Indiana University Press blog

Reading Outward: A Closer Look at VIC 61.2

“Reading Outward” is a cluster of essays from Victorian Studies newest issue, drawn from papers delivered at the Fall 2018 North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference, with the theme "Looking Outward."

In the excerpt below, CUNY Professor of English Talia Schaffer summarizes essays from Sara Maurer, Maia McAleavey, and Lech Harris while framing them in relation to issues facing Victorian scholars today.

The entire “Reading Outward” response and essay cluster can be read for free now on JSTOR.

---

The 2018 NAVSA conference was called “Looking Outward,” but I heard so many talks about forms of reading that I decided to take the opportunity to think about how we read and what we read for. By “reading outward,” I mean to designate a restlessness with received wisdom, a desire to strike out into fresh ideas about literary forms and histories.

We are rethinking reading, I believe, because two critical trends are converging. For the past several years Victorianists have been debating how we read: by way of surface reading, symptomatic reading, suspicious reading, distant reading, close reading, reparative reading, paranoid reading, and digital reading. The reading wars often tacitly have constructed the text itself as a vulnerable, inert, mute entity, and the reader as an active agent. We could be hurting or helping it, consolidating similar items in bulk or zooming in on one, skimming over its surface or digging into its depths. But this vision collides with a different model of textuality that I find implicit in recent work on temporality, wherein texts are somewhat more interactive, influencing one another, carrying residual marks of previous contact, prefiguring and recasting inherited techniques. In reassessing literary history, we accept a more modest and hopefully less invasive kind of agency, the stance of the careful observer assessing changed forms over time. Theorists of queer temporality have been exploring the political affordances of finding oneself outside of conventional linear (re)productive time, and the ways in which this subject position might orient one toward suspension, looking backward, or a utopian futurity.¹ This work stresses the subjective experience of temporal duration, in which time can feel suspended, slowed, frozen, simultaneous. This suggests a new model of understanding literary history beyond a simple linear chronology in which predecessors influence inheritors. In other words, considering time itself might provide a more generous and nuanced way of thinking about reading.

The three preceding articles bring historical interest to bear on the reading wars. Sara L. Maurer, Maia McAleavey, and Lech Harris each offer a radical proposition based on the surprising longevity of an early-Victorian textual structure. Their work models the ways in which a sensitive alertness to textual elements can reshape conventional literary history by steering between the Scylla of intrusive critical agency and the Charybdis of simplistic models of influence. They trace the long afterlife of 1810s-1830s readerly expectations, a richly residual presence that a careful reader can sense permeating subsequent work.

Sara L. Maurer’s study of the evangelical religious tracts of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that they discouraged sympathetic affiliation. Rather, in Maurer’s words, they “encouraged the individual reader to experience his or her own unlimited personal responsibility for developing an inner conscience in response to these texts. This weakened the tracts’ potential for creating fellow feeling among transnational communities” (224). Thus the Religious Tract Society produced stories featuring someone unlike the reader, not to encourage identification, feel community, or develop sympathy, but rather in order to “foreground . . . reading as re-experience” (226). Tract readers used the text to move back into their own memories. In the early Victorian period, people practiced a form of reading that was a kind of closed loop, a solipsistic self-reference that explicitly eschewed affiliative outreach. Maurer’s study shows that “embedded within the most social space of the Victorian social problem novel is a style of deeply asocial reading” (229).

Like Maurer, Maia McAleavey recovers a form of writing that rethinks the value of social relations. McAleavey analyzes the continuity of a genre popularized by Sir Walter Scott in the 1810s and 1820s, the chronicle, which she describes as “a narrative form that prioritizes setting over plot, the episodic over the finite, and the group over the individual” (233). A story that could go on forever and can be told from the point of view of multiple characters, the chronicle lends itself well to series fiction, as Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge found in writing their chronicles, multiple novels with a large cast of characters in a given place. McAleavey explains that the chronicle upends several seemingly universal features of Victorian fiction. . . . In moving narrative focus from the individual to the group, chronicles lose the logical shape of biography and its watershed events: birth, marriage, and death. Chronicles instead narrate a swathe of time that might be shorter or longer than a lifespan, often presented as a mere slice of an unfolding history. (234)

The chronicle eschews teleology to offer different models of temporality, historicity, place, and self. It asks us to read relationally, to see characters as part of a larger social group anchored in space and extending through time. 

In the final article, Lech Harris executes a startling revision of literary history in arguing that modernist style actually perpetuates, and indeed literalizes, the earlier rhetorical norms seen in Henry Fielding and William Makepeace Thackeray, among others. The congenial, chatty, digressive narrator may seem wholly unsuited to the stringent psychological style of fin-de-siècle fiction, but Harris argues that modernist style—here, Joseph Conrad’s—subsumed rather than replaced its earlier narrative version. The difference is that the earlier version of oral narration drew on a rhetorical model of public speech, while the later used a literal transcription of speech, requiring the reader to investigate and assemble widely dispersed clues to the narratorial persona.

These three essays contribute to a new sense of history. The religious tracts teach readers to revisit their own spiritual histories, reinforcing and reinscribing that constitutive conversion experience. In so doing, the Religious Tract Society makes history into a fiercely personal account, firmly refusing any potential transnational or transperiod affiliation. Meanwhile, the chronicles—as their name implies—constitute fiction as a form of history, teaching us to register the ways in which people change over decades as they are shaped by their particular regions. This is a genre that is all about shifting nations and eras, and about the reverberations that occur when they clash—when, for instance, an elderly person trained in one era encounters new norms, or a particular region learns to define itself as a borderland against a space that claims centrality. I am also haunted by Harris’s claim that style has a history: a mode of writing we have understood as abruptly breaking with the past can be read instead as the long tail of that past. Perhaps we ought to think of literary history itself as a chronicle, an endless story without any particular resolution, in which neither central figures nor watershed events matter because we are tracking slow changes of local cultures over time.

 . . .

Talia Schaffer is a Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (Oxford UP, 2016); Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford UP, 2011); and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (U of Virginia P, 2001). She is currently writing about “ethics of care” and Victorian fiction as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

---

Read the entire “Reading Outward” cluster for free now on JSTOR!

• Reading Others Who Read: The Early-Century Print Environment of the Religious Tract Society
  Sara L. Maurer
• Behind the Victorian Novel: Scott's Chronicles
  Maia McAleavey
• Elliptical Orality: Rhetoric as Style in Conrad
  Lech Harris
• Response: Reading Outward
  Talia Schaffer

---

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Engaged Students Give More : A Closer Look at PED 2.2

Beverly Brooks Thompson and Michael F. Burnett’s article, “Impact of the S.T.R.I.P.E.S. Leadership and Extended Orientation Program on Philanthropic Giving,” from Philanthropy & Education's newest issue, is now available on JSTOR. Below, co-author Beverly Brooks Thompson elaborates on the effects of student engagement with campus traditions and leadership on giving back.

---

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a young staff member at LSU working in Student Life when S.T.R.I.P.E.S. was first envisioned. Student leaders and staff mentors were chosen, and the campus was abuzz with excitement around this new program. Staff members were encouraged to assist in imagining a program that would be fun, exciting, and teach our new freshmen campus history and traditions to instill in them a love and passion for the university. At the time, frankly, it just seemed like a fun experience to be a part of. I felt honored and lucky to be one of the staff mentors.

Over time, those student leaders began to make their mark on the University.  S.T.R.I.P.E.S. became a well-known breeding ground for student leaders, and administrators around campus began to take notice.  Several years into the journey, I became one of the first Student Life development officers in the country.  During my tenure, I was honored to receive a $1.2 MM philanthropic gift from Mr. Charles Barney to endow the S.T.R.I.P.E.S.  program.  He made this investment simply because he loved his alma mater. He wanted students to have the same passion and fire for the university that he still had as a businessman in his 80’s.  It was a perfect match. Overnight, the program doubled, and more students began to participate. Philanthropy had made its mark on the program, and students participated in the stewardship of that gift through thank you notes and awards in Mr. Barney’s name.

Over the years, I rose through the development ranks and became the Director of the Forever LSU Campaign, a $750MM comprehensive campaign at the university that concluded in 2010.  In that role, I began to see over time the impact the students and alumni that had participated in S.T.R.I.P.E.S.  had on the university.  I routinely witnessed them in leadership roles as students and as emerging alumni leaders around the country.

I had a hunch!  Without any empirical data, I simply had a hunch that students who had participated in this extended leadership and orientation program would be more significant donors than their peers. My colleague and friend, Dr. Missy Korduner, had conducted a study surrounding retention rates of student participants. Her significant findings led Dr. Burnett and I to do similar research on this population by studying their philanthropic giving. I could not be more pleased that my hunch turned into facts.

It is extremely gratifying to share these findings with the education and philanthropic community. As we strive to find new and significant ways to create cultures of philanthropy on campuses and to engage young donors, it is our hope that the recommendations within can be practical guides for implementation.  We are honored to have the opportunity to present this research. We also want to thank Dr. Drezner and his team for mentoring us through the process. 

. . .

Beverly Brooks Thompson is running for Louisiana State Senate as a Baton Rouge entrepreneur focused on using teamwork to unite communities.

---

Read “Impact of the S.T.R.I.P.E.S. Leadership and Extended Orientation Program on Philanthropic Giving,” for free now on JSTOR!

---

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Neurodiversity and Personhood in Eva Trout: A Closer Look at JML 42.2

Valerie O’Brien’s article, “'A Genius for Unreality': Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout," from the Journal of Modern Literature's newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Valerie discusses how using neurotypical capacities to define personhood distorts and neglects the complex interior lives of neurodivergent subjects.

---

When I first read Elizabeth Bowen’s idiosyncratic final novel, Eva Trout, I was drawn to Eva’s way of seeing the world. Uncomfortable with language and sensitive to sound, Eva focuses instead on the visual. Her mind translates abstract ideas, such as time and love, into colored patterns and concrete images. Eva often sees obliquely—she watches the sun rise through its reflection in a mirror and detects a swan’s movement in the rippling of light on her ceiling. These descriptions of visual imagery frequently convey Eva’s sense of wonder: “How the short days glistened in the transparent woods!” In a novel that offers only fragmentary and inconsistent insight into its enigmatic characters’ interior lives, Eva’s singular visual perspective produces some of the novel’s most striking and poetic descriptive passages.

I was surprised to learn that not everyone saw Eva this way.

Indeed, she is often perceived by both scholars and other characters as unthinking, incomplete, and two-dimensional. Characters frequently describe Eva as stone-like, that is, inflexible, monolithic, emotionless, “dumb as a rock”—descriptions which scholarship has not always questioned. Reflecting on the difference between these views of Eva and my own, I realized that many of the behaviors that have led characters and critics to such judgments are commonly associated with neurodiversity, or naturally-occurring cognitive variance: Eva avoids eye contact, struggles to express herself in conversation, dislikes loud noises, and has difficulty forming relationships.

I became interested in reading Eva in terms of cognitive difference to promote alternative ways of understanding her character that highlight her complexity and depth. My article shows that Eva’s neurodivergent behaviors do not preclude her from having a rich inner life—one which the novel itself provides access to through descriptions of Eva’s perception of and imaginative connection to her surroundings.

The stakes of how we understand Eva extend well beyond interpretations of Bowen’s writing. Stereotypes of neurodivergent individuals as flat, incomplete, unfeeling, and inaccessible—as not fully human—persist into the twenty-first century. Thus, the question Eva poses late in the novel—“What is a person?”—remains relevant to debates around both historical and contemporary attitudes about neurodiversity. Recognizing the complex interior lives of neurodivergent subjects requires interrogating how neurotypical values shape prevailing conceptions of the human, given that neurotypical capacities for language, reasoning, and emotion are still often used to define personhood.

When we reject the conflation of neurotypicality with personhood and understand Eva as cognitively and emotionally complex, we see that the novel both examines and challenges common attitudes about cognitive difference, decades before the term neurodiversity had been coined. Eva’s mind and responses to her environment—what first drew me to the novel—illustrate the truth of her personhood.

Although neurodivergent experience remains seriously underrepresented, fiction and memoir of recent decades increasingly promote more inclusive conceptions of phenomenological experience. The number of works that represent neurodiversity, and autism in particular, has grown significantly in recent decades, and includes memoirs such as Tito Mukhopadhyay’s How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? and Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump, and novels such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. These works have emerged alongside a rise in autism advocacy promoting a shift from deficit- to difference-based characterizations of neurodiversity. In portraying the cognitive processes and phenomenological realities of neurodivergent individuals, this growing body of literature is expanding narrative structures and reimagining how stories can be told. These overdue stylistic changes open our eyes to different ways of seeing and being in the world.

. . .

Valerie O’Brien is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

---

Read “'A Genius for Unreality': Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout," for free now on JSTOR!

---

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Chinua Achebe - African Hero or Closet Imperialist?: A Closer Look at RAL 49.4

Jago Morrison’s article, "Tradition and Modernity in Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy," from Research in African Literatures' newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Jago discusses a rereading of Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God as three parts of a unified project that problematize the opposition of tradition/modernity, expressing Achebe's distinctively Igbo commitment to dialogue and boundary crossing.

---

On 22 March 1990, speeding along the Lagos road from his hometown Ogidi, Chinua Achebe’s car overturned. Had it been deliberately tampered with by political opponents? That has never been clear, though its axle had snapped in an inexplicable way.  The impact left him unconscious, with the car upside down on top of him. His son managed to shout to passers-by and as the news spread that Chinua Achebe had been hurt, a crowd quickly gathered to lift the vehicle from his broken body. He was paralyzed from the waist down, but survived.

Achebe was never shy of controversy, and he always divided opinion. By many, he was hailed as the founder of modern African Literature. Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in South African jails for fighting racism, famously said that he was the author “in whose company the prison walls fell down.” According to Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, he was “the true man of the people.” Such praise, however, has not shielded Achebe from attack by some of the most distinguished figures in African Studies.

The basic implication behind these attacks is that Achebe is a hypocrite. His works pretend to celebrate traditional African culture, but really he is a closet imperialist. As Princeton Professor Simon Gikandi points out, Achebe was a product of the British colonial school system. Looking at his novels, Gikandi argues, it is clear that he was never fully able to escape from the values he was fed as a boy. Sure, Achebe portrays some aspects of pre-colonial culture with beauty and dignity, but he also leaves us in no doubt whatsoever that as a whole, indigenous culture is doomed. According to this logic Western style modernity – as brought by the colonialists – is the only viable future for Africans. Harvard Professor Biodun Jeyifo brings a similar attack. What Achebe really wants to show us, Jeyifo suggests, is the fundamental collapse of all the practices and values of traditional culture. As such, what is there to separate him from the “hegemonist ideology of empire-building Europe over the course of four hundred years?” Instead of challenging imperialist ideas, as a writer in his position should do, Achebe ultimately reinforces them.

In my work, I’ve argued that these criticisms of Achebe are misplaced, because they are based in a misunderstanding of what he was trying to do. It’s true, we do see imperialist attitudes in his writing, just as we see images of resistance. We also see various apparent contradictions, like selfless colonialists and pragmatic traditionalists. Why is this?  It’s because Achebe is not an ideologue. He is interested in creating spaces where opposing ideas can cross-engage. Reflecting on his own work, Achebe described himself first as an Igbo writer. This is quite significant: by characterizing his work as Igbo, he is trying to emphasize its democratic, non-judgemental quality. Especially in his later writing, he spoke strongly against what he called the “One Way, One Truth, One Life menace.” Therefore, the last thing he wanted was for his own writings to be treated as manifestos for any One Way, of whatever ideological stripe. 

Achebe’s hope was that his work could provide a “middle ground” where many possibilities and perspectives might find voice. The work of an Igbo writer, he said, should be “the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony.” In his fiction, therefore, we do have fighters for freedom, who are none-the-less doomed to failure.  We do have racist administrators who, nevertheless, sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others. Wisdom is not always heard in Achebe’s novels. Sometimes different forms of wisdom conflict.  Idealism is sometimes misplaced, and not always rewarded. And of course, this is exactly the complex, open quality that has made Achebe’s writing so enduringly popular, and such a pleasure to work on.

On 21 March 2013, a friend emailed me with the news that Achebe had died. It shouldn’t have come as a shock: I knew he was getting older and hadn’t been in the best of health since the accident. Somehow it had never struck me that he would not always be there. He was not the first African writer, the first to write in English or the first to publish in the West. He was not the first to incorporate traditional oral culture into a novel, or to mix European forms with African settings. In another way though, he was a pioneer, and that was in his tireless promotion of the idea of dialogue. Certainly, this comes across in his own work. Of All African authors, however, it was also Achebe who worked hardest to bring on other writers and to promote the flourishing diversity we see today. He was a figurehead, pointing to a future for African Literature based in open creative exchange. In times of escalating international tension and ferocious political conflict, he was a champion of democracy and pluralism. This didn’t always win him friends. However, it is in the nature of things that a champion can expect a few challengers.

---

Jago Morrison is a specialist in contemporary literature and division lead for English and Creative Writing in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Brunel University His key areas of expertise are contemporary fiction and security, postcolonial writing in English, with a special interest in Chinua Achebe, and contemporary women’s writing.

---

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

The Performance of Revolt: A Closer Look at VIC 61.1

Gregory Vargo’s article, “Chartist Drama: The Performance of Revolt,” from Victorian Studies newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, editor Rae Greiner provides an introduction to Gregory’s work.

---

In “Chartist Drama: The Performance of Revolt,” Gregory Vargo shows how Chartist activists made powerful political use of the stage, re-contextualizing familiar plays and penning new ones, producing staged re-enactments of historical events, and navigating the demands of amateur production during a turbulent period of radical reformist activity. Mining primary texts unfamiliar to many readers today, Vargo deepens our understanding of the energies—and violence—that fueled both the Chartist movement and the vibrant scene of 1840s drama.

Abstract Drama played an important but under-recognized role in the dynamic counterculture of Chartism, the working-class protest movement for political rights. Making use of a wide range of theatrical genres, the Chartists staged amateur productions in their own associations and held frequent benefits in many of London's largest working-class theaters. They recontextualized an array of published plays and produced such original works as John Watkins's John Frost, a Chartist Play (1841) and reenactments of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet's 1803 trial. Within Chartism, drama exemplified a form of collaborative labor that advanced claims about the capacity of working-class people to imagine and create alternative social formations. It also functioned as a means of debating the most pressing issues that the Chartists faced, including the potential and limits of political violence. Whereas Chartist poetry commonly shied away from endorsing “physical force,” on stage Chartists instantiated revolutionary crowds and enacted the threat of governmental reprisal.

---

Gregory Vargo is an Assistant Professor at New York University. In 2018, Cambridge University Press published his book, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel.

He is a co-editor of Chartist Fiction Online (chartistfiction.hosting.nyu.edu/), which indexes over nine hundred stories and reviews in over thirty-five Chartist periodicals. He is also the editor of a collection of four Chartist plays for a volume under contract with Manchester University Press.

---

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Why I Wrote “‘The Secrets of Blood and Seed’: Primo Levi’s Poetic Emergence”: A Closer Look at JML 41.3

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article. 

Barbara Estrin’s article, “The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Barbara explores a poet who struggles to end the conflict between knowledge and feeling.

---

I have always demurred from Eli Wiesel’s pronouncement that “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later” (3). Nowhere did I find a better refutation of Wiesel’s assumption than in Levi’s own Collected Poems. The volume reflects what Levi emphasizes in The Search for Roots: the surprising realization that his “experiences in the concentration camp…weigh[ed] so little” (5) in the formation of his literary self. Most criticism of his poetry focuses on just four poems: “Buna,” “Shemà,” “Sunset at Fossoli,” and “For Adolf Eichmann.” Almost nothing has been written about more than 70 other pieces where he sought to realize himself in the full force of his creative capacity.

Those lesser-known poems place Levi squarely in the modernist context, along with other writers who began (as he did) in the European tradition and then questioned that poetic in their post-war work. These texts reflect a connection that many poets perceived between poetry and war. Especially striking to me was that Levi—a victim of that interface— categorized himself as a practitioner of the patterns that fed into the rhetoric of genocide.

I also wanted to puzzle the curious phrase in Levi’s Black Hole: “I write because I’m a chemist” (98). If that affinity formed the basis for Levi’s youthful work, this liaison would be explicitly challenged in “Memorandum Book” where the atomic bomb is linked to fourteenth-century art. Levi demonstrates that the possessive impulse in science and the poet’s “search…for the word that can contain the typhoon’s force” are both problematic (Collected Poems 72), thus exposing the downside of a reciprocity that had fueled his early poems. He cites an interdependence that Adrienne Rich emphasizes in her later work. In Midnight Salvage (1999), Rich graphically catalogues mid-twentieth century horrors, after which she overturns a younger poet’s faith in the healing of art: “Would it relieve you to decide / Poetry doesn’t make this [the Holocaust and Hiroshima] happen”? (29). In his late poems, Levi similarly “decides” that the poetics he had heretofore pursued had a bearing on the disastrous consequences of twentieth-century violence.

The model for “the sad crepuscular poems” described in The Periodic Table (128) shadows the Ovidian history—“sixty centuries old and always new” (Collected Poems 62)—to which he is indebted. Those poems turn life loss into verbal gain: the search for scientific mastery and artistic closure fuses with an aggression that applies to both love poems and scientific inquiry. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes about that conflation: “It is not enough that a certain picture which I have in mind should exist; it is necessary as well that it exists through me” (736). The denial of the other, the intractability of the material, whether in the Ovidian-Petrarchan complex or in scientific theoretical practice, will sustain the momentum to write and also engage with experiments.

Thus the “no” of resistance understood both as the sought-after other in the poetic tradition and the initial non-compliance of chemical substances in the research lab becomes the “yes” of a poetic and scientific desire to keep going. A productive absence determines lyric imagistic presence and methodically deductive experiment. Levi’s declaration in The Search for Roots that “there are no demons, that the assassins of millions of innocents are people like us. They don’t have different blood to ours” (207) can be understood in view of his two-pronged career. 

Refusing to exempt his own work from that indictment, Levi “decides” to follow a different road. His later poems reveal a poet who ends the conflict between knowledge, based on remoteness and the image of a grasping “I,” and feeling produced by a receptive rather than resistant other. His last poems echo Lucretius, a poet-scientist he admires because Lucretius rejoiced in “the body’s sense” of “touch” (Search 138).

As an example of the revisionist Levi, “The Work” centers on a poet who surrenders to, rather than usurps, the other, forgoing the mastery of the appropriative self for the modesty of his pleasure in the inspirational other: “the way a woman leads you to the dance” (Collected Poems 56). Through that new alliance, the poet moves through two states simultaneously; hence he feels doubly energized. In the late poems, Levi finds himself “lively as quicksilver” (ibid.), the chemical compound associated with the shape-changing Greek god Mercury who inspires the word-changing delight of collaboration. These poems reveal how Levi wished to be remembered.

Works Cited

Levi, Primo. The Black Hole of Auschwitz. Trans. Sharon Wood. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Polity, 2005.

---. The Collected Poems. Trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. Faber and Faber, 1992.

---. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Schocken, 1984.

---. The Search for Roots. Trans. and Introd. Peter Forbes. Ivan Dee, 2003.

Rich, Adrienne. Midnight Salvage. Norton, 1999.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. Washington Square P, 1984.

Wiesel, Eli. “Con l'incubo che tutto sia accaduto invano.” La Stampa Turin, 14 Apr. 1987.

---

Barbara L. Estrin is professor emerita of English at Stonehill College.

---

More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.3

OTHER-LATE-META-MODERNISMS

The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Stephen Benz

Marianne Moore's Cabinets of Curiosity 
Sarah Berry

Lola Ridge, American Modernism's Forgotten Radical
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Review by: Joshua Logan Wall

 • READ FOR FREE • 
“The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence
Barbara L. Estrin

Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure
James Brunton

It is I: Robert Creeley's Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self
Andy Weaver

Making Conjuncture
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley by Robert Creeley, Rod Smith, Peter Baker, Kaplan Harris
Review by: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Trailing through the Thicket
Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins
Review by: Zhaohui Liu

Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry
Michael Leong

Career Windows
The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America by Jesse Zuba
Review by: Mike Chasar

A Book of Readings on Anne Carson
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Review by: Calista McRae

ELIOT RETURNS

“The Eliot we have is the Eliot we make”: A Review of The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot by Jason Harding
Review by: Chen Lin

Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital, and the Cultivation of Detachment in T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
Frank Capogna

Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form
Matthew Scully

A Myriad of Critical Lenses on The Waste Land
The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land by Gabrielle McIntire
Review by: Ping Song

Living Dangerously: Reflecting on Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic”

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” from the Victorian Studies archives is available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, guest author Mary L. Mullen explores the essay with fresh eyes in anticipation of celebrating Freedgood’s extraordinary career.

---

Elaine Freedgood has shaped the field of Victorian studies through her highly original thinking, meticulous research, beautiful, sometimes wry writing, and relentless work to support young scholars. Among other things, she has probed the shifting distance between the Victorian past and our present. In her groundbreaking book The Ideas in Things (2006), she argues for a practice of “strong metonymic reading”—or reading things in terms of their own characteristics, properties, and histories rather than as metaphoric objects subordinated to subjects—in part to acknowledge and theorize the “gulf of time and space” that separates us from Victorian readers (24). Strong metonymic reading does not simply recover lost meanings—the connections between Negro head tobacco and the elimination of Indigenous peoples, for instance—it demonstrates the very instability of interpretation: what we know, what we see, and how we read change over time.

More recently, Freedgood has been considering what Megan Ward calls the “historical middle”—the period between the Victorian past and the present we inhabit—to offer a stunning new account of the ways in which the embrace of classical realism as a coherent form has led us to forget the strangeness and messiness of the Victorian novel. In her forthcoming book, titled Worlds Enough, or Against Realism, Freedgood returns to nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of the novel to question just when and how the Victorian novel became ‘great.’ Hint: only retrospectively. Reconceiving the history of the Victorian novel, Freedgood rethinks the politics of the novel, literary form, and literary history as she interrogates what it means to feel at home in ontologically-flexible novelistic worlds.

Given Freedgood’s own work to reinvigorate the past to reflect on what and how we read, it is my great pleasure to return to her essay “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” first published in Victorian Studies in 1995. I do so in anticipation of a conference hosted by New York University on September 21, 2018 to celebrate Freedgood’s extraordinary career.

“Banishing Panic” became part of the first chapter of Freedgood’s Victorian Writing About Risk (2000), a book that questions the desire for safety by showing how danger is always displaced. The article turns to Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy to argue that in a moment of social unrest and uncertainty, Martineau seeks to assuage anxiety by naturalizing the laws of political economy. She does not teach readers to accept risk but rather to eliminate it. Martineau thus deals with the uncertainty of modernity and capitalism by doubling down on the certainty of political economic laws, in Freedgood’s account.

Reading this article now, I heard echoes of Hannah Gadsby’s recent stand-up special, Nanette. In this wildly-popular comedy act, Gadsby explains how jokes produce tension and then relieve this very tension. Teaching the audience about this two-part structure, Gadsby then refuses to reproduce it. Instead, she introduces tension that she does not alleviate so that the audience better understands the tension that “not normals carry around inside of them all of the time.” Long before Gadsby’s act, Freedgood similarly questions who feels tension and anxiety, why they feel it, how it is alleviated, and to what end. Feeling anxiety about capitalism is utterly rational: it is a cruel system that depends upon and reproduces inequality. As Freedgood shows, even most theorists of political economy in the nineteenth century understand capitalism to be tragic: they lament the conflicts capitalism produces and its deadly effects even if they ultimately embrace it. Martineau’s writing, however, works differently: it assuages anxiety—eliminates risk—by transforming anxiety about an unjust economic system into a utopian myth about the happy endings that will result if one obediently follows economic laws. However, the ease with which Martineau alleviates tension for middle class readers—the way in which she combines realism and myth—is ultimately why her writing has less of an impact over time. As Freedgood warns, there is “a need for anxiety to be heightened before it is relieved: perhaps because of this temporary heightening, the relief is more intense and more lasting” (36). Banishing panic without grappling with people’s very real anxiety about capitalism ultimately provides only fleeting comfort. Tellingly, Martineau’s text wasn’t especially popular among working class readers.

In characteristic Freedgood fashion, this article is about much more than Martineau: it thinks about reading as an affective process, analyzes literature’s short- and long-term political effects, and examines the intersection of gender, political economy, and domestic economy as well as the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. Throughout, Freedgood warns against easy solutions to complex political problems: both Martineau’s work to banish panic without representing real anxiety, and realist novels’ work to express contradictions that cannot be entirely resolved. For although realist novels assuage anxiety by having readers feel it—readers of realist novels must spend more time dwelling with difficulty—they, too, ultimately produce an illusory sense of safety by displacing danger onto others. The challenge, it seems, is to recognize the anxiety and uncertainty in the world without attempting to render it safe through fiction, myth, or displacement.

We, too, live in a historical moment when capitalism produces a great deal of anxiety and panic feels like a reasonable response. Freedgood’s article encourages us to inhabit this historical moment and grapple with its complexity without too easily replacing real dangers with fiction’s comforting narrative structures. In turn, Freedgood’s actions—her support of young scholars, willingness to fight unjust professional norms, and commitment to rigorous research while imagining the university and the profession otherwise—suggest that acknowledging anxiety, panic, and danger not only leads to a better understanding of history in all its contradictions, but also enacts forms of social relationality and collective care that refuse to follow the logic of capitalism. Through her work on and off the page, Freedgood demonstrates that although we cannot banish panic, we do not need to face it alone.

Read Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy” for free on

---

Mary L. Mullen is assistant professor of English and faculty member in the Irish Studies program at Villanova University. Her research examines theories of history, education, and empire in the context of nineteenth-century English and Irish literature.

An Antidote to the Myth of Historical Progress: A Closer Look at JML 41.3

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

James Brunton’s article, “Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure,” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, James elaborates on poetry as an antidote to the noise of self-righteous social media posts and crisis-fueled cable news.

---

I encountered the work of Harryette Mullen at a time when I had begun to grow cynical about the place of contemporary American poetry. It seemed that almost every new book or journal issue I picked up represented one of two extremes: the first, a plainspoken narrative aimed at the revelation of a universal truth through observation of, say, nature or some quotidian scene in a restaurant or on a city bus; the second, an academic-inflected descendant of Language poetry, with all the difficulty but none of the bite. This is an exaggeration, of course, but in light of the political landscape (the increased media visibility of police shootings of black citizens, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Donald Trump’s move from reality TV star to serious contender for the Republican presidential nominee), I felt that the poetry I was reading (and even the poetry I was writing) was talking past issues of urgency. Then I read Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary.

Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) is similar stylistically to Mullen’s earlier Trimmings (1991), which mimics the formal experimentations of Gertrude Stein. But here, Mullen makes explicit the connection between our everyday lexicon and racism, showing, through her word play, how the language we inherit shapes our collective unconscious in ways that must be openly dealt with, even (and perhaps especially) in spaces that self-identify as politically progressive. The attitude of these poems reminded me of the work of Evie Shockley, another experimental poet whose work addresses US racism from a historical perspective. Like Mullen’s work, Shockley’s the new black (2011) and a half-red sea (2006) draw on the modernist tradition—most notably, of Langston Hughes—to contrast the beauty of poetry with the abject horror of racism.

Both Mullen’s and Shockley’s work fits the broad definition of “metamodern” given by Urmila Seshagiri and David James: contemporary literature that uses the formal techniques of modernism to critique the present. But much of the art and literature that has been labeled by scholars as “metamodern” is marked by a belief in historical progress, which Mullen and Shockley do not share. Their poems take precisely the opposite view, dwelling in moments of failure, whether at the interpersonal or the political level. My JML article unpacks how the techniques and perspectives of these two poets, who draw on the avant-garde strain within modernism, differ from other artists to whom the metamodernist label has been given and claims a place for Mullen and Shockley in metamodernist studies.

Mullen’s and Shockley’s poetry demonstrates that failure is our present reality, that the myth of historical progress is not worth salvaging, and that sharp-witted, adrenaline-fueled adaptation to ever changing circumstances—not congratulatory optimism—is necessary for our survival. Their poetry feels like a response and an antidote to, rather than a retreat from, the noise of self-righteous social media posts and crisis-fueled cable news. It is, I think, exactly the kind of engaged, self-critical aesthetic perspective that can help guide and sustain a political movement.

Ultimately, what I find most gratifying about these poems is their refusal to let us off the hook as readers. We don’t get to breathe a sigh of relief after reading the last line, resting assured in our own moral positions newly put to us through the beauty of poetry. What Shockley and Mullen offer is not revelation—they are not in the business of digging up the “hidden” evils of institutionalized racism, sexism, or homophobia. Rather, through recourse to avant-garde modernist techniques, they state the obvious yet unspoken failures of American democracy, pointing out how we are all complicit in systems of oppression through our very language, and leaving us to sit uncomfortably with that disavowed truth.

---

James Brunton teaches critical theory in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

---

More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.3

OTHER-LATE-META-MODERNISMS

The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Stephen Benz

Marianne Moore's Cabinets of Curiosity 
Sarah Berry

Lola Ridge, American Modernism's Forgotten Radical
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Review by: Joshua Logan Wall

“The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence
Barbara L. Estrin

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure
James Brunton

It is I: Robert Creeley's Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self
Andy Weaver

Making Conjuncture
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley by Robert Creeley, Rod Smith, Peter Baker, Kaplan Harris
Review by: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Trailing through the Thicket
Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins
Review by: Zhaohui Liu

Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry
Michael Leong

Career Windows
The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America by Jesse Zuba
Review by: Mike Chasar

A Book of Readings on Anne Carson
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Review by: Calista McRae

ELIOT RETURNS

“The Eliot we have is the Eliot we make”: A Review of The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot by Jason Harding
Review by: Chen Lin

Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital, and the Cultivation of Detachment in T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
Frank Capogna

Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form
Matthew Scully

A Myriad of Critical Lenses on The Waste Land
The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land by Gabrielle McIntire
Review by: Ping Song

Reflecting on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with Transition Magazine

Today marks the 54th anniversary of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - the landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.

In honor of this historic event and current trends, we invite you to explore Transition Magazine’s 1972 conversation with James Baldwin, and a discussion of more than five decades of black action in St. Louis, from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.

James Baldwin, A Transition Interview / James Baldwin, 1963, and the House that Race Built 

Although the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X continues to receive the most attention, Fredrick Harris argues that James Baldwin is better situated to explain why black Americans continue to be pressed to the margins of American society.

 

Generations of Struggle

History tells us that it takes, and that it will take, generations of striving, organizing, and mobilizing to fight for the kind of world that we want to see. And these distinct generational approaches play out in all of your work within the black liberation movement. The following excerpt is taken from a panel discussion at Harvard University on December 3, 2015 organized by The Charles Warren Center with support from the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute. Moderated by Professor Elizabeth Hinton, panelists Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, George Lipsitz, and Jamala Rogers examine the achievements and challenges of more than five decades of black activism in St. Louis, Missouri.

 

The Problem of Citizenship, the Question of Crime, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

Exploring the statistical link between blackness and criminality, Michael Ralph reviews Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2011).

 

"Hammering at the Truth"

The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 by Hugh Davis Graham. Reviewed by Robert C. Smith.

 

---

Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. Transition is a publication of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente.

Exploring Documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement with Black Camera and the BFC/A

 

Today marks the 54th anniversary of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - the landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.

In honor of this historic event, we invite you to explore Indiana University’s Black Film Center / Archive, courtesy of Black Camera, the international film journal from IU's Media School.

 
BFC/A Documentaries on the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements

The exploration and research of black history, the study of the documentary genre, and the use of film as teaching aids (for Indiana University faculty) are just some of the contributions made by documentaries in the BFC/A collections. Spanning from the 1890s to the present day, our documentaries tell countless stories about the black experience. Because the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the mid-20th century are pivotal areas of study in the field of black history and are the subjects of frequent requests, we have compiled the following list of documentaries in the BFC/A collections that explain aspects of these movements.

 

The Rosa Parks Story: The Making of a Civil Rights Icon

The Rosa Parks Story (2002) belongs to the wave of civil rights films that emerged in the 1980s and was dedicated to recounting the fight for desegregation in the southern states. Rosa Parks quickly became an icon of collective resistance by famously refusing to forfeit her seat to a white passenger on board a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. In this made-for-television biopic, director Julie Dash strives to retrace Rosa Parks's personal and political journey to emancipation. This article considers the constraints the director had to negotiate while recounting the story of a national icon for television. Not only did the weight of legacy bear on the project, but so did the conventions of the biopic as a genre that stresses the personal rather than the political. The historical narrative of the civil rights movement is simplified into a story that reproduces stereotypes popularized by both race melodramas and mainstream media.

 

Civil Rights, Labor, and Sexual Politics on Screen in Nothing But a Man (1964)

The independently made 1964 film Nothing But a Man is one of a handful of films whose production coincided with new civil rights insurgency and benefited from activists' input. This essay argues that the film's unusual attention to labor and gender politics as key elements both of racial subordination and liberation resulted from an unusual and productive, though not egalitarian, collaboration across racial lines. The white and Jewish filmmakers recognized the black freedom struggle in the U.S. South as part of World War II–era mobilizations against fascism and postwar challenges to colonialism around the world.

 

---

Black Camera is a journal of black film studies and engenders an academic discussion of black film production, including historical and contemporary book and film reviews, interviews with accomplished film professionals, and editorials on the development of black creative culture.