Marshall Brown Research Articles

Notes from the Joint

Research Article| May 01 2023 Notes from the Joint: Collage Ethics Anna Arabindan-Kesson Anna Arabindan-Kesson Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nka (2023) 2023 (52): 44–53. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10434980 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Anna Arabindan-Kesson; Notes from the Joint: Collage Ethics. Nka 1 May 2023; 2023 (52): 44–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10434980 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNka Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2022 reprinted from Marshall Brown and James Glisson, eds., The Architecture of Collage: Marshall Brown2022 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

The Life after Texts, the Life within Them

The Life after Texts, the Life within Them

MLQand Marshall Brown among Their Peers

<i>MLQ</i>and Marshall Brown among Their Peers

The Difference an Editor Makes

The Difference an Editor Makes

Marshall Brown, Editor Extraordinaire

I am grateful to have the opportunity to thank Marshall Brown publicly for his unmatched intellectual generosity and editorial prowess since I have relied on it so thoroughly for decades.I first met Marshall as a job candidate and junior colleague, whereupon he told me—in response to the very first piece of writing I shared with him—“It occurs to me that you may not know the meaning of a paragraph.” If my teeth veritably chattered, I did not keep aloof long. For one thing, among his many gifts, Marshall is a very fine cello player, who will play for you upon request, and I am very fond of the cello.More pertinently, I learned, as many reading this will know from their own experience, that though Marshall is candid and forthright, he is also yielding, persuadable, and unstinting with his time, erudition, and editorial elegance. His exactingness as editor is also an open door. Over the years I have sent him all sorts of things, which he always found time for, some of which he published and some of which he declined. “This is strong,” he once said, but “not your best work”—which was true. He has taught me to strive for lucidity and succinctness, to avoid italics for emphasis, and to fend off scare quotes as if they were plagues on written language. Deploy is a very tired word, Marshall once (rightly) told me, though he excused one particular usage in reference to Lord Palmerston’s gunboats. He has said many other things so perceptive and encouraging that I could not possibly repeat them in print. But I will say that his affirmative words have meant more to me than anyone’s, not least because I know that they are genuine; that if I were not doing my best work, this one reader, if not any other, would be certain to say so.Eleni Coundouriotis, who introduced the panel at the Seattle MLA, when these thoughts were first formulated, offered a few words at that time about our mutual experience of working with Marshall on the special issue “What Is and Isn’t Changing: Critique after Postcritique.” Like all of my work, inside and outside the pages of MLQ, the introduction Eleni and I cowrote for that issue, and the essays we contributed to it, became stronger for his painstaking advice. But that is something that we knew we could count on. What we hadn’t realized we’d discover, as we attempted to achieve some grasp of the core issues and debates that the twenty-first century has brought to the fore, was how MLQ’s articles, and especially its special issues, had consistently provided unparalleled provocations, catalysts, and crystallizations.In addition to his unfailing care and attention, Marshall, in his editorial role, has the even rarer gift of never aging intellectually: in the matter of literary criticism and the world of ideas, he is the least conservative—the most supple, youthful, and passionate—person I know. There is simply nothing else like Marshall and the critical and literary enterprise he has nurtured in MLQ over these three decades. Since it is his special genius to teach every author he works with how to write and think better, one takes comfort in knowing that, even when he steps down as editor, there will be dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of scholars and critics inspired by his example and keen to live up to his standards.

An Appreciation of Marshall Brown

Those of us who first met Marshall through his wonderful essays on matters far and wide in European literature of the eighteenth century and the Romantic era were not surprised, once we met him and got to know him personally, to find confirmed and to cherish in him the qualities of mind promised by the critical writing: intellectual rigor and boundless curiosity woven together by warm enthusiasm for the complexities of cultural and social life. More important for this occasion is the way those qualities extend beyond Marshall personally, and even beyond his own considerable body of writings, as a gift to the profession at large, institutionalized in his thirty years as editor of MLQ. During an age of diversity, volatility, and sometimes sharp-toned polemic, MLQ remained open to a shifting world, with a commitment to flexibility and nuance—a continual reminder that intellectual rigor and discipline are most fully animated in their hospitality to an open play of mind on the questions that matter most to us.Marshall is a generous collaborator, not least in his generative editing of MLQ. Working with Marshall on the MLA panel that became a special issue and then an expanded anthology from the University of Washington Press, Reading for Form, was Susan’s joy. In 1996, when critiques of literary form and formations, incorrectly summed as “formalism,” were so pervasive that care for this was discreditable as a thin, rear-guard defense of an insular domain of criticism installed by New Critics (again, a cartoon), Marshall approached Susan to see if we could convene a fresh conversation. This became a panel, in a large, packed room, at the 1997 MLA convention, and ultimately, with Marshall’s inimitable powers of pitching and practical suasion, a celebrated anthology of extraordinarily wide-ranging essays on everything from medieval poetry to Paradise Lost; to eighteenth-century couplet practice; to the poetics of William Blake, Laura Moriarty, Louis Zukofsky, and Paul Celan; to the impact of form in Jane Austen’s fiction; to the freightings of syntax in Victorian fiction; to revelations of form that emerge in computation; to the subtle temporalities of modernist fiction (Wolfson and Brown 2006). Many of the essays in the book that emerged from this issue (most, in fact) are now standard reading, in the contributions to the introduction to the occasion, and wonderful essays by Ellen Rooney, Virgil Nemoianu, D. Vance Smith, Heather Dubrow, Ronald Levao, J. Paul Hunter, Susan Stewart, Marjorie Perloff, Robert Kaufman, Frances Ferguson, Garrett Stewart, Franco Moretti, and Catherine Gallagher. The special issue “Reading for Form,” it became blazingly clear, is not something left behind in the variable progress of literary studies but has abided as a fertile preoccupation for careful readers to bring to an impressive array of registers and concerns. It was Marshall’s foresight, his power to attract interest and participation, his skilled editing, and his plain old professional know-how that made all this happen, to durable effect and influence.

Philip Watts Editor/Edited

In an age when our annual performance reviews invite us to assign metrics to all of our activities--so many student credit-hours taught, so many articles published, so many dollars of grant funding received--some of the most important work we do for each other and for the profession as a whole cannot be accounted for: namely, editing. I am not referring primarily to the type of editing we do under the guise of peer review, which can count as service to the discipline at institutions that value such service. Rather, I have in mind the kind of attentive reading and critical feedback that is informal, a response to a request from a close colleague or friend, and ends up in no ledger of faculty workload. It is editing as a metric-defying labor of love that defined my relationship in the profession to my brother. Allow me to back up and explain why I want to describe Phil's work as editor. I became more fully aware of the effort required in editing and the implications of that effort when I spent a year as acting editor of Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ) while its regular editor was on sabbatical. Marshall Brown, who has edited MLQ for nearly two decades, has a reputation as a provider of extensive feedback; even in the case of submissions that are clearly unpublishable, Marshall often sends three single-spaced pages of comments to the author, which speaks to his sense of responsibility to the field and ethic of care in relation to everyone who has chosen to be part of it. I could not quite replicate Marshall's mode as editor, but I certainly aimed to evince the same attention and devotion to the task and realized, as I tried to refine my practice, that Phil's mode as editor was my model for engaging and, hopefully, improving the work of colleagues during my time at the journal's helm. The nature of Phil's notes and comments in the margins of the sometimes half-baked work I would regularly send him--and I did send him a lot, and he did read it all--is my focus, but starting with what he wrote in his first book, Allegories of the Purge (1998), in the handwritten dedication of the copy he gave me (which is particularly germane to the money/l'argent theme of the 2014 20th/21st Century French and Francophone Studies conference) can help give the sense of the tenor of his comments: Rich: Please don't sell this book! With all my love, Phil. One finds in this dedication his usual self-deprecation and lack of self-seriousness, but there is also, by antiphrasis, the recognition of the virtual unsalability of academic writing. Writing in this space somewhat removed from market pressures was important to Phil, who was not looking to tell heartwarming, popular stories and certainly was not interested in making money. To return to the matter at hand, though, the brevity and ironic counterpoint on display in that dedication are the hallmarks of Phil's marginal comments that served as advice for improving my work and, I suspect, that of many of those who are reading this tribute. In relating this anecdote of Phil's inscription in his own book, I am following another piece of brotherly advice from someone who, like Kurt Vonnegut, an exemplar of sorts for Phil (perhaps because Vonnegut is the bien-pensant version of Celine?), could be grave and comic in nearly the same instant: always open with a joke, even if what you are talking about might make your audience cry. So what was his mode as editor? As his own writing so clearly shows, Phil valued straightforward honesty in intellectual work above all else, and so tended to focus his editor's gaze on those flourishes in my writing least grounded in solid evidence. Any ad hominem attack on a critic, any too-easy or tendentious accusation in my dissertation or first book of, say, colonial racism in the paratext would elicit suggestions to contextualize the statement. The point was not necessarily to soften the attack or accusation, but to make it more compelling and more plausible through understatement of the point and overstatement, as it were, of the evidence. …

Introduction

Introduction

The Primacy of the Present, the Primacy of Place: Navigating the Spiral of History in the Digital World

In her introduction to the english institute's e-book on periodization, the editor, virginia jackson, remarks on the ability of its “digital format” to invite innovative ways of interacting with texts. Marshall Brown's article in the book, for example, allows readers to hear Joseph Haydn's music while they read nineteenth-century literature, giving them an immediate understanding of the musical metaphors Brown uses for describing literary history. Our contemporary presence and capabilities in the digital world, Brown suggests, may help us to understand periods as “linked episodes within the rolling flood of time,” enabling what Jackson describes as “a literary historical process” that “is not progress but wave, not transcendence” but, as Brown writes, “the metrics and bar lines shaping the pulse of history'” (Jackson, par. 4). The authors of On Periodization suggest a practice of periodization that allows for simultaneities: “a new plane of historicity on which several temporalities unfold at once” (Jackson, par. 4). This conception of time is made possible by the present moment, the (relatively) new technologies we have in our midst, through which this e-book is expressed. This “new plane” of simultaneities reflects the primacy of the present in that the technologies we use are actively shaping how we experience literature and literary history (Martin 153–56). Furthermore, while chronological periodization can dis-embed events from their places, our process of reading rhizomically in the digital world may move us to reconsider the primacy of place.

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry by Marshall Brown

Marshall Brown. The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Pp. 384. $75.00 cloth/$35.00 paper. Che impensata novita! exclaim the enraged posse of characters in pursuit of Don Giovanni, when they discover Leperello in his master's guise. What a totally unexpected thing! Beset by mille torbidi pensieri, the characters reel, knocked silly. But what truly unexpected, from the Don's point of view, the behavior of everyone else in the opera. From the opening scene, when he grappled with by Donna Anna--e sono assalitrice d'assalita! she later boasts--everyone off script, refusing their roles. Of course, he persists with the old routines the end, deaf the realignment of desire and language occurring around him. Not. doesn't always mean in Don Giovanni, but as Marshall Brown brilliantly adduces in the concluding chapter of his new book, it the opera's signature utterance, along with two other epithets of the modern: sentire (to feel) and battere (to beat/fight), the latter originated by Giovanni and Anna's deadlocked struggle, but which signifies also, Brown suggests, the restless beat of Mozart's music, and the momentous historical change both the Don and Mozart's Prague audience of 1787 must be made hear (Viva la Liberta!). The skeptical energy that pulses through Mozart's Don Giovanni marks a fitting (actually rousing) conclusion Brown's The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul, a book concerned throughout with facets of skeptical artistry (37) in music and poetry. Abstraction Brown's master term for the negativity that characterizes music and lyric poetry: how both art forms operate upon a deficit of meaning and thus are always pointing the pure necessity and energy of form. The introductory chapter includes a tour of modernist painting--Picasso, Rothko--before concluding that abstraction is a mode, not a period (14) and setting sail for the long eighteenth century. In Brown's hierarchy of arts, the abstraction or immateriality of music the condition which poetry aspires. In Faure's song Rencontre, for example--Brown's reading of which sets the terms for much of what follow--the lyric does not succeed in rescuing the music from abstraction. Rather, Faure's setting introduces a vital indeterminacy, and thus emotional depth, otherwise bland verse. In this way, the lyric art, written, sung, or played, represents an essential musicalization of experience (xi). All arts are one. In chapter two, the oft-derided subcategory of becomes the name for this principle of abstraction, a contrarian move characteristic of the skeptical sensibility Brown brings Romantic definitions of art. not license (44), even less an unbounded state of mind, but rather an achieved affect dependent on craft. Like the Mephistophelean no coursing through Don Giovanni, fantasy a questioning presence audible not only in custom-made settings such as Mendelssohn's Overture A Midsummer Night's Dream, but in such sublime edifices as Beethoven's Fifth. Fantasy Brown's name for that symphony's incomplete catharsis, its lack of a statement form shore up against the restlessness of a pulse (60). Brown's close analyses of momentary musical effects enacts the difficult rescue of music from ideology, linking it to a different kind of meaning that might rescue society from the tyranny of its principles (62). In a later chapter, Brown reiterates the point in a reading of Dickinson, whose empirical poetics of our phantasmic sense-world communicate their spirit the book (as well as its toothsome title): Poetry's estrangements are not transcendence. Rather, they are antiphonal the hymnic strains that regulate belief systems (98). In such moments as these, the very considerable stakes of Brown's enterprise become clear, as well as the specific powers of an interdisciplinary approach that takes music, not text, as the model of art. …

&lt;i&gt;Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson Heather Zias Jonathan Kramnick. Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson. Stanford: Stanford, 2010. Pp. vii + 307. $65; $24.95 (paper). “My right Hand writes, whilst my left Hand is still: What causes rest in one, and motion in the other?” Locke asks in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. “Nothing but my Will,” he answers, “—a Thought of my Mind; my Thought only changing, the right Hand rests, and the left Hand moves. This is a matter of fact, which cannot be denied.” Locke’s question, according to Mr. Kramnick, represents a basic philosophical concern of the long eighteenth century—the concern to account for functions of the mind in a physical world increasingly reducible to cause-effect explanation. Are minds subject to natural laws, or are minds distinct from matter? How does thinking produce physical changes like causing hand movement? And what effects do physical changes have on minds? Locke’s “matter of fact” answer that weds physical movement to conscious willing is one solution among several explored in Actions and Objects; readers will discover by the end of the exploration that in the eighteenth century the “hard problem of consciousness” remained (as it does to this day) unsolved. If Actions and Objects were no more than another rehashing of Locke, Hume, and Hobbes, readers should not will their right or left hand to pick it up, but Mr. Kramnick does not so much chart the history of a philosophical debate as he traces the recurrence of a structural impasse. This impasse is represented in the scene of Locke pondering his own hand moving, a scene, asserts Mr. Kramnick, that “reappears in different guises across the literatures of the period” from Haywood to Rochester to Richardson. The content of this scene shifts—Haywood ponders sexual consent; Rochester, his uncontrollable erection; and Richardson, Clarissa’s refusal of marriage—yet each scene arrives at the same representational crossroads. Should mind or matter be preeminent in the depiction of characters’ actions? Writers in the period, Mr. Kramnick implies, can be loosely grouped based on whether or not they “blur” (Rochester, Haywood) or “etch in stone” (Richardson) the dividing line between physical states and states of mind. Situating the “mind-talk” of the period within the context of depicting characters’ actions enables Mr. Kramnick to question the narrative that the eighteenth century brings into being the modern subject by rhetorically cordoning off an interior, private space. If the period is a “heyday for the importance of consciousness” as critics such as Ian Watt, Marshall Brown, Deidre Lynch, and Nancy Armstrong claim, it is so precisely because marking the boundaries of consciousness is so difficult. Contours continually shift; external factors consistently exert their force. Mr. Kramnick discerns within the period’s literatures that “the line between persons and their component parts, persons and society, the mind and the body, one mind and another, all come under meaningful pressure.” Consequently, his counternarrative is that the period’s basic questions are ontological rather than epistemological—what constitutes an agent and an action is far more important than how already constituted agents act and know. Excellent close readings, particularly of Rochester and Haywood, help Mr. Kramnick confirm this thesis. For instance, he discovers that desire in Rochester’s poetry [End Page 139] has no interior origin; rather, desire operates “in reverse,” originating in diffuse external objects and then glomming onto bodies. Those diffuse parts do not necessarily add up to a whole, and the mind appears as a superfluous afterglow of an independently functioning physicality. Similarly, Mr. Kramnick argues that in Love in Excess and Fantomina, Haywood represents the interior lives of her protagonists only to make those interior lives “blend into their surroundings,” becoming indistinguishable from setting, other characters, and even the narrator’s voice. “Terms of mind splatter over the sentences only to become the actions they represent or consider.” The period’s philosophical and fictional works, in Mr. Kramnick’s view, are jointly constructing an interpretive framework for understanding ontology; especially important, the epistolary novel purports to offer readers an insider’s view of characters’ motives. These significant and suggestive claims are downplayed by Mr...

Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric (review)

Reviewed by: Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric Joseph Orchard Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric. Edited by Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. [xx, 366 p. ISBN-13: 9780226041292. $45.] DVD, illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Musical analysis of any sort is valuable insofar as it leads the listener (in the broadest sense) to fresh experiences of a given work or repertoire. The same analysis increases in value as it broadens the cultural vision of the perceiver, leading to deeper listening and deeper understanding. On all of these counts, and more, the volume of essays at hand scores high marks. The book reproduces eleven of fifteen presentations given at the conference, " 'A Clever Orator': Colloquies and Performances Exploring Rhetoric in Haydn's Chamber Music" at the University of California, Los Angeles in April 2001. The apparent goal of the published symposium was to give a discussion of musical rhetoric its full due: to place it in an historical (Haydn's past, present, and future) and cultural context by going beyond a musicological perspective on the subject to include scholars from parallel disciplines. The present volume reunites four contributors to the earlier Haydn and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): Tom Beghin, Mark Evan Bonds, Elaine Sisman, and James Webster. Additional musicologists in this collection include C. P. E. Bach scholar Annette Richards and Haydn veteran László Somfai. The contributions of classicist Sander Goldberg, historian James Van Horn Melton, and the two literary/cultural scholars Timothy Erwin and Marshall Brown establish a substantial basis for the image of Haydn as orator. The first essays ("Back grounds") approach questions of performance, rhetoric, and aesthetics contextually, while the later essays ("Fore grounds") view the context through the perspective of the music and its performance. Included with the book is a DVD that replicates images found in the book and features mostly audio and some video performances of music examples. Though the editors indicate that "compromises" were made in the production of the DVD, it is wondrously done, and lends vibrancy to the various arguments. The first chapter, "A Visit to the Salon de Parnasse," precedes "Backgrounds" and is not actually a paper, but a conversation. Elisabeth Le Guin (a major mover in the success of the conference and whose performances on the violoncello are featured on the DVD) fashions a fictionalized and idealized dialogue as it might have happened in a salon. Since Haydn attended salons while in Vienna, this episode provides a vital contextual element for his music. Since the conversationalists are predominantly French, this salon takes place in Paris, where many ideas about performance were being published. Those attending include Diderot, Rousseau, and d'Alembert, and the spoken texts quote their writings, and those of other attendees, and other fresh queries. The participants explore in this dialogue the nature of conversation, and, through a performance of the first movement of the piano trio, Hob. XV:14, reflect on how their ideas resonate with the performance. The two media even share an awkward silence, whimsically illustrating further parallels. The first essay, "Performing Theory: Variations on a Theme by Quintilian," is written by Goldberg. Unlike Aristotle, the [End Page 301] most articulate of the Greeks in the field of rhetoric, the Roman Quintilian wrote extensively on oration, or delivery. Among the reasons for this difference, the most relevant was the workings of the legal system. In addition to oratory, acting became an element in the issue of delivery. The practice of rhetorical delivery could be complicated by any of four factors: emotion (when and how to employ it), knowledge (usually the more, the better), declamation (an unlimited use of invention), and truth (or, the avoidance of falsehood). The DVD cleverly illustrates performance issues in oratory with a link to a Web site, http://cicero .humnet.ucla.edu/speech.htm (accessed 20 August 2008) that includes three versions of a speech by Cicero, with English translations. In "Ut Rhetorica Artes: The Rhetorical Theory of the Sister Arts," Erwin reveals the breadth of the impact rhetorical thinking had on the various arts. Design is his topic, not only as a literary element, but as an organizational element...

The Gothic Text (review)

Reviewed by: The Gothic Text Robert Miles Marshall Brown . The Gothic Text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 312pp. US$48. ISBN 978-0-8047-3912-2. The Gothic Text is trained on a single, bewildering consequence of modernity: the astonishing fact of "mind." The modern historicizing school of Gothic criticism has tended to marginalize Immanuel Kant as a peripheral figure who could have had little impact on, and therefore relevance to, the ideological material narrated by the Gothic. In direct opposition to this critical tendency, Marshall Brown meditates on a fundamental consequence of Kantian philosophy: the defamiliarization [End Page 181] of mind. Although British empiricism had the capacity to render the mind passing strange, especially as it drove a sceptical wedge between sense data and things, it rested on a camera obscura model of mental functioning that reinforced naturalism. Thus, while one might question the relationship between the image cast on the mind's tabula rasa, and its source, the unintended consequence of the metaphor was to reinforce a model in which, as Richard Rorty puts it, "all the knowing gets done" under "the gaze of the unblinking Eye of the Mind" (cited in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992], 55). Even for sceptics, the mind was a box in which sense data impinged on a receptive consciousness. By contrast, Kantian philosophy closed the shutter on the world of things. It ushered in a form of radical subjectivity in which the mind shadowboxed with itself, disconnected from anything graspable through "common sense." For Brown, the Gothic is the literary form that arose in astonished contemplation of this fact. Brown begins his revisionist reading with three theses, each carefully designed to pick apart the critical consensus: Romantic Gothic fiction is not exciting ; Gothic novels are not Ghost Stories ; Gothic novels are not women's writing. Pace Henry Tilney, the Gothic is not designed to set one's hair on end, but is a ludic thought-experiment: the "gothic exists in a state of suspense—of questing and questioning—that we have come to call the fantastic" (9). For Brown, as for Todorov, the Gothic belongs in an uncertain halfway house, a stage in metaphysical history in which the mind stood mutely wondering before the Kantian rupture. As thought-experiments they have almost nothing to do with the gender politics attributed to the Gothic by a long tradition of feminist criticism. Indeed, the negative of the third thesis is just another expression of the parochialism that Brown sets out to dismantle. The Gothic is not circumscribed by gender, nation, or language, but is a pan-European form, stretching from the Urals to the Western plains, flowering along the trade and immigration routes that spread the Kantian revolution. In his short second chapter, "Fantasia: Kant and the Demons of the Night," Brown lays down the true cornerstone of his book: "The greatness of the gothic—inseparable from the seeming frivolity of all its greatest exemplars—is not that it plays with terror and the limits of reason, but rather, precisely, that it plays with these things, that is, that it imagines them" (14). In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick advanced the influential thesis that live burial was the Gothic's master trope, its organizing grammar, or structure, where terror turned on one of two modalities: the dread of being cut off from others, whether literally, in a box, or figuratively, through the impediments of mind or language; and the dread of being invaded, of [End Page 182] not being able to keep contaminants out, whether rapacious banditti or destructive fantasies. In the live burial trope, barriers remain shut when we want them open, but stay open when we want them closed. Brown appears to sketch a similar dynamic when he argues that the Gothic imagines and plays with the limits of reason. He angles towards a "transcendental aesthetic" of a sublime beyond human psychology, which is to say, beyond Burke and his proto-Freudian reading of terror as the overturning of the ego. In explaining this transcendental aesthetic, Brown is teasingly cryptic. At the centre of this...

Carribean migration and the construction of a black diaspora identity in Paul Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones

Analyses the novel 'Brown girl, brownstones' (1959) by Paule Marshall. Author argues that this novel offers a complex and nuanced understanding of how Caribbean migration impacts upon cultural identity, and how this cultural identity is dynamically produced, rather than static. He describes how the novel deals with Barbadian migrants to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, and further elaborates on how through this novel Marshall problematizes common dichotomies, such as between the public and the private, and between racial (black) and ethnic (Caribbean) identity. Furthermore, he indicates that Marshall through her representation of the Barbadian community, foregrounds the central role of women in the production of Caribbean identity in the US. In this, he shows, Bajan women's talk from the private sphere is very important. Further, the author discusses how the Barbadian identity is broadened to encompass Caribbean and African Americans in the novel, thus creating transnational black diaspora connections, such as by invoking James Baldwin and Marcus Garvey.

The Gothic Text (review)

Reviewed by: The Gothic Text Aaron Chandler Marshall Brown , The Gothic TextStanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, xxii + 280 pp. With The Gothic Text, Marshall Brown continues the provocative project (begun in his 1991 study Preromanticism) of rereading literary history teleologically, though Brown's concept of telos is emphatically not a single point of arrival from which final judgments of value can be made, but rather a vector of thought aiming uncertainly into the future. Conjoining text and time in this fashion exposes unseen relationships between texts, and it is Brown's insistence on this perspective that makes The Gothic Text so rewarding and suggestive. At the heart of this study lies the bold proposition that "Kant and the gothic together discovered a new dimension of human consciousness," namely the confrontation with reality-as-unknowable (ix). This epistemological and psychological shift forced a split between phenomena and the thing-in-itself and thus opened the realm of the transcendental, at once governed by unseen laws and haunted by undisclosed monstrosities. The consequences of that split come to fruition in the work of Freud; indeed, part of Brown's insight is that the form of the gothic itself anticipates his own extremely Lacanian lens. The first two parts of Brown's book place the first gothic text, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, in extended dialog with Kantian philosophy. The insights gathered from that intertext are neatly threaded through the attendant chapters in the book's third and fourth sections, culminating in rereadings of Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. However, even if the body of his text begins and ends with English writers, Brown insists on the international character of the gothic and draws on French, German, and Russian examples, strengthening his claim that gothic literature helps to inaugurate a significant change in Western thought. As if to underscore this continental scale, The Gothic Text ends with a postscript, co-written with Jane K. Brown, in which Goethe's Faust is engagingly read as both the culmination of the gothic impulse and the mark of its circumscription. Throughout, in accessible and warm prose, Brown offers readings that challenge us to take the gothic seriously and to read philosophy imaginatively. [End Page 178] Aaron Chandler University of North Carolina–Greensboro Copyright © 2007 Southern Comparative Literature Association

Comparative literature in an age of globalization

As an academic discipline built upon Enlightenment thought and a cosmopolitan worldview-not grounded in the literary tradition of any single language or nation-comparative literature has benefited from regular reexamination of its basic principles and practices. The American Comparative Literature Association 1993 report on the state of the discipline, prepared under the leadership of Charles Bernheimer, focused on the influence of multiculturalism as a concept transforming literary and cultural studies. That report and the vigorous responses it generated, published together as Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, offered a comprehensive survey of comparative criticism in the 1990s. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, globalization has emerged as a defining paradigm in nearly every area of human activity. This latest report from the ACLA demonstrates that comparative critical strategies today can provide unique insights into the world's changing-and, increasingly, colliding-cultures. Incorporating an even wider range of voices than had its predecessor, the report examines how the condition (or myth) of globalization in all its modes and moods, affirms or undercuts the intuitions of comparative literature; how world literatures whether seen as utopian project or as classroom practice, intersect with the canons and interpretive styles of national literatures, and how material conditions of practice such as language, media, history, gender, and culture appear under the conditions of the present moment. Responding to the frequent attacks against contemporary literary studies, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization establishes the continuing vitality of the discipline and its rigorous intellectual engagement with the issues facing today's global society. Contributors: Emily Apter, Christopher Braider, Marshall Brown, Jonathan Culler, David Damrosch, Caroline Eckhardt, Caryl Emerson, David Ferris, Gail Finney, Roland Greene, Linda Hutcheon, Djelal Kadir, Francoise Lionnet, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Richard Rorty, Haun Saussy, Katie Trumpener, Steven Ungar, Zhang Longxi

Gothic and the Generation of Ideas1

AbstractGothic writing has remarkable generative power: as Marshall Brown has described it, gothic is a genre with what he calls a teleology, whose “significance lies in what it enabled its future readers to see, in what arguments it provoked, and . . . in what dreams it stimulated” (xix). From a brief discussion of selected early studies of the gothic, this article moves on to consider the extraordinary development of gothic criticism from the 1970s on, when the emergence of feminist and post‐structuralist criticism put gothic literature on the map in a new way. Tracing the development and imbrication of the many strands of gothic criticism yields a complex and at times paradoxical picture: gothic has been read as the most rigid and formulaic of literary forms but also as centrally engaged with the notably slippery concepts of sensibility and the sublime; as escapist and as grounded in the realities of human existence; as focused on the individual psyche and as socio‐cultural critique; as commenting on class, on gender, on race; as engaged with questions of national, colonial, and post‐colonial identity. The field is now so well developed that guidebooks and handbooks to both primary sources and critical approaches have emerged over the last few years to codify and make it accessible. And so the question arises: have we said all that we can about this genre or can we learn still more from it? The closing portion of this article suggests that we can, pointing to gothic and religion as an area of particular interest. Religious issues have been front and center in gothic writing from its inception, and criticism to date has opened up – but hardly exhausted – this potentially rich area of research.

“Melville: The Aesthetic Turn”

For quite a while now, the questions we have asked about Melville's work have tended to come in two varieties: the first cultural/historical/political; the second philosophical/ethical/psychoanalytic. The idea behind this panel was not to displace either of these categories of questions but to stress a third category of question: the aesthetic. Aesthetic questions have been enjoying a revival in literary studies over the last decade or so; witness George Levine's Aesthetics and Ideology, Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois's Close Reading, Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown's special issue of Modern Language Quarterly on “Reading for Form,” Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo's special issue of American Literature on “Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” and Michael Bérubé's The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Some of the aesthetic questions that it's possible to imagine asking of Melville's work are: What kinds of things provoke aesthetic responses from him? How does he respond to the inherent ambiguities of the aesthetic, i.e., its location in the subject and the object, its capacity to promote ideology and critique? What kind of relationship is there between his aesthetics, his philosophy, and his politics? Where might we now re-place the aesthetic, in relation to current modes of theoretical and political critique, and how might he help us find that place? These are some of the questions that were addressed in the papers for the panel and in the response offered by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Yale), each of which suggested the richness of aesthetics as a starting point for investigations of Melville's work.

"New Texts in Receptive Minds": The Cross-Pollination of Genres in the Long Eighteenth-Century

New Texts in Receptive Minds: The Cross-Pollination of Genres in Long Eighteenth-Century G. GABRIELLE STARR. Lyric Generations: Poetry and Novel in Long Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 298 pp.Books . . . are made to a significant extent out of other books . . . . Texts fermenting with other texts do indeed give rise to new texts in receptive minds (202). So Jocelyn Harris reminded readers at end of Richardson: Original or Learned Genius? In Lyric Generations, G. Gabrielle Starr extends this argument to include not only canonical novelists such as Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding, but also Eliza Haywood, Thomas Percy, and other eighteenth-century readers of novel and lyric poetry. This argument, on surface, is no more than common sense. After all, without previous books or texts, there would be no literature, literary studies, or literary field, and writers would start from a blank slate. Scholars such as J. Paul Hunter, Lennard Davis, Robert Mayer, and Michael McKeon have examined extent to which non-fictional texts (news, autobiographies, conduct manuals, even history), print, and epistemology have shaped novel as a genre. Ros Ballester, Catherine Gallagher, and others have explored genre's indebtedness to amatory fiction while William Warner has depicted emerging novel as early modern print entertainment (xiii). Furthermore, as Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction has convincingly indicated, novels do not merely infect weaker, more susceptible readers with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls Bovaryism (852), or attempt to emulate fictional characters; they affect culture as a whole through act of defining desire, femininity, and masculinity. If writing has power to [situate] individual within poles of nature and culture, self and society, sex and sexuality, as Armstrong has argued in her outline of Michel Foucault's theory of discursivity (13), it is also worth exploring how imaginative writing itself had been situated within poles of novel and lyric poetry during long eighteenth-century, and how this unstable situation then created writing that in turn situated individual.Starr does just this, responding to histories of novel that, exemplified by Ian Watt's The Rise of English Novel and, later, influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin, have emphasized genre's mimetic qualities and its reliance on formal realism at expense of what she calls its chiastic elements. Her stipulative definition of chiasmus positions term as alternative to idea of mimesis and acknowledges readers' awareness that they are entering spaces of imagining (Starr 107). It is important to recognize, though, that this is a figurative definition used to refute positioning of novel as a genre that privileged the impression of fidelity to experience (Watt 13) over its honoring of literary conventions, especially those originating in other genres. This definition also enables Starr to draw on critical works by Carol Barash, Donna Landry, and Marshall Brown for insights on poets and poetry that are relevant to her comprehensive and complex argument.To begin mapping eighteenth-century writing's position between poles of lyric and novel, Starr quickly points out that one must resist constraint of remaining within one genre (1-2). Authors such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith explored multiple forms, and, as Starr suggests in a footnote to her chapter on Behn, Haywood, and Pope, a scholar's concentration on one genre provides an incomplete understanding of an author's work (219n). This is especially so when demands of marketplace have led author to cross generic boundaries as was case with Behn, Haywood, and Smith. Contemporaneous readers read across genres in a way that challenged later hierarchies of genres and valuation of cultural capital. …