Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574801
Matt Sussman
This essay traces the concept of “aesthetic historicism” in literary studies, from its first appearance in the writing of Erich Auerbach to its influence on an array of contemporary currents loosely associated with “new formalism,” such as historical formalism, historical poetics, and historical stylistics. It argues that while Auerbachian aesthetic historicism played a key role in relativizing standards of aesthetic judgment—and thus arguing against aesthetic universals—a newly invigorated version would conceive the history of criticism as a chronicle of different formalisms, each contributing to the construction of “the aesthetic” across time and space.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574855
Margaret Simon
{"title":"Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork","authors":"Margaret Simon","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574855","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74020346","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 : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574864
Alex Millen
Literary historians often cite George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) as a chronicle of a waning literary scene, but his sentences offer altogether stranger demonstrations of how a threatened form of realism attempts to grasp a radically transformed and transforming social situation. Drawing on recent work on the politics of style, this essay argues that Gissing’s narrative style is best understood in terms of two motivating forces powerfully at work in late nineteenth-century Britain: an ascendant popular culture and the massive expansion of the imperial regime. By focusing less on the rumble and verve of an incipient modernism than on the creaky cadences of a realism not long for the world, we begin to discern tectonic shifts at the level of the sentence within and beyond Gissing’s late novels (and the triple-decker). Such shifts allow us to understand how the residual realism of nineteenth-century social-problem fiction attempts to map the world-system. A discussion of Gissing’s style is thus an opportunity to specify the motivating forces at work in his writing and to speculate more broadly about how novelistic prose registers working-class massification and the internationalization of British economic and social worlds in the late nineteenth century.
{"title":"George Gissing Goes Out in Style: The Syntax of Class after 1890","authors":"Alex Millen","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574864","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Literary historians often cite George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) as a chronicle of a waning literary scene, but his sentences offer altogether stranger demonstrations of how a threatened form of realism attempts to grasp a radically transformed and transforming social situation. Drawing on recent work on the politics of style, this essay argues that Gissing’s narrative style is best understood in terms of two motivating forces powerfully at work in late nineteenth-century Britain: an ascendant popular culture and the massive expansion of the imperial regime. By focusing less on the rumble and verve of an incipient modernism than on the creaky cadences of a realism not long for the world, we begin to discern tectonic shifts at the level of the sentence within and beyond Gissing’s late novels (and the triple-decker). Such shifts allow us to understand how the residual realism of nineteenth-century social-problem fiction attempts to map the world-system. A discussion of Gissing’s style is thus an opportunity to specify the motivating forces at work in his writing and to speculate more broadly about how novelistic prose registers working-class massification and the internationalization of British economic and social worlds in the late nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77324429","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 : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574828
A. Frisch
{"title":"Subjects of Affection: Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage","authors":"A. Frisch","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574828","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80878164","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 : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574792
Valerio Amoretti
This essay uses W. R. Bion’s object-relations theory to argue that the formal experiments in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable demand a distinctive kind of psychic work from readers. It describes this work in terms of containment, an unconscious mechanism that supports the psyche’s capacity to think. The concept of containment reveals the continuities between the psychological breakdowns that occur in psychosis, trauma, and ordinary development, as well as the relationship between these breakdowns and the emergence of the ability to represent and narrate experience. Analyzing the affective configuration generated by The Unnamable through the prism of containment deepens our understanding of the challenges posed by the text and of the text’s historical situatedness.
本文运用W. R. Bion的客体关系理论论证了塞缪尔·贝克特的《无名者》中的形式实验要求读者进行一种独特的心灵工作。它从遏制的角度描述了这项工作，这是一种支持心理思考能力的无意识机制。遏制的概念揭示了在精神病、创伤和正常发展中发生的心理崩溃之间的连续性，以及这些崩溃与表现和叙述经验的能力的出现之间的关系。通过遏制的棱镜分析《无名》所产生的情感配置，加深了我们对文本所构成的挑战和文本的历史情境的理解。
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Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574891
Zarena Aslami
{"title":"Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction","authors":"Zarena Aslami","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574891","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574891","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87267207","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 : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335679
Paul K. Saint-Amour
{"title":"To Detail a Dollhouse","authors":"Paul K. Saint-Amour","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335679","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73879647","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 : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335697
Tyler Bradway
This essay reconsiders the skepticism toward queer characters and the default privilege given to antirepresentational aesthetics in queer theory. To grasp the queer affordances of character, the essay identifies character-detail as an iconic and embodied dimension of character as an aesthetic form. Character-details beckon for queer uptake, or the recirculation of character-details into contexts, genres, and media to unlock new narrative trajectories for queerness. Character-details thus highlight the promiscuously queer relationality of character as an aesthetic form. The essay then turns to A. K. Summers’s graphic memoir, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag (2014), which takes up the character-details of Tintin to expand the narration of gender nonconformity. Finally, the essay traces how character-details focalize bisexual queer eroticism in Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory” from Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Taken together, these texts exemplify the centrality of queer characters to—and character as an aesthetic form in—contemporary queer literature.
本文重新审视了酷儿理论中对酷儿角色的怀疑以及对反表征美学的默认特权。为了把握人物的奇异启示，本文将人物细节视为人物的一种标志性和具体化的维度，作为一种审美形式。角色细节召唤着酷儿的吸收，或者角色细节在语境、体裁和媒体中的再循环，为酷儿开启新的叙事轨迹。因此，人物细节突出了作为一种美学形式的人物混杂的奇怪关系。随后，文章转向了a·k·萨默斯(A. K. Summers)的图形回忆录《怀孕的布奇:变装的九个月》(Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, 2014)，该书从丁丁的人物细节入手，扩展了对性别不一致的叙述。最后，本文追溯了卡门·玛丽亚·马查多(Carmen Maria Machado)的短篇小说《她的身体和其他派对》(2017)中的人物细节是如何聚焦双性恋酷儿色情的。综上所述，这些文本例证了酷儿角色的中心地位，以及作为当代酷儿文学审美形式的角色。
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335706
Dora Zhang
Departing from the premise that novelistic details particularize and locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this essay examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. The essay focuses on the French writer Anne F. Garréta’s novel Sphinx (1986), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one Black. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s discussion of realism and typicality, the essay considers how these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well as their approaches to the representation of difference.
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