Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion ed. by Hester Blum

Abstract

Reviewed by: Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion ed. by Hester Blum Amanda Stuckey TURNS OF EVENT: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion. Edited by Hester Blum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016. When does a turn constitute a new direction, and when does a turn require a look back? These are questions that contributors to Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion address through a sustained and cautious examination of the concept of a critical "turn." Through what editor Hester Blum calls the "meta-disciplinary reflections" collected in this volume, contributors, all established scholars, propose a critical lexicon of the conceptual and theoretical moves that constitute the work of literary and cultural studies of the long nineteenth century (2). As Blum notes in her introduction, the essays focus less on the "particularity" of various turns and more on the "propensity of C19 literary studies to desire revolutionary movement, to join broader critical interests in turning as a way to reject stasis, to signal newness" (4). These "broader critical interests" include turns already made in cultural studies overall. Evidence of a digital turn organizes the first half of the collection, in which Geoffrey Sanborn reflects on the importance of face-to-face classrooms, Meredith McGill reconfigures book history within the field of comparative media studies, and Martin Brückner examines the metaphors and materials of cartography, digital or otherwise. The second half of the volume is dedicated to positioning American literary studies within the transnational turn. Michelle Burnham proposes that, as part of this movement, a turn toward the oceanic can open land-locked U.S. literary histories to an "alternative dimensionality" that "emphasizes America's ongoing material connectedness with the rest of the globe" (153, 155). In interrogating the consequences of these and other turns, contributors advise against a "'fashionable fascination'" with critical "fads" (42, 3). As Sean Goudie cautions of the recent surge of interest in Caribbean studies, scholars must be careful of "half turns," of underestimating the power of re-turning to yet unrealized stories and histories of U.S.-Caribbean interactions (135). But as Christopher Castiglia demonstrates, historicizing the concept of a turn has the power to reinvest critical work with the "hope" central to its vision, the dissatisfaction that motivates scholarship to pursue "a differently functioning version of the real" (62, 69) As Ralph Bauer argues, a turn does not "make an absolute and exclusive claim to truth," but remains committed to "critical debate and 'dialogue' … that puts considerations of subject positions at its front and center" (93, 94). A turn, then, in Monique Allewaert's words, "evokes a partiality," a willingness to explore a new direction, in its knowns and especially in its unknowns (111). Throughout, Turns of Evens remains committed to dissecting the concept of the turn, but not in so narrow a way that it limits its relevance to cultural studies and the humanities at large. For, here, the "literary" is also understood as multidimensional, as an interdisciplinary method of examining a range of "subject positions." Contributors prove that the "critical mobility" of American literary studies is characteristic of humanistic inquiry more broadly, a mobility ever expanding to the global yet committed to interrogating the terms that dictate a turn (2). [End Page 124] Amanda Stuckey York College of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2018 Mid-America American Studies Association