Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft. Tilottama Rajan.

Abstract

Tilottama Rajan, Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) xxvii + 282 $65.00 Tilottama Rajan's Narrative is a quiet sensation of a book. Although title ostensibly describes a project centered around two touchstones that haunt core and periphery of studies, book dissolves any simple intuitions about what one might think Romantic and might be. Rajan explores both terms as strange epistemological, aesthetic, and ultimately institutional composites of what emerge as disruptive traces of a negativity that unsettles logic of progressivism that often colors multiple forms of narrative. Although not planned as such, Narrative is an elegant shadow companion of sorts to Rajan's two previous classic volumes: Dark Interpreter and Supplement of Reading; it too is concerned with dense interpretative strategies entailed by texts that cannot fail but to (re) read themselves, strategies that challenge formal logics governing their seemingly pristine forms. Indeed, in these prior books, and even more so in Narrative, Rajan examines very thought of Romanticism as something that is still (to be) born (44), or excessive figure of a tension that is at once site of a potentiality and un-avowable remainder of a traumatic encounter that is prior to experience itself. In this way, Rajan builds upon scholarship of critics such as Peter Brooks, Paul Ricoeur, J. Hillis Miller, and D.A. Miller (to name a few), but her approach is decidedly--and eloquently--aslant and athwart their writings. Narrative considers how question of narrative is itself symptom of processes of dislocation and division that undo any generic argument that aims to gird what Carol Jacobs has called uncontainable aspect of thinking, which is to say, its resistance to any claims for substantialization and demarcation. Thus uniqueness of Rajan's work lies in way in which each of her chapters falls away from structural considerations, and challenges apparent insularity of thinking about narrative as something that only produces itself out of established norms of a text. Narrativity becomes a process ... that operates between texts and is not to be aligned strictly with genres of prose or (4). This tension informs Rajan's almost polemical deployment of narrative throughout her and she develops three overlapping positions: that narrative is not easily assimilable to the apparatus of Novel and its various forms of institutionalization; that narrative is not akin to reading for plot; and finally, that narrative has something to say about disciplinary issues raised by historical study, specifically modern, epistemic relationship between and prose, and reorganization of knowledge that produced notion of nineteenth century as an institutionalized power that precipitates strange (dis)avowal of idea of Romanticism. While each of six chapters concentrates on work of a single author, approach is de-familiarizing and uses texts as part of a critical laboratory around crisis of narrativity. first chapter, The Trauma of Lyric: Shelley's Missed Encounter, primarily reads Alastor as a text that meditates on what poetry and might mean in a period of generic transition where ascendancy of narrative-as-novel gives way to various kinds of formal experiments. Rajan argues that Alastor is neither lyric nor narrative, but rather a collapse of both possibilities as Narrator produces a work that echoes a Wordsworthian lyricism which hampers posthumous attempts at subsuming poem into any recognizable form. misrecognition, as Rajan argues, of Alastor lies in its embrace of a Blanchotian negativity that undoes lyric's culturally productive ideality. …