Bill Brown Research Articles

The Furniture of Narrative in Crébillon’s Le Sopha and Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses

My argument begins with a fashionable item of eighteenth-century furniture. The canape a confidents, or confidente, was a sofa with two extra seats attached at the ends (fig. 1). These were the confidents, by analogy with the minor characters--ladies-in-waiting, nursemaids, freres et soeurs de lait, and other companious--who were familiar figures not only in the theater and novels of this period, but also in everyday aristocratic culture. (1) This practice of assigning social functions and human attributes to was widespread in the eighteenth century. In the rich contemporary typology of furnishings, there was a type of armchair, for instance, known as the bergere (or shepherdess), and another referred to as the voyeuse. The latter was designed to be straddled by a male occupant, who placed his elbows on a padded rail at the top of the back. With his torso and head thrust forward, the sitter was thus in an ideal position for attentively observing the social activity in front of him. Hence the name: voyeuse, or chair for looking. (2) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] This essay is based on the premise that furniture, and aristocratic culture all share a common preoccupation with functions, roles, and positions (both physical and metaphorical). (3) Specifically, I propose to examine what we might refer to as the furniture of narrative, by analogy with what philosophers, educators, and psychologists call the furniture of the mind--the mental structures and mechanisms, whether innate or acquired, that make cognition possible. (4) The of similarly, would include the basic functional equipment of storytelling. The terminology for this equipment has changed according the vicissitudes of critical fashion, but in general, it includes character, setting, focalisation, and so on. On a more specific level, we might add the rhetorical strategies, formal conventions, and character types associated with various periods of literary history: the hero and the opening in medias res (for the epic) or the libertine and epistolary form (for the French Enlightenment novel). Like actual, physical furniture, these conventions and strategies serve to capture a person's interest, to provide him or her with a comfortable and familiar framework, and to position him or her as a subject. I explore the possibilities and limits of this analogy by examining two eighteenth-century novels in which plays a central role: Claude de Crebillon's Le Sopha (1740) and Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). The two items of at the center of my analysis--the sofa in Le Sopha and the secretaire (or writing desk) in Les Liaisons dangereuses--are particularly revealing in that each functions as a metaphor for the narrative strategy of the text. This is most obvious in the case of Le Sopha, where a series of erotic vignettes is told from the point of view of an Indian Brahmin who is reincarnated as a sofa. (5) In Les Liaisons dangereuses, the secretaire performs a similar function, albeit less conspicuously, as a site for writing, storing, and relaying the letters that constitute the novel. What is striking about both novels, as these brief synopses suggest, is the highly visible and material character of their narrative furniture. What, after all, could appear more contrived to a reader raised on the conventional realist fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than a novel told from the point of view of a sofa, or entirely through letters? The realist novel generally seeks to put the fictional world before the reader's eyes, as if he or she were looking through the literary devices that are used to create it. (6) In Le Sopha and Les Liaisons dangereuses, by contrast, narrative devices are reified; they become material things that one encounters. (7) Bill Brown has written eloquently about the encounter with things: You cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut. …

Mountain Ski Maps of North America: Preliminary Survey and Analysis of Style

This article examines mountain ski resort trail maps in North America in 2008. It looks at the styles of maps used by resorts and at the main artists involved in producing the maps. The survey included maps from 428 resorts with additional analysis of maps from the 100 largest resorts. Point of view and creation method are the primary factors in determining the style of each ski trail map. Artists have employed three main types of views for ski mountains: panoramas, profiles, and planimetric maps. Panoramic views are by far the most common type of map (86% of all maps and all of the maps at the top 100 areas). Profile views are used in 8% of the maps and planimetric views in only 6%. Production methods for ski trail maps fall into three main categories: painting, illustrating, and computer rendering. Maps created with painting techniques are the most widespread, in use at 72% of all resorts and at 89% of the top 100 areas. Those created in a hard-edged vector-based illustration style are in use at 20% of resorts and those created through computer modeling and rendering at 3% of resorts.Many artists have created ski trail maps for resorts in North America but one artist, James Niehues, has produced by far the most maps in current use. His maps are in use at over a quarter of all ski areas and at half of the top resorts. Niehues follows in the footsteps of two other Coloradans, Hal Shelton and then Bill Brown, and this Colorado School has been key in the development of a classic painted panoramic style of North American ski maps. Additional research is recommended to provide further details of the history of the maps and their creators as well as to analyze the artists’ terrain manipulations and to look at the growing use of electronic trail maps.

The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

<i>The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (review)

Reviewed by: The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity Andrew Louth The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity. By Patricia Cox Miller. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. viii, 263. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-812-24142-6.) This latest of Patricia Cox Miller’s books draws together two themes that have been her concerns for a long time: the holy and the bodily, or perhaps more precisely, saints and bodies. The links between the two have been noticed ever since scholars paid attention to the notion of the holy in late antiquity. In the first martyrdom account preserved, that of Polycarp, the faithful used to vie with one another to touch his body during his lifetime; after his death, his relics were important. Such respect, or rather, veneration, for the dead bodies of saints marked out Christians from pagans, who were horrified by bringing corpses into cities, the dwelling place of the living. The cult of icons, which developed out of the cult of relics, also concerns bodily elements. What Miller does in this book is to explore the various notions of bodily elements in late antiquity and also apply the methods and results of modern cultural theory, in particular “thing theory,” taken from the work of Bill Brown. There seem to be two aspects to Miller’s approach. On the one hand, she distinguishes various approaches to bodily elements connected with thing theory—i.e., the notion that in certain ways bodily objects become things, as opposed to mere objects—a focus of attention and significance, which is expressed in late-antique writing through ecphrasis and what Miller calls “visceral seeing” (p. 104). She also introduces notions such as the corporeal imagination of the book’s title and the notion of the “material turn” (p. 3). This latter notion sounds familiar, as it is present in Miller’s “linguistic turn” (in The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion [Burlington, VT, 2001], p. 6) and “cultural turn” (in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. Dale B. Martin and Miller, Durham, NC, 2005). On the other hand, Miller takes us through various ways in which the body becomes significant in late antiquity: the way in which the body becomes integral to the notion of selfhood; the significance of relics; and the way bodies are depicted, which leads naturally to the icon. Throughout, Miller provides examples, drawn from her extensive knowledge of the primary and secondary literature. She moves through the material at quite a pace and too frequently moves from one investigation to another before reaching any, if provisional, conclusion. In the end, it cannot be said that Miller’s discussion is comprehensive. There is no question that her subject is of immense importance. In the ascetic literature, to which she [End Page 514] pays less attention, it is increasingly evident how the very importance of ascetic practice, for all that it seems to be directed against the body, ultimately confers on the body central significance. The development of Eucharistic theology points in the same direction: It is our bodies that enable us to participate in the divine through the Eucharistic elements—something, as St. John Damascene points out, denied to the angels, so that in some sense we are superior to the angels through our bodies. Miller helps us to see the importance of the tangible in Christian religious experience in late antiquity, but the treatment is too episodic to be entirely satisfying. Andrew Louth University of Durham Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press

Virginia Woolf, fashion, and literary modernity

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity. R. S. Koppen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009) ix + 182. Clothing was deeply implicated in fashioning and refashioning of what it meant to be modern in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Virginia Woolf, as for contemporary historians, psychologists and sociologists, sartorial fashion served as a privileged metonym for modern metropolitan life, while dressed body was primary site at which competing versions of modernity were proposed and contested. While fashion system was taken as an apt model of social and economic organization in modern metropolis, fact that clothing operated on boundary between body and external world enabled fashion to serve as dominant mode of negotiation between subjective and objective culture, between individual and society. The liminality of clothing imbued sartorial register with dialectical as well as symbolic power, with capacity to make connections between and to trace shifting relations of subject and object, organic and inorganic, masculine and feminine, in constituting modern. R. S. Koppen's Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity maps traffic between literary, visual and material cultures from Victorian period to 1930s, revealing ways in which Virginia Woolf employed language of clothing and cloth to articulate conditions of modernity, to formulate a critical historiography and to conduct her analyses of culture. Woolf draws on both alienating and exhilarating aspects of fashion system, with its capacity to regulate and standardize as much as to liberate and transform. Clothes are included as both material fact and metaphorical construction in Woolf's meditations on economies of class, gender and power. Koppen presents a comprehensive study of Woolf's work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction; of clothes as things, commodities and symbols; and of fashion as theory and practice. Striding through cultural landscape of Victorian period and into 1930s, we meet sartorial figures and clothed fantasies of age; contested modernities dressed up in different outfits, from Pre-Raphaelite swathed in flowing robes to suited and booted lesbian dandy. The dressed body is shown as star performer in a range of political and cultural movements, and Koppen's extensive frame of reference spans Surrealism, suffrage and sexology to popular physics, psychoanalysis and social reform. A sure-footed grounding in theory, taking in both usual suspects and lesser known, complements historiographical breadth. Drawing on work of period thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, and J. C. Flugel, as well as contemporary theorists of material culture and exponents of Thing-Theory such as Bill Brown, Koppen's skilful handling of complex issues is one of great successes of book. Yet, at times, level of involvement with theory tends to crowd out what's distinctive about this period in general, and about Virginia Woolf in particular. The result is a kind of heaviness at odds with Woolf's own lightness of touch. A sense of lack arises, I think, from a certain dismissal of personal and idiosyncratic. While Woolf, in Koppen's own words, is concerned with both seemingly trivial and ostensibly serious, Woolf's engagement with fashion on a personal level, trials and tribulations, however trivial, of her embodied experience, is only briefly touched upon in opening chapter, before vanishing without so much as a dangling thread. Despite an emphasis on principle of embodied mind, of (dressed) body itself as cultural and political agent, I found voice of Virginia Woolf becoming more disembodied as book progressed. Koppen cites Woolf's assertion in Three Guineas that Since marriage until year 1919 ... was only profession open to us, and since clothing has a function of attracting a male, the enormous importance of dress to a woman cannot be exaggerated. …

The Red Badge of the Running Back: Stephen Crane, Football and the Fictional Representation of the American Civil War

The most famous fictional rendition of the American Civil War is Stephen Crane's masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Lacking any experience of warfare, Crane asserted he had gained his ‘sense of the rage of conflict on the football field’, college football being a popular sport in America in the 1890s. This claim has been discussed in some detail by Christian K. Messenger (in Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction, 1981) and Bill Brown (The Material Unconscious, 1996), and both scholars find Crane's use of the football trope either inappropriate or improper. It is my contention, however, that Crane's experience of football in the 1890s pervades his narrative use of the physical, tactical and rhetorical images of the sport to recreate successfully the sights and sounds of warfare, transforming a historically frightening, confusing and chaotic event into a structured and meaningful contemporary literary experience.

Feminist Thing Theory in Sister Carrie

Feminist Thing Theory in Sister Carrie Tracy Lemaster (bio) Sister Carrie employs a ubiquitous rhetoric of "things," using the word thing and its compounds something, anything, and everything more than a thousand times. The term's placement is as prominent as its repetition, the term appearing within the first page and a half of every single chapter. Yet critics have not looked at Dreiser's rhetorical preoccupation with the word thing other than through passing critiques of his overall "tedious repetition of words" (Leibowitz xvi). Accounts of Dreiser's "relentless repetition" (Matthiessen 85) are often coupled with references to his seeming sense of the insufficiency of his linguistic medium, as in his comments in Sister Carrie that "words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean" (6) and that "[p]eople in general attach too much importance to words" (88). Dreiser's supposed uncertainty about the efficacy and interpretative power of language and his skepticism about being able "to give authoritative shape to words" (Poirier 239) unfairly frames his rhetorical strategies as passive report. Rather than merely contributing to the monotony of his style, Dreiser's use of thing becomes an important means of characterization. What we might call "thing rhetoric" documents Carrie's development both as an actress and as a "stand-in for the figure of the writer" (Hochman 57) through her gradual appropriation of Dreiser's authorial voice. When Carrie employs this rhetoric, she challenges woman's social objectification and commodification, as is shown in a reading of the novel in terms of feminist thing theory. "It strikes to the heart of all life, animate and inanimate": Thing Theories Arguably the creator of thing theory for literary studies, Bill Brown challenges the assumed mute and self-evident status of the object by demonstrating how the animate and inanimate reciprocally shape, mimic, and [End Page 41] occupy one another in instances where "things seem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like" (Sense 9).1 By asking "why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies" (4), Brown raises questions relevant for Sister Carrie. As Caren Town observes, in Dreiser's works "locations and objects have become personified and people objectified. … Dreiser has invested a great deal in his descriptions of the material world. … [I]f the characters themselves are inarticulate, bewildered, or mistaken, then the things surrounding them must do the work instead. [Thus] objects create instead of represent self " (44). Town's Lacanian analysis of Carrie's self-formation in relation to her mirror is one study among many interested in a single object or a set of object relations in the novel. Brown himself has addressed how "Dreiser stands out among American realists and naturalists as the writer most devoted to things: to the detailed rendering of streets, hotels and restaurants and office buildings, magnificent mansions and squalid flats, shoes and scarves and jackets and skirts" ("Matter" 84), and he goes on to describe windows in Sister Carrie as "an optical mechanism that generates a dialectic of proximity and distance which structures desire" (88). However, this traditional thing-theory approach does not account for how Dreiser's thing rhetoric adds dimensions to objects beyond what mere descriptions achieve. As Alan Trachtenburg argues, because "Dreiser's reverence for the world of objects is so great that at various times it seems as if he tries to transmute the word into the object itself," the relationships between materiality, representation, and signification are so enmeshed in Sister Carrie as to produce the effect of the "thingness of words and the wordness (or articulateness) of things" (Trachtenburg 101). Brown addresses the relevance of thing theory to gender only in a brief discussion of how woman as "the priestess of the temple of consumption" (quoting Charlotte Perkins Gilman) implicates the man "harnessed" by domestic goods (quoting Henry David Thoreau) (Sense 24).2 In contrast to Brown, feminist thing theorists, recognizing the political in the personal, investigate "an aesthetics of everyday life to ponder questions about gender" (Lloyd xiv), including questions about women's marginalization from democratic processes and their...

The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England Bill Brown (bio) Mark Blackwell, ed. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. 365pp. US$62.50. ISBN 978-0-8387-5666-9. When, in his introduction to the 1946 edition of Henry James’s American Scene, W.H. Auden claimed that, “outside of fairy tales, I know of no book in which things so often and so naturally become persons,” he marked the oddity of the fact that James grants the power of speech to churches and train cars, among other things (xi). Within the novelist’s impressions of the U.S., the secret life of things looms large, as it does for other writers at other times in other genres—and not just the genre of the fairy tale or fable. In England, more than thirty editions of Aesop’s fables were published between 1708 and 1798, but by the close of the eighteenth century animals were considerably more voluble in, say, The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1785), “related by a mouse,” or The Memoirs of Dick (1800), a pony: “I trust the following Memoirs of my checquered life will prove that I am not uncultivated, or have been an inattentive observer of human manners.” Moreover, inanimate objects considerably outdid animals in their capacity to wax autobiographical; the object autobiography became a much discussed convention and pretty standard reading fare. This is why it is not (so) surprising that George Eliot’s brilliant young doctor, Lydgate, an obsessive reader of Rasselas and Gulliver, also read (by the age of ten) the novel by Charles Johnstone entitled “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk” (Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–72; New York: Penguin, 1994], 143.) In Gulliver’s own adventures, after all, conditions for vocability are buoyantly breached. And just as Swift’s non-humans have strong reactions to their human others, so Chrysal does not mince his words: unwilling to argue strongly within the nature/nurture debate, the guinea remains eager, after recounting the despicable schemes of a gentleman, to share the observation that while humans are careful to track the pedigrees of their dogs and horses, they seem to “show no regard to the dispositions of those, on whom they propagate their own species” ( Johnstone, Chrysal [1764], 13). Johnstone’s novel, reprinted three times before being expanded into a four-volume edition, was once deemed worthy of collection in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library (1822), but it belongs to a subgenre (in [End Page 631] which things become persons) that remained generally unread in the twentieth century, even by such a voracious reader as Auden. This is the subgenre now widely designated as the “it-narrative,” with protagonists—shoes, quills, coats, cats, dogs, cork-screws, coaches, kites, canes, pins, and any number of coins, most famously the gold guinea Chrysal—that often serve as homodiegetic narrators. As Mark Blackwell explains in the introduction to this impressive collection of essays, despite Joseph Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling” (1710) and Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) belonging to this genre, scholars have widely ignored it, disdaining it as formula fiction, and it has thus “languished in critical purgatory” (11). The Secret Life of Things provides instead a critical paradise. For some readers, this collection could no doubt be captioned “everything you wanted to know about it-narratives and chose not to ask”; for many more readers, though, it will certainly serve as the critical foundation for formulating new questions about a form of narrative prose fiction that proves to be far more than a curiosity, newly legible here as an integral part of literary and cultural history, appearing to allegorize (and at times to ameliorate) anxieties about authorship, property, ethnicity, female sexuality, point of view, and the eighteenth century’s burgeoning consumer culture. This is one of literature’s more idiosyncratic contributions to what John Brewer and Roy Porter have called the Enlightenment’s task of “making sense of the opportunities...

Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language as Testamental Text

Critical conversation about the work of Samuel Beckett has been immeasurably enriched by the meditations of such thinkers as Alain Badiou and Pascale Casanova, both of whom – for very different reasons – have elevated Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983) to the status of “testamental” or “recapitulatory” text: that is, a text that, in Badiou’s phrasing, serves to “take stock of the whole of Samuel Beckett’s intellectual enterprise.” This essay on Harold Pinter endeavours to make a similar claim for his short 1988 play Mountain Language . In particular, and through the unique theoretical interventions of Badiou, Bill Brown, and Cary Wolfe, “Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language as Testamental Text” delineates the myriad strategies of repressive forces in their ongoing project of domination. These prominently include the priority of the voice, the activation of material “things” as psychical weapons, and frequent recourse to a discourse of species to elide boundaries between the human and the animal, all of which provide a means to re-read the canon of Pinter’s work.

Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter's Mountain Language as Testamental Text

Critical conversation about the work of Samuel Beckett has been immeasurably enriched by the meditations of such thinkers as Alain Badiou and Pascale Casanova, both of whom – for very different reasons – have elevated Beckett's Worstward Ho (1983) to the status of “testamental” or “recapitulatory” text: that is, a text that, in Badiou's phrasing, serves to “take stock of the whole of Samuel Beckett's intellectual enterprise.” This essay on Harold Pinter endeavours to make a similar claim for his short 1988 play Mountain Language. In particular, and through the unique theoretical interventions of Badiou, Bill Brown, and Cary Wolfe, “Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter's Mountain Language as Testamental Text” delineates the myriad strategies of repressive forces in their ongoing project of domination. These prominently include the priority of the voice, the activation of material “things” as psychical weapons, and frequent recourse to a discourse of species to elide boundaries between the human and the animal, all of which provide a means to re-read the canon of Pinter's work.

Registration of ‘Bill Brown’ Wheat

Registration of ‘Bill Brown’ Wheat

Theorizing Surfaces and Depths: Gaskell's &lt;i&gt;Cranford&lt;/i&gt;

Cultural and literary critics have long been occupied with deciphering the of things. For Karl Marx, for instance, are disguised social relations, hieroglyphics that appear to have language of their own only because they disguise the secret of their production.1 For poststructuralists, are signs, sharing with language all the ambiguity and slippage that writing brings to signification, and available metaphorically in fiction as indexes of the real world from which they are drawn. In New Historicist lexicon, they exist alongside texts as part of cultural context to be reconstructed. More recently, however, new developments in and the study of have suggested that may be most important because they occasion different forms of reading from texts or signs. In his 1986 introduction to the Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai broke conceptual ground by suggesting that are freer to move between categories of (of the gift, of the commodity) than Marx had imagined. This analysis helped to introduce contemporary perspective in which themselves seem to talk above or below the language of their social situation. Thus, for Bill Brown, Susan Stewart, John Plotz, Elaine Freedgood, and others speaking up for the realm of material studies within the discipline of literature, ways of what Freedgood terms readings things in texts, and of reading texts as things, are still to be developed.2 value of retraining ourselves as readers advanced by all of these critics, who pick up on Appadurai's general point that history, subjectivity, and consciousness happen in contact with surfaces and textures, even when these surfaces and textures are the products of social context in the first place. The of the thing, argues Brown, is the of changed relation to the human subject.3 As Brown's use of the word story suggests, there strategic aspect to such an approach, provisional willingness to use what Freedgood describes as a strong literalizing metonymy [to] 'start' fictional objects into historical life . . . against the grain of the kinds of allegorical we already know how to find, read, and create.4 More definitively, though, thing theory suggests that if we overhaul our whole way of reading both texts and objects, we might get beyond the dichotomies of sign and essence; depth and surface; metaphor and metonym, which are distinctions that by definition refuse to uphold.5 best engagements with materiality, argues Plotz, look beyond the realm of symbolic circulation to the limit cases where an object's meaning ends and its materiality begins.6 In the realm of texts this involves the opportunity to approach texts (as words and paper and print) as part of the ungovernably real, practical relations of the subject with the material world. This essay something of thought experiment in seeing where such corrective might lead in terms of one work, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1851–1853). Cranford was first published as series of stories under Charles Dickens's editorship in Household Words before being brought out as the single volume of what can now be described loosely as novel lacking conventional plot or character development. Cranford lends itself to an investigation of partly because of this structure, and its appearance in Household Words, journal in which many pieces draw their readers' attention to everyday surfaces, and partly because it text in which the objects of Victorian village life—candle lighters, rubber bands, decorative garters, apples studded with cloves, lavender bags, red and green silk, Italian lace collars, butterfly brooches—seem to come to life in place of the characters who would normally drive such plot. current upturn of interest in Cranford, long Gaskell's most popular work, but much less focus of twentieth-century appreciation than her probing novels of social realism, reflects new sense of it being possible to...

William Liddle Brown (19292007)

Bill Brown was born on 24th December 1929, in Edinburgh, was evacuated during the war, and then came back to his family in Edinburgh, where he obtained his undergraduate university education. Despite speaking French for most of his professional life, when speaking English, he never lost his slight Edinburgh accent. He studied chemistry at Edinburgh University from 1948 to 1952, obtaining a first class honours degree, then set out to gain a degree in geology, partly, we suspect, because of his love for the Scottish mountains. The university regulations did not allow graduates to hold two honours degrees, so when, after only two years, he obtained first class honours marks in geology, he was given his own one-man section in the lists for the graduation ceremony. The great Arthur Holmes was Regius Professor at the time, and Bill was thrilled by Holmes’ work on the age of the Earth and continental drift. Even 50 years ago most geology students complained that crystallography was too difficult, but Bill found it all perfectly obvious and spent much time playing bridge. It was Holmes who spotted his talent in matters crystallographic and recommended that he study for a doctorate (Dr. Sc. Nat.) at the ETH in Zurich, which he obtained in 1958, under the direction of Fritz Laves. This work, published in 1960, on the effect of heating on the cell parameters of plagioclase and the first full characterization of peristerites, set him on a lifetime study of the feldspar minerals. Dr. Robin Nicholson wrote in a letter “I cannot help feeling we lost a great field geologist after he met Laves”. Bill held various posts during his career: Assistant in Mineralogy–Crystallography at ETH (1957–1958), Research Associate in Mineralogy at Pennsylvania State University (1959–1960), Maitre assistant titulaire at ETH (1960–1962), Lecturer in geology …

Registration of ‘Bill Brown’ Wheat

‘Bill Brown’ (Reg. No. CV‐133, PI 653260) hard red winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) was developed by the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station and released in August 2007 through an exclusive marketing agreement with the Colorado Wheat Research Foundation. In addition to researchers at Colorado State University (CSU), USDA‐ARS researchers at Manhattan, KS, St. Paul, MN, and Pullman, WA, participated in the development of Bill Brown. Bill Brown was selected from the cross ‘Yumar’/‘Arlin’ made in 1997 at Fort Collins, CO. Bill Brown was selected as an F5:6 line reselection in Yuma, AZ, in May 2003 and assigned experimental line number CO01385‐A1. Bill Brown was released because of its superior grain yield under nonirrigated and irrigated production in eastern Colorado, high grain volume weight, resistance to leaf (Puccinia triticina Eriks.) and stripe rust (P. striiformis Westend.), and superior milling and bread baking quality. The name Bill Brown was chosen to honor the memory of former CSU Extension Plant Pathologist Dr. William M. Brown.

Reweaving the Carpet (Reading Stephan Mussil Reading James)

Reweaving the Carpet (Reading Stephan Mussil Reading James) Bill Brown (bio) [L]anguage seemed itself only where sound and image, image and sound, interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called “meaning.” —Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”1 I. A Little Drama If there is an open secret in the work of Henry James (a secret in plain sight), it may well be his dramaturgy, what he called his “scenic philosophy.” No matter how you yourself experience the effect of this philosophy, James considered it a sublime yet simple trick. “Yes, I see thus, I think, my little act of my little drama here. Ah, this divine conception of one’s little masses and periods in the scenic light—as rounded ACTS.” In the Notebooks, he comes to fixate on this divine discursive maneuver, “the scenic philosophy and method”: “I feel as if it still (above all, YET) had a great deal to give me, and might carry me as far as I dream!”2 Two months later (in 1896), with eight sections of What Masie Knew (1897) complete, the fixation remains fully in force: “the scenic method is my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation,” a salvation because it enables him to “stick to the march of an action,” the “only thing that really, for me, at least, will produire L’OEUVRE, and L’OEUVRE is, before God, what I’m going for.”3 There are few moments where the intensity of James’s relationship with his work (with himself) is so manifest, at once so gleeful and so grandiose. Of course James continued to deploy this “method,” and he continued to think about it in print, above all when he sat down to reread his fiction and to write the prefaces for the New York edition. In his preface to The Ambassadors, describing his “insistence on the scenic side of [his] labour,” he portrays “the material” of the novel as “taken absolutely for the stuff of drama,” and thus declares, for instance, that the problem of [End Page 801] Strether’s biographical past gets “treated scenically, and scenically alone.” But James also believed that this scenic philosophy does not reveal itself—that the novel looks “as little scenic as possible.”4 The metadrama staged here—between composition and reception, between the scenic method wonderfully deployed and that method everywhere disguised—casts critical work as the act of disclosure, as though the “absolute . . . salvation” at the heart of the WORK were something that only an especially astute reader, an initiate, could detect. James has enjoyed many such astute readers, of course, who have made much of the novelist’s dramatic mode, perfected even as he failed as a dramatist in the theater, humiliated by the public response to Guy Domville in 1895. My point, then, is not to call attention to this method (as others have) but to call attention to James’s own account of the method—his spiritual conviction about its underlying and overarching power, coupled with his observation that it would be anything but obvious to his reading public. It is as though James understood his scenic philosophy as a “secret in spite of itself,” an “exquisite scheme” that had become his work’s “organ of life.” He might have written that it “stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it.”5 And though he never did speak or write of his scenic philosophy in precisely these words, these are the words that the novelist Vereker employs to describe the secret of his work to the narrator of “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), the unnamed critic, ambitious yet uninitiated, who feels responsible for discovering the secret—at once “a little trick” and “an exquisite scheme”—and for sharing that secret with the reading public (FC 366). This is one reason why it seems difficult to extract “The Figure in the Carpet” from the context of...

On Stuff

This review essay takes Bill Brown's question, how we ask things 'to make meaning, to remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, and to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies' as a starting point for considering Dickens's affective relationships with household objects (now on display at the Charles Dickens Museum). Quite what they meant to him and what his affective relationship to them might now mean to us is a question which – if taken properly seriously – plunges us into a profound encounter with the object world – with the plethora of things that make up our daily habitudes. Reviewing recent studies on the material imagination by Bill Brown, Elaine Freedgood and Carolyn Steedman, this essay examines the relationship between the subject and the material in the Victorian novel.

Sister Magic: The Trouble with Violet (review)

Reviewed by: Sister Magic: The Trouble with Violet Hope Morrison Mazer, Anne Sister Magic: The Trouble with Violet; illus. by Bill Brown. Scholastic, 2007 [112p] Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-439-87246-1$3.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 2-3 The first in an anticipated series, this novel for early readers introduces sisters Mabel and Violet. Eight-year-old Mabel is organized, responsible, and presentable, and she's constantly irritated by five-year-old Violet, who is pretty much just the opposite. As the story begins, the girls receive a package from their uncle Vartan, a relative who occasionally sends gifts but whom they have never met. Around the same time, strange things begin to happen in their family: shoelaces untie themselves, wallets show up in freezers, Violet claims to be hearing voices. Soon Uncle Vartan himself manages a visit, disconcerting the girls' mother and departing suddenly (he disappears into midair, in fact); when Mabel finds out that Vartan "has magic," she quickly surmises that Violet may have it, too. Mazer, familiar from her series The Amazing Days of Abby Hayes, lays the groundwork for a new series here, making clear that its central conflict lies in the fact that messy little Violet has magical powers and sensible Mabel has to deal with it. That's an idea with undeniable sympathetic appeal, and the reading is accessible here as well. The buildup is extremely slow, however, and many readers, anticipating from the title a story of magical sisters, may abandon it long before this revelation in the final pages; Mom's confession that Vartan's magical abilities are why he's been kept away from his nieces is neither surprising nor exciting. The idea of a rambunctious younger sibling with the ability to use magic against her serious older sib is an intriguing one, though; let's hope the second book gets off to a brisker start. Final illustrations not seen. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

On the Face of the Case: Conrad,Lord Jim,and the Sentimental Novel

837 For detailed suggestions on this essay, I’d like to thank Lauren Berlant and Bill Brown; for helpful responses, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Seamus Deane, and Tom Mitchell; for help with library work and manuscript preparation, my research assistant, Mollie Godfrey. 1. On the form of the case, see Andre Jolles, Einfache Formen (1930; Darmstadt, 1958); trans. under the title Formes Simples by AntoineMarie Buguet (Paris, 1972). And see my elaboration of Jolles’s account in James K. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), pp. 203–12. On the Face of the Case: Conrad, Lord Jim, and the Sentimental Novel

Treason by words: literature, law, and rebellion in Shakespeare's England

Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England, by Rebecca Lemon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 256. Cloth $45.00. Reviewer: DENNIS KEZAR To mangle Stein on Oakland, there is not always much there here. Rebecca Lemon tantalizes us with what at certain points sounds like a compelling thesis for students and colleagues working with Renaissance English literature (historians, political scientists, and legal scholars are not encouraged by this reviewer to go any further). In its most invigorating formulation (for those of us invested in importance of words), Lemon's advertised thesis seeks to remand study of early modem treason law to language alone. What matters here is words (broadly and finally amorphously defined), and what matters much less is deeds, tyranny of things promoted by scholars such as Chicago's Bill Brown, cultural artifacts, and so forth. There is absolutely no reason I can that scholars of Renaissance literature should not - as I initially did not - find themselves immediately attracted to and sympathetic with such a project, as such a project is very much what our professional lives depend upon. The problem - or, to be more fair, my problem - is how this project of linguistic remanding devolves quickly into plot summary and diacritical recursivity (as opposed to diacritical intervention). I cannot a legal historian worth her or his salt not aware of important (and well re-documented in this monograph) transition from Edward Ill's 1352 statute defining treason as, to use Lemon's language, focused mainly on action (5). Of course this statute itself notoriously deploys problematic language - also well rehearsed in Lemon's whiggish history of what finally (in afterword, which begins with an epigraph from late Justice Rehnquist) becomes a thinly veiled allegory of presidential usurpation of republican rights: When a man doth compass or death of our lord king, of our lady his Queen ... (5). As Lemon dutifully notes, subsequent monarchs (Henry, Elizabeth, James) interpretively burden word imagine with a wealth of allegedly strict constructionist legal freight. But nowhere in this book appears a theoretical dialogue with important legal-historical scholarship on debates over mens rea in early modem common law; nor in this book could I find any evidence on continuing and neglected relevance of speech-act theory to literary scholars working on nexus of law and ethics in Renaissance. What is delivered instead sounds a bit tautological. Lemon wants to talk about the proliferation of materials and textual explosions because, well, she wants to talk about words and texts (see pages 3, 11, 13). Fair enough, but other problems become apparent when she attempts to do so. Theoretical impoverishment (not that there's anything wrong with that) can only be justified by readings of Uterary texts that justify themselves. Structurally and thematically (and effectively) this book revolves around Essex Plot and Gunpowder Plot. Textually (and mostly sensibly) this book concerns itself with Hay ward' s Henry TV, Shakespeare's R ichar d II and Macbeth, 'Donne' s Pseudo-Martyr, and Jonson's Catiline. It is of course unfair to complain about selection, but one wishes Measure for Measure, with its thematizing of mens rea v. actus reus (thoughts are no subjects) had made an appearance. More puzzling is inattention in Lemon's reading of Richard II to Exton episodes (genealogically related, of course, to Marlowe's treatment of treasonous epistolic communication/interpretation in Edward II, also ignored). One frequently gets sense that Lemon's thesis has gotten lost in local readings (again, not necessarily a bad thing). …

Cruel and Unusual Light: Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane's The Monster

Cruel and Unusual Light:Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane’s The Monster Jonathan Tadashi Naito (bio) Stephen Crane's 1898 novella, The Monster, is among the most cryptic and the most ruthless of his works. In brief, it tells the story of a small town thrown into chaos when Henry Johnson, a black coachman employed by a white doctor, Dr. Trescott, literally loses his face. In the first half of the novella, Henry Johnson's actions range from fatherly to romantic to heroic; but after his face is burned off during his daring rescue of the doctor's son from a chemical fire, Johnson is branded a "monster" and ostracized from the town.1 In a crucial confrontation soon after the fire, Judge Hagenthorpe, an influential town elder, urges Dr. Trescott to simply let Johnson die. When Trescott refuses, the judge and the doctor set out the terms within which Henry Johnson will be described for the remainder of the novella: "He will be your creation, you understand. He is purely your creation. Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead. You are restoring him to life. You are making him, and he will be a monster, and with no mind." "He will be what you like, judge," cried Trescott, in sudden, polite fury. (The Monster 32) As this passage suggests, Crane's novella is just as interested in the residents of the fictional town of Whilomville as it is in the character at the center of the uproar: they are the ones who label the living Henry Johnson an undead "thing" and thus represent the true creators of the [End Page 35] so-called monster. Even as it touches upon relatively abstract questions such as the relationship between being and non-being, Crane's novella makes it impossible to ignore the fact that the person at the center of the controversy is an African American man in a largely white small town. This issue has deservedly been at the center of recent scholarly interest in The Monster.2 Soon after its publication, critics began to speculate about what could have possibly inspired The Monster's narrative of alienation in small town America and the vivid and disquieting imagery used to describe Henry Johnson. Early critics often begun and ended their discussion of Whilomville by making mention of Port Jervis, New York, where Crane spent much of his youth. In one of the first attempts to identify Henry Johnson with an actual person, Thomas Beer asserted that Henry Johnson was inspired by Levi Hume, a "disfigured teamster" from Port Jervis, though Beer seems to have been thwarted in his attempts to verify his theory through Crane's relatives (Levenson xiii). John Berryman's biography of Stephen Crane includes a brief statement about the origins of the story that has been cited by many subsequent critics: 'The town is based on Port Jervis, as the "monster" was suggested one niece says by a Port Jervis refuse-collector whose face was eaten with cancer; but it is any New York town' (193).3 However, fixating on this individual as the source for Henry Johnson has at least one serious limitation: it does nothing to explain Crane's decision to center so much of The Monster upon racial difference: like Crane, the Port Jervis refuse-collector was white (Stallman 333). Bill Brown's 1996 study, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play, greatly expanded the historical and cultural context for Crane's novella. Even as he accepts the refuse-collector as the immediate inspiration for Henry Johnson, Brown also locates Johnson in relation to a number of embodiments of fin de siècle monstrosity: "'the last slave set free by the Supreme Court,'" an "idiot savant" known as "Blind Tom"; the black dandy of the minstrel stage, "Zip Coon"; and, most suggestively, a man who was actually named "Henry Johnson": a microcephalic African American born in New Jersey (despite his supposed African origins), who was easily the most famous of several sideshow freaks known as both "What is It?" and "Zip" (208, 214–17). He thus reads Crane's Henry Johnson as undergoing a "metamorphosis...