Psychological Interiority Research Articles

The Archbishop’s Ceiling and Postmodernism

abstract The Archbishop’s Ceiling is a new kind of drama for Miller. His plays of the 1940s to 1960s focus on characters’ psychological interiority, their struggle to maintain their belief that the stories they have been telling themselves and others about who they are and how they fit into the world are true. These plays focus on ethics, on characters’ understanding of the personal values that constitute their selves, what Miller called “dignity.” In The Archbishop’s Ceiling, characters have abandoned the idea that they are constituted by this interiority; rather, their self is their public appearance, a kind of theater. To understand a person, we no longer can seek to see into inner psychological states and values; all we can do is try to understand the purpose of their overt action in the context of the broader public events that surround it. Ethics has collapsed into politics. The notion of a private interior self has been replaced by the self of public display. This is the move from modernism to postmodernism.

Modeling Therapy as Discourse in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Abstract This article uses quantitative methods of cultural analytics in order to trace points of contact between the discourse of therapy as it emerges in the encounter between patient and clinician and in the language of twentieth-century US novels. Our computational analysis moves away from considering therapy as a diagnostic tool, either for characters or authors, and towards thinking about therapy as a discourse: a set of words (semantics) in a pattern of proportions (parts of speech, grammar). Our computational models identify excerpts of novels that contain therapy discourse and, in so doing, reveal the ways that the discourse of therapy exists in the novel beyond its expected pathways of entry (through setting, plot, and characterization). In close reading these excerpts, we observe the consistent use of a representational aesthetics of psychological interiority, one that endeavors to approximate a realistic experience of living in and through our interactions with one another. We propose that therapy as a discourse is not strictly a clinical endeavor but is more broadly an intersubjective enterprise—a process-oriented linguistic phenomenon that arises in a more heterogeneous canon of novels than those in which critics have traditionally thought to look. Using cultural analytical methods to explore therapy as a discourse helps us . . . to consider therapy and the novel as interdependent terms of analysis and at heretofore impossible scales.

Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction; The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism

Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction; The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism

Reexamination of Orientalism by the Protagonist’s Psychological Interiority in Concert with Setting Description in The Painted Veil

In The Painted Veil, the setting descriptions serve as an apparatus to reveal the protagonist Kitty’s mental or emotional status for that her psychological interiority is projected onto these external objects, which T.S. Eliot named Objective Correlative. Through this angle, this paper reexamines certain Orientalism related topics and previous critiques. This paper analyzes how Kitty’s psychological world and setting descriptions coordinate to indicate Kitty’s transformation. The transitional process of Kitty’s attitudes towards China and Chinese and the development of Kitty’s perception of life are explored. Intriguingly, this paper tempts to prove that some critiques against Maugham and the novel may be prejudice-oriented or evidence insufficient.

The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers

The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers

From Interior to Interiority: Locating Key Historical Moments in the Relationship between Spaces and Individuals

We spend increasingly more time in architectural interiors, spaces that can give us quality of life and interesting scenarios for the growth of identity and interiority. However, both spatial interior and psychological interiority faces difficulties inherent to contemporary life. This text proposes a critical review of the literature on the socio-spatial archeology of the subject in order to see possible paths of realisation of interiority in the present. The document presents several stages in the sociocultural evolution of an interior space that needs to be described with different adjectives (spiritual, hedonistic, promiscuous) and groups the most relevant contributions of the literature according to this proposal.

All Aboard for Ararat: Islands in Contemporary Flood Fiction

All Aboard for AraratIslands in Contemporary Flood Fiction Caroline Edwards (bio) One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focused interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and desertification, the return of "last man" narratives of global viral pandemic, as well as the collapse of oil-based petroconsumption. Analyses of fiction that deal with climate change (what has been called climate change fiction, or "cli-fi," among the online commentariat) have started to recognize a fundamental shift from literary fiction's preoccupation with characters' psychological interiority, to the grander-scale attempt to understand the place of human subjects within a broader ecosphere at a time of rapid change. As bill mckibben writes in his introduction to the short-story collection I'm With the Bears (2011): "Instead of being consumed with the relationships between people, they increasingly take on the relationship between people and everything else. On a stable planet, nature provided a background against [End Page 211] which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet we're creating, the background becomes the highest drama."1 However, scholarship of contemporary literature has thus far overlooked an important set of narratives dedicated to examining the "highest drama" of literary setting as a subject in and of itself: flood fictions. These fictions depict a range of cataclysmic floods and encompass both the small scale of texts whose tsunamis and deluges are local, partial, and/or provisional, as well as the larger-scale and planetary accounts of rising sea levels, global disaster, and pluvial shifts in meteorology. Among this caucus of fictions, we might identify a number of prominent examples, including: literal journeys to Ararat and the retelling of the Genesis flood narrative in David Maine's The Flood (2004; released in the U.S. under the title The Preservationist) and Yann Martel's phantasmagoric bestseller The Life of Pi (2001), Geraldine McCaughrean's Not the End of the World (2004), and Meg Rosoff's YA novel There Is No Dog (2011); apocalyptic deluges caused by impact events, such as the meteorite-induced tsunami in Maggie Gee's The Flood (2004) or the alien invasion in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon (2014); and the disastrous effects of rising sea levels caused by global warming, as in Marie NDiaye's genre-melding memoir Autoportrait en vert [Self-Portrait in Green] (2005), Kim Stanley Robinson's SF thrillers Forty Signs of Rain (2004) and New York: 2140 (2017), Will Self's The Book of Dave (2006), Stephen Baxter's Flood (2008), Paolo Bacigalupi's young adult novels The Drowned Cities (2013), Ship Breaker (2011), and The Windup Girl (2009), the graphic novel IDP: 2043 (2014), David Sachs's The Flood (2015), Don DeLillo's Zero K (2016), Megan Hunter's The End We Start From (2017), Philip Pullman's fantasy prequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy, La Belle Sauvage (2017), and Abi Curtis's Water & Glass (2017). These texts take up the mantle, as McKibben puts it, of addressing the gaps in scientific- and policy-based research relating to climate change and global warming by "help[ing] us to understand what things feel like,"2 something that the novel form is privileged in being able to accomplish. In the blending of speculative with realist literary imaginaries, flood fictions return us to the experimental period of Science Fiction's New Wave in the 1960s: a time that was similarly preoccupied with stories of cataclysmic climate change in texts such as J. G. Ballard's early catastrophe novels The Wind from Nowhere (1960), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964; expanded and [End Page 212] republished as The Drought in 1965), and The Crystal World (1966), and John Christopher's post-apocalyptic survivalist texts The Death of Grass (1956) and The World in Winter (1962); as well as earlier ur-texts of flooding, including Richard Jefferies's After London; or, Wild England (1885), Garrett P. Serviss's The Second Deluge (1912), S. Fowler Wright's Deluge (1928), and John Wyndham's alien invasion The Kraken Wakes (1953). As Rob...

The Cybernetic Character of Domestic Realism

Critics have struggled to account for realist characters’ development on the repetitive timescale of Victorian domestic realism, which is devoted to representing the sameness of daily routine. This essay argues that this struggle stems from literary criticism’s implicit reliance on psychological interiority as the defining criterion for humanlike mimesis. It proposes that we instead look to an alternative theory of seeming human, one based on repetition and routine. Cybernetics, an early form of artificial intelligence, provides a theory of developmental time through the feedback loop. Reading Charlotte M. Yonge’s Daisy Chain (1856) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866) through the temporal structure of the intelligent machine, this essay argues that these novels imagine new, routinized theories of development. Through the characters’ endless meal planning, sewing, and verse memorizing, an alternate history of realist character emerges: the lifelikeness of automation.

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain by Enrique Fernández

Reviewed by: Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain by Enrique Fernández Holly Sims Fernández, Enrique. Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2015. 273 pp. ISBN: 978-14-4264-886-9. In Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain, Enrique Fernández analyzes descriptions of interiority in the works of Fray Luis de Granada, Francisco de Quevedo, Miguel de Cervantes, and María de Zayas. He uses the language of dissection to uncover the association between anxiety and the internal spaces of the body, such as the heart, head, and other organs, as well as human psychology. The author characterizes these works as "dissective narratives" because they probe the interiors of sacrificial figures and expose the cultural anxiety surrounding internal spaces that are in some way uncontrollable (3). Chapter 1 of the study discusses how perceptions of interiority changed as a result of improved knowledge of human anatomy, especially following the publication of a fully illustrated version of Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica in 1534. These images, as well as explanations from contemporary medical texts, demonstrate that the practice of dissection was similar in purpose to the works Fernández analyzes because both reveal the complex and potentially dangerous nature [End Page 188] of the human interior. The author also explains that this practice was met with fear and distrust in Spain due to the pervasiveness of religious orthodoxy in an absolutist state. Consequently, the texts considered in this study are not accounts of enlightened self-discovery through introspection, but rather descriptions of sacrificial victims whose interiority is dangerously exposed. In Chapters 2 and 3, the author analyzes works by Granada and Quevedo, respectively, as examples of dissective narratives that demonstrate the complexity of interiority through anatomical references. He attributes Granada's works to an interest in a more private form of religion introduced by the devotio moderna but which conformed to Catholic doctrine. Granada's publications reflect the belief that the interior of the human body reveals God's work in creation and depict the dissected victim as a compliant martyr whose self-sacrifice makes known the presence of God. However, Granada's positive depiction of interiority differs from Quevedo's representation of the human interior as a source of the illnesses that plague the body politic. Quevedo's satirical works expose the interiority of grotesque figures, which function allegorically to represent individuals who threatened the divinely inspired social order. This contrast between Quevedo's representation of society as a fragmented body and Granada's view of the body as a microcosm of creation emphasizes that efforts to expose embodied interiority – whether of the individual Christian or the body politic – produced anxiety about its potentially dangerous contents. In Chapter 4, the author expands this discussion to psychological interiority by examining Cervantes' El coloquio de los perros and El licenciado Vidriera and Zayas' Desengaños. These works, unlike those by Granada and Quevedo considered in previous chapters, do not include allusions to anatomical dissection. Nevertheless, they can be considered dissective narratives because they expose the risks inherent in cultivating private, autonomous spaces. For example, the character Cañizares in El coloquio de los perros demonstrates the peril of separating oneself from society in a misguided attempt at autonomy because Cañizares' self-imposed isolation allows her to modify her own nature through witchcraft. The author connects Cañizares' deceptive behavior to negative aspects of machines such as clocks, which he also explores in relation to anxiety about autonomy and interiority in El licenciado Vidriera, because Tomás Rodaja's excessive pursuit of knowledge contributes to his dehumanization. However, the analysis of the Desengaños focuses on female anatomy as it relates to an interior anxiety caused by honor and violence in Zayas' texts. To emphasize the various anxieties of interiority present in the works of Cervantes and Zayas, Fernández contrasts them with contemporary publications by Baltasar Gracián. While Gracián also employed anatomical references in his works, they are not considered dissective narratives because the anxiety of interiority has been replaced by an anxiety of performance. This epilogue helps to clarify the author...

Detachable Pockets and Letter Folds: Spatial Formalism and the Portable Interiors of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Revisiting Richardson's Pamela as a site of “spatial formalism,” this essay maintains that the notion of the domestic interior as a setting conducive to psychological interiority requires further materialist analysis. It argues that the interiority of Pamela hinges less on characters' emotions than on its ability to move between different spatial interiors, from the oft-cited interiors of domestic architecture to the interiors of spaces that initially register as objects, such as women's detachable pockets as well as books and letters themselves. Ultimately, Pamela lays claim to her selfhood through effecting a dynamic whereby her movable possessions—her letters, her pockets in particular—become spatial territories of the self that challenge the authority of land ownership conferred to her social superiors. She effects, in other words, a shift in social relations as defined by property as well as by marriage through her ability to transform the interiority afforded by her everyday possessions into a movable estate of the self.

Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov by Anthony Uhlmann (review)

Reviewed by: Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov by Anthony Uhlmann Adam Barrows Anthony Uhlmann , Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov New York: Continuum, 2011, 164 pp. Scholars and educators in the ever-beleaguered humanities are often asked to justify their continued existence in terms of real-world "deliverables." Literary studies, perhaps the most insecure of all disciplines, has long rested on the nebulous claim that it provides "critical thinking tools" to students who presumably would not learn to think properly without struggling their way through Beowulf. Yet it's difficult to argue that there are any uniquely critical tools that one acquires from studying Milton that one couldn't otherwise acquire through studying history, philosophy, or political science. Cornering the educational marketplace on "thought" may be a losing game. What if, however, one could establish that there is a type of thinking that is unique to literature or that literature affords a perspective on the way thought works that is not available elsewhere? Such indeed is the ambitious claim of the eminent Beckett scholar Anthony Uhlmann in his new book, [End Page 336] Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov. Drawing upon and carefully explicating some fairly dense philosophical material by Spinoza and Leibniz by way of Gilles Deleuze, Uhlmann makes the claim that there is a "kind of thinking that is proper to the arts" and that literature itself "might be understood to be thought," a grandiose claim that Uhlmann anchors to skillful close readings of the three modernist authors in his subtitle. Making the connection between modernism and thought might seem to be a return to a fairly old-fashioned reading of high modernism that conceptualized it as an art of psychological interiority and solipsistic insularity. Yet Ulhmann is careful to explain that what he means by thought is not individual "consciousness" but a much more complexly interwoven mediation between subjectivity and objectivity, sensation and rationality. The old modernist "stream of consciousness" model has "atrophied over the years," Uhlmann observes, but early critics who spoke in terms of a stream of consciousness were "responding to a genuine tendency" in modernist works. Mislabelling that tendency "consciousness," critics missed that the literature of Joyce and Faulkner was not offering "an analogue of consciousness" but rather "an analogue of thought itself," which "exceed[s] the representation of consciousness" and offers "a surface that is folded so that the internal and external become complex, or inter-involved." Spinoza and Leibniz both offer useful models of reality that collapse the abstract and the particular, the subjective and the objective, into one complexly inter-folded substance. For Spinoza, Thought and Extension were simply two different attributes of the single immanent substance of God or Nature while Leibniz conceptualized the thinking subject as a monad which reflects, even in its solitude, the primary or originary monad: God. For both Spinoza and Leibniz, thought involves an attempt to bridge the synaptic and sensory gaps between the individual and the universal. Thought, for Spinoza, is a relation or ratio between elements that seem mutually exclusive or unrelated. "Ratio," Uhlmann reminds us, "literally means 'to think'," a process that occurs at the level of sensory experience itself and which is thus decidedly non-or extra-linguistic, requiring us "to understand what is not present in, or goes beyond the linguistic signifier, what is in the idea rather than the word." Seeking a univocal compositional whole within artistic "works" (these are decidedly not Barthesian "texts"), Uhlmann never directly wrestles with the fact that what philosophically justifies the complex inter-folding of external and internal in the work of both Spinoza and Leibniz is the greatest transcendental signified of them all: God (or Nature, which amounts to the same thing in the seventeenth century). Take away that transcendental anchor and what remains, as Hamlet would say, is "words, words, words." Ulhmann is conceptualizing a return to aesthetic categories and modes of analysis that have been largely out of favor since the linguistic turn of the late 1960s, including the recuperation of authorial intent in his implicit [End Page 337] praise of Samuel Beckett's dictatorial and litigious control over productions of his plays. Indeed, Uhlmann begins his argument by asserting...

Mindless Modernism

What would modernist fiction look like if it were mindless and had no access to mental states? While modernism is often understood as a psychological turn inward, this article shows how introspective psychology competed against other psychological discourses—and how writers such as Samuel Beckett theorized a modernism without introspection. In his essays “Dante … Bruno … Vico … Joyce” (1929) and Proust (1930), Beckett argued that the psychological interiority of high modernist fiction could be attributed to nonmental and behavioristic causes. And in his novel Murphy (1936), he suggested that novelistic form belied the unknowability of mental states. To Beckett, the novel's ability to know other minds was itself fictional; the representation of character minds, he contended, should be subjected to the same psychological laws as real people. Beckett's early writings, then, ask us to reconsider how we understand literature's historical and logical relationship to psychology. Following Beckett's lead, this article concludes by asking us to imagine what the modernist novel—as well as contemporary criticism—would look like if we stopped taking the introspective mind for granted.

Theorizing Character in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) demands to be read through the dual meanings of “character”—the literary persona and the moral sense. Through performances of literary character that work to reveal moral character, Edgeworth generates a theory of novelistic character that is shaped by impersonation and interiority. Often considered an unfortunate episode in an otherwise sophisticated novel, Edgeworth’s incorporation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) in Belinda is in fact central to the novel’s consideration of character. Edgeworth’s meditation on character illuminates a number of issues: first, relationships between the genre of the novel and subject-formation; second, fictional representations of surface legibility and psychological interiority; third, the ideological function of the marriage plot. In her consideration of imaginative identification, psychological interiority, and subject-formation through Belinda’s recasting of Bernardin’s novel, Edgeworth presents her theorization of character, which postulates that the moral sense—what we might call a living person’s “character”—depends on an engagement with literary character.

Visibility, Interiority, and Temporality in The Invisible Man

Visibility, Interiority, and Temporality in The Invisible Man Rachel A. Bowser One can always see a lot in your work—there is always a ‘beyond’ to your books—but into [The Invisible Man] (with due respect to its theme and length) you’ve managed to put an amazing quantity of effects. —Joseph Conrad The novel form, perhaps especially the Victorian realist novel for which depth in characterization is a hallmark, traffics in a fantasy of establishing psychological interiority as a visible object: we “watch” the development of interiority by sharing a character’s experiences and seeing them assimilated into a psychological whole. The frequently deployed metaphor of “deep characterization” in nineteenth-century fiction has been the subject of much literary scholarship, in which critics often read the metaphor as shoring up aspects of identity that are thrown into crisis by a range of cultural developments. In The Invisible Man (1897), Wells anticipates those literary critics by literalizing and complicating that metaphor, thereby asking the reader to interrogate the fantasy that a “deep self” seeks to sustain. This disassembling gesture inserts Wells’s science fiction novella into the aesthetic purview of the realist novel. The figure of “depth” for psychological interiority is of course meant to speak to the representation of identity. Nancy Armstrong has recently argued that representing individual identity is the most fundamental work of all novels, writing that wherever and whenever they are written, novels “think like individuals about the difficulties of fulfilling oneself as an individual under specific cultural, historical conditions…novel[s] cannot help but take up the project of universalizing the individual subject. That, simply put, is what [End Page 20] novels do” (10). More narrowly, Armstrong herself along with myriad other critics have argued that the nineteenth-century novel is more fully invested in representing the individual subject than preceding forms of the novel and that it does so through an emphasis on psychological experience as the genuine “essence” of identity. In order to enact this emphasis, the nineteenth-century novel and especially the nineteenth-century realist novel must suggest interiority as the location of authenticity, and it must suggest that an individual’s experiences are reliably assimilated and accruing within that interiority. The “deep” character of the realist novel is the character that manifests accrued and assimilated experience as self.1 To suggest the reliable accrual of experience, the realist novel must imply a continuous and assimilative timeline into which its characters are fit. Ian Watt makes this point in his influential study, The Rise of the Novel (1957): The novel’s plot is also distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguise and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure. Even more important, perhaps, is the effect upon characterization of the novel’s insistence on the time process. (My emphasis, 22) This reliable, causal temporality shores up the representation of interiority that is the lynchpin of the form. The novel is a form so much about interiority that Lukács, in Theory of the Novel (1916), claimed the genre was defined by “the adventures of interiority” (88). Deep interiority, within these arguments, is the promise of continuous and individualized psychological presence and development over time and the promise that one’s interiority constitutes the lasting and knowable essence of one’s self. What we find in The Invisible Man is a pointed apprehension about such promises. While we are well past the time when treating science fiction as serious literature was anathema to legitimate scholarship, we still do not tend to look to genre fiction for insight on the aesthetic and ideological issues realism has laid claim to; we are not trained to read science fiction for evidence of deep characterization, nor do we tend to think science fiction has anything to say about the aesthetic parameters that make a realist novel recognizable as such. To the extent that the realist project and the aesthetic hallmarks of it are, however, invested in the representation of individuality and questions about human nature, we can...

Masculinity's Interior: Men, Transmen, and Theories of Masculinity

This essay describes paradoxes and contradictions in treatments of masculine psychology in men, masculine women, and female-to-male transgendered persons. Using object-relations psychoanalysis, Nancy Chodorow explained the complementary and opposing psychologies in men and in women, emphasizing competitive and inhibited aspects of masculine psychology. Similar psychological theories are still being advanced today as applicable to most men and women. However, some contemporary gender scholars reject psychoanalysis as not only outmoded, biased, and sexist, but also as intrinsically inapplicable to gender variant people. They may resist all psychological theories on the grounds that such theories inevitably pathologize their subjects, with the paradoxical results that transgendered subjects, in particular, are accorded no psychological interiority at all and that all descriptions of the non-normative are considered pathologizing. Even more paradoxically, theorists of female masculinity like Judith Halberstam and scholars of transgender studies, including Henry Rubin, Sally Hines, and Bobby Noble, imply that people born female may make better men than people born male. Along with therapists of transgender clients, transgender studies scholars claim that gender is innate and biological in origin, yet they seek to facilitate gender transition through social changes, including new technologies and new queer ideologies. Although generally decrying essentialist prescriptions for human behavior, moreover, these scholars may conclude that they are ethically bound to essentialist explanations of gender.

Female Quixotism and the Novel: Character and Plausibility, Honesty and Fidelity

Verisimilitude (probability, plausibility) began to be cited in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries as the feature that distinguished the novel from the other narrative genres of romance and history. Observing that verisimilitude was borrowed from neoclassical dramatic theory, and defined in terms of (gendered) character typologies, I argue that the decorum of dramatic verisimilitude was specially implicated in the decorum of female honor. I explore the much-discussed shift in the European discourse around gender and sex during the same period, and the connection others have established between that and the emergence of the modern novel, as a shift from "honesty" to "fidelity." Specifically, I examine this shift in the context of verisimilitude and the fictional representation of gendered and interiorized character in the European novel. With reference to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, David Hume's History of England, and Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, I suggest that the aesthetic paradox of the quixotic figure in the early novel, and "female quixotism" in particular, performed, rather than directly representing or reflecting, this shift in the decorum of femininity from honesty to fidelity. In the process quixotism helped produce the effect of psychological interiority so often associated with the novel, by performing a gesture of internalizing moral norms that had traditionally been imposed from without..

Una breve reflexión sobre la psicología contemporánea

Making approximations to the genealogy of subjectivity, a term coined by Michel Foucault, who in turn approached conceptually what might be considered as an “archeology of psychology” and later outlined the concept of “psychological interiority”, "which converges well with the search for the individuation process. It should be noted that currently the psychological interiority may well result from the features theory made by R. Catell and G. Allport, or perhaps the psychological interiority can be integrated from the temperament approaches suggested by R. Cloninger and have a heritable basis and that allow the consolidation of identity and personality (Celikel, Kose et al. 2009).

Corporeidade e ação nos processos de formação do eu

Parte-se da hipótese de que tanto os modos de constituição da subjetividade, quanto as teses epistemológicas sobre a formação do eu têm sofrido importantes mudanças nas últimas décadas. No plano das identidades pessoais, tal fato se expressa no atenuamento do ideário intimista, tradicionalmente centrado na idéia da vida mental como espaço privado e interior. No plano epistemológico, diferentes saberes vêm questionando a equivalência entre vida mental e interioridade psicológica e propondo descrições da origem do eu que incluam a dimensão da corporeidade e da ação. Considerando as noções de representação e de ação como eixos fundamentais para diferentes concepções da subjetividade, este artigo examina um modelo internalista do psiquismo, contrastando-o com outro que toma o eu como agente corporificado.

Review

Reviewed by: Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 Elizabeth Hewitt Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. By Laura Doyle. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xii + 578 pp. $99.95/$27.95 paper. One cannot help but admire the bravado of Laura Doyle's enormous book: to chart a history of the novel from its origins in the seventeenth century through the twentieth century, striving to locate a cornerstone structure she sees incorporated in works by many of the canonical authors in the Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic traditions from this expansive period. Even a brief glimpse at the table of contents is rather awe-inspiring, as it surveys a range of authors, including Samuel Richardson, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Horace Walpole, Pauline Hopkins, Catherine Maria Sedg-wick, George Eliot, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf. Doyle argues that all these writers (and by implication any novelist) developed their fiction around a basic narrative that she terms a "freedom plot" or "freedom story." This story is one that celebrates freedom—political, economic, and religious—as natural liberty and attaches this liberty to a racial origin. For Doyle, this origin is necessarily racialized because it depends on an appeal to Anglo-Saxon identity: hence, her claim that "in Atlantic modernity, freedom is a race myth" (3). In this way, we see that the vastness of her argument is not located only in the range of her primary texts but in the book's thesis, which states that the Anglo-Saxon freedom story is responsible not just for the novel but for all modern history—the sublime, Calvinism, and psychological interiority, to name a few. She begins by describing in some detail the "origin" of her freedom story, which she locates in the years leading up to the British Civil War and Parliamentarian disputes with the Stuart kings. Doyle says that in the political rhetoric of the early seventeenth century we see explicit invocation of Anglo-Saxon [End Page 212] racialism as the means to make arguments against monarchical power, associating James I and his legacy with Norman invaders. She does a nice job sketching out this significant history, but I found myself nonetheless resistant to some of the claims from the start—and such resistance proved troublesome since, in many ways, this first section of the book is the foundation for all that follows. While she disavows historicism as her methodology (choosing, for example, to position texts from different historical eras so as to reveal the essential atempo-ral structures of their freedom plots), this choice causes some problems with an argument that ultimately is necessarily historical, insofar as it strives for a sweeping literary history of a form and identifies an origin to a structure that extends over four centuries. A key term in Doyle's book, "race" seems to be used somewhat anachronistically. While she never really identifies or defines what she means by the term, she seems to use it in a modern (later-nineteenth-century) sense and then reads this definition back into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century appeals to the Anglo-Saxon. While she says that early fashioning of Anglo-Saxonism is the "'ancient' ballad structure" for the "full orchestral and eugenist racist symphonies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (5), in many ways her book instead proposes that the music of modern racism is the basic structure for an earlier system. To extend her music metaphor, it is as if she were to argue that contemporary polytonality was the basis for baroque counterpoint. Second, while she makes a good case for the association between Anglo-Saxonism and early modern rhetoric of political liberty, she also allows the concept of Anglo-Saxonism to substitute for myriad other terms that are not necessarily synonymous. Thus, for example, because some authors explicitly attach Saxonism to claims about native and natural liberty or to the "pure Church," Doyle then presumes that any subsequent invocation of "native" or "pure" is inherently an invocation of Saxonism. This substitutive logic continues throughout the book, in which any use of "liberty language" (68) becomes synonymous...

Postwar Liberalism, Close Reading, and “You”: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The five hundred pages that intervene between the Prologue and Epilogue of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) are explicitly concerned with the self-definition of a speaking (and writing) “I,” a ...