent, they pose at once a formal problem (of where to place the character in relation to the story) and a political one (of who can participate in the life of the collective) that had particular salience in the era of emergent mass politics.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140458671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060407
Dorothy Kelly
{"title":"Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France","authors":"Dorothy Kelly","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060407","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140458262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060535
Alexander Mazzaferro
{"title":"Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas","authors":"Alexander Mazzaferro","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060535","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140457864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060479
Margaret Connolly
{"title":"Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500","authors":"Margaret Connolly","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060479","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140457848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060455
Lorenzo Bartolucci
Before alighting on his vocation, the poet W. H. Auden grew up among doctors and went to Oxford University to study not literature but the natural sciences. This article pursues the ramifications of that background through the development of Auden’s career, focusing on his biographical and intellectual adjacency to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Several close readings illustrate the resonance between Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt and an epistemological shift at the heart of Auden’s poetry, wherein the idea of the self is reconfigured in terms of the embodied experience of inhabiting a place. In this way, a new perspective takes form on the transdisciplinary scope of literary history, its broader cultural relevance, and the mutuality between the poetic and the scientific imaginations of our own day.
诗人奥登（W. H. Auden）从小在医生中间长大，进入牛津大学学习的不是文学，而是自然科学。本文通过奥登职业生涯的发展来探究这一背景的影响，重点关注他与生物学家雅各布-冯-乌克斯库尔（Jakob von Uexküll）在传记和思想上的关系。通过几篇精读文章，我们可以看到乌克斯库尔的 "环境 "理论与奥登诗歌核心的认识论转变之间的共鸣，在奥登的诗歌中，自我的概念从栖息地的身体体验角度进行了重构。这样，一个关于文学史的跨学科范围、其更广泛的文化相关性以及当代诗歌与科学想象力之间相互关系的新视角就形成了。
{"title":"The Surface of the World: W. H. Auden and the Umwelt","authors":"Lorenzo Bartolucci","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060455","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Before alighting on his vocation, the poet W. H. Auden grew up among doctors and went to Oxford University to study not literature but the natural sciences. This article pursues the ramifications of that background through the development of Auden’s career, focusing on his biographical and intellectual adjacency to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Several close readings illustrate the resonance between Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt and an epistemological shift at the heart of Auden’s poetry, wherein the idea of the self is reconfigured in terms of the embodied experience of inhabiting a place. In this way, a new perspective takes form on the transdisciplinary scope of literary history, its broader cultural relevance, and the mutuality between the poetic and the scientific imaginations of our own day.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140458292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060415
Michael C. Cohen
{"title":"Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry","authors":"Michael C. Cohen","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060415","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140458468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-11060519
James Kuzner
This essay considers the relation between lyric utterance, dramatic irony, and intellectual disability in King Lear, particularly in Lear’s famous address to Cordelia—which begins with “Come, let’s away”—just before Edmund sends both to prison. Reading “Come, let’s away” alongside early modern prison literature, the essay argues that the speech’s work as lyric within tragic drama erodes dramatic irony, removing the audience from the superior knowledge position that such irony affords and that enables ableist perspectives to begin with. In shifting attention from tragic action to lyric power, Lear’s speech renders the ability and willingness to understand one’s situation, and to act efficaciously in that situation, irrelevant to accessing what is beautiful and true. Shakespeare thus separates the question of mental capacity from that of felicitous choice. The irony of capacity in “Come, let’s away,” then, is this: that when readers focus on the value of mental capacity and on the power over action that Lear lacks, they miss what his speech does, the lyric capacity that it has.
{"title":"King Lear and the Irony of Capacity","authors":"James Kuzner","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060519","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay considers the relation between lyric utterance, dramatic irony, and intellectual disability in King Lear, particularly in Lear’s famous address to Cordelia—which begins with “Come, let’s away”—just before Edmund sends both to prison. Reading “Come, let’s away” alongside early modern prison literature, the essay argues that the speech’s work as lyric within tragic drama erodes dramatic irony, removing the audience from the superior knowledge position that such irony affords and that enables ableist perspectives to begin with. In shifting attention from tragic action to lyric power, Lear’s speech renders the ability and willingness to understand one’s situation, and to act efficaciously in that situation, irrelevant to accessing what is beautiful and true. Shakespeare thus separates the question of mental capacity from that of felicitous choice. The irony of capacity in “Come, let’s away,” then, is this: that when readers focus on the value of mental capacity and on the power over action that Lear lacks, they miss what his speech does, the lyric capacity that it has.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140458493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-08DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10929002
Christopher Braider
We’ve always had two Pascals, one apologetic, the other startlingly unapologetic. The unapologetic Pascal is the merciless, proto-ethnographic observer of human psychology and human social arrangements whose sardonic picture of what he calls the wretchedness of life without God is summed up in the strikingly Hobbesian chiasmus “Lacking the might to compel obedience to right, we’ve made it right to compel obedience to might.” However, Pascal turns demoralizing insights like this to apologetic purposes by showing how they’re the natural effect of a lack of specifically Christian belief. The question this essay poses against the background of the conflicted history of Pascalian exegesis is, how should we read the Pensées? The answer proposed is that we should do so in the dialectical terms that Pascal’s characteristic resort to chiasmoi like this one suggest. The result takes the form of a three-cornered conversation that links Pascalian thinking not only to the Hobbes of Leviathan but to the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Elements of Right and to the Wittgenstein of the late, sadly fruitless notebook On Certainty.
{"title":"Pascal without Apology","authors":"Christopher Braider","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10929002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10929002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We’ve always had two Pascals, one apologetic, the other startlingly unapologetic. The unapologetic Pascal is the merciless, proto-ethnographic observer of human psychology and human social arrangements whose sardonic picture of what he calls the wretchedness of life without God is summed up in the strikingly Hobbesian chiasmus “Lacking the might to compel obedience to right, we’ve made it right to compel obedience to might.” However, Pascal turns demoralizing insights like this to apologetic purposes by showing how they’re the natural effect of a lack of specifically Christian belief. The question this essay poses against the background of the conflicted history of Pascalian exegesis is, how should we read the Pensées? The answer proposed is that we should do so in the dialectical terms that Pascal’s characteristic resort to chiasmoi like this one suggest. The result takes the form of a three-cornered conversation that links Pascalian thinking not only to the Hobbes of Leviathan but to the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Elements of Right and to the Wittgenstein of the late, sadly fruitless notebook On Certainty.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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