Browsing by Author "Armstrong, Nancy"

Paradoxically, Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community occupying a territory at once bounded and sovereign became commonplace around the same time that prominent global novelists were beginning to reject the obligation to reproduce that fantasy. I consider two generations of novelists who do so in the late twentieth century. J.M. Coetzee articulates the failure of sovereign boundaries in the postcolony and the changing nature of the relationship between the citizen-subject and the state, while Sebald considers the possibility that a new form of non-hierarchical community might come into being amid the European ruins of the Second World War. For both authors, such projects rely on an acknowledgment of the limitations, disappearance, or outright absence of the nation-state, despite its purported centrality in modern life. More recent Anglophone novelists, by contrast, feel obliged to think with and within the infrastructure of global capitalism, paying particular attention to individuals who have been either empowered or dispossessed by global flows of resources, people, and information. Teju Cole, Indra Sinha, and Colson Whitehead are among these writers who can indeed sketch and animate the community to come, and they do so in forms predicated on the extinction of anything like the individual citizen-subject in favor of new heterogeneous and often radically antisocial forms of community. These novels offer their variously damaged (former) individuals as protagonists who militantly oppose the partitioning of society into friends and enemies, since such distinctions ultimately encourage the classification of groups according to metaphysical categories of good and evil. The common purpose of these protagonists is instead to negate the negativity of that very opposition in the hope that anything else—some intelligent form of life—might grow.

This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process-oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s-70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science.

The novels I read - by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot - emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel's ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience.

Just over 300 years have passed since John Locke proposed that the basis of the individual was property and, in turn, that the labor which was the individual’s first property in his own person was the source of all property he accumulates. Labor, in other words, and the property it produces would transform the subject into the independent individual of the liberal imaginary. When we turn to the realist novel, however, labor is notoriously absent, as if to make us aspire to a way of life in which we do not work for money but our money works for us. While the novel suggests that, to become an individual with a story to tell, one must transcend the world of work; liberal political economic theory argues that it takes work, as well as our capacity and will to do it, to become a full-fledged individual. To turn principle into paradox, the novel draws on romance as the means of redefining work as the obstacle rather than the means of rising in the field of social relations. Romance incites the individual to find a position apart if not above work, often in a household where one finds self-completion in a union with an ideal other. In this way, romance provides the foundation for a domestic sphere that restores the individual’s body and spirit by means of the freely given labor of love. As it reimagined the single-family household as a site of social reproduction, the novels of the Victorian period also leant both tangibility and accessibility to an apparatus that ensured that the relations of capitalist production would be reproduced down through the generations. Labored Romance: The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of Late Capitalism begins by showing how a classic work of realism, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, stages a struggle between the necessity of labor as the foundation of value and the work of romance as the transcending of waged labor. If the struggle between work and romance is realism’s legacy, then contemporary fiction calls attention to the fact that romance is missing from the novels that vie for critical recognition today. At the same time, these novels put not only the protagonists but virtually the entire field of characters to work and, indeed, they do little else. Given that novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder are not only works of fantastic fiction, the question is why? In the contemporary novel, both traditional romance and the household that constituted a world apart—a space of love without labor—has all but disappeared while labor is all but impossible to avoid. Instead of a space of personal gratification and replenishment, these novels offer us a virtually boundless workplace that has subsumed both the trappings and functions of the home. On the other hand, the discourse of romance, at once indexed to and detached from the household, is attached to and integrated into waged work. How, in its appropriation of many of the reproductive functions once served by the household, does information work make use of the infectious properties of romance? What purpose does romance now serve if not to compel and sanctify the composition of the basic consumer unit, the heteronormative family? These are the questions that Labored Romance asks of three contemporary novels published during the first decade of the present century.

By the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, as A.O. Hirschman famously tells us, the early modern passions had been rehabilitated as a creative force, one driven by economic interest. From the turn of the nineteenth century onward, however, the passions returned with a vengeance — as indicated by the works of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and the Brontë sisters. What we now call “the emotions” had suddenly slipped out from under the control of individual reason and become a force of nature. As such, they could be held responsible both for keeping the individual alive and for the species’ ability to prosper and expand in number. Michel Foucault has offered perhaps the clearest articulation of how the century that followed developed new forms of government that both taught individuals to manage themselves by observing disciplinary regimens and regulated the unruliness of entire populations by means of biopolitical policies. But while, like Hirschman, Foucault links the redefinition of sexuality and how behaviors and effects were classified and managed directly to the emergence of industrial capitalism, neither he nor Hirschman consider the novel instrumental in their respective accounts of the passions. Novels, as the self-anointed discourse of personal experience, were ideally positioned to respond both critically and creatively to the disruptions of daily life that began in the late eighteenth century. In the decades that followed, I will show, the novel successively updated the causes and effects of emotional experience to accommodate the transition to an industrial society from an agrarian way of life supported by commerce and early colonization.

From Jane Eyre to Daniel Deronda, the novel features a protagonist whose biographical destiny depends on a form of yearning well in excess of the prevailing social classification system. This unnamable sense of belonging elsewhere is indeed so in excess of then existing codes of conduct and self-expression that it escapes the confines of the individual and pervades each habitat it enters with a sense of lack and constriction. The natural principles Charles Darwin first discovered during his landmark Voyage of the Beagle gave him the grounds, by 1872, to conclude that just as any species, man or animal, must physically adapt to its environment, so too must its feelings. Darwin understood that these affects — a term I use for feelings that have not been codified as one of the then recognized emotions — allow the species to develop new relations among themselves to enable survival. Over the century, the novel followed this same principle perhaps more so than any other form of writing, as it sought to alter the basis of human feeling to accommodate the material conditions of existence. My introduction explains how the novel carried out this project by capturing and reforming feelings in excess of accepted social roles and reworked both feelings and roles to form emotional ties capable of sustaining domestic life: first, during the early decades of the nineteenth century as inherited land lost its status as the coin of the realm, then in the economic crisis called the Hungry Forties, and finally during the period when England’s economy shifted from the English countryside to the imperial metropole.

“Out of Service: The Work of Character in the Novel of Post-Industrial Society” argues that the formal innovations in the novel since 1945 reflect the form’s revolutionary redevelopment as a technology of social production. Over the last seventy-five years, the novel has registered, both in its form and its substance, a momentous social and economic revolution, in which the manufacturing economies of industrialized Europe and North America have steadily given way to a tertiary service sector devoted to the production of “immaterial” goods like knowledge, care, affect, communication, leisure, and art. This dissertation points to the reciprocal relationship between the work of fiction and the work of service, as two components of a single mode of social production, which is to say the production of human subjectivity and social relations. To produce its social commodities, this ascendant service industry makes use of an entirely new set of tools, which, I argue, include the narrative machinery of the novel. At the same time, the contemporary novel not only draws on the new service class for its subject matter—that is, by taking as its exemplary subject the work of servants, knowledge workers, care providers, artists, and writers—but also incorporates the techniques and methods of service labor at the level of form.

In addition to exploring the socioeconomic trends that have inspired the contemporary novel to engage in the work of satisfying consumers, creating knowledge, and providing care, this dissertation also explores how the rise of service has effected a qualitative shift in how the novel shapes subjectivity. The novel traditionally serves its readers by making abstract economic relations imaginable in the fictional social relations of a literary character. In the realist fiction of the age of industrial capitalism, this character took the form of an autonomous and “problematic” individual, an atomistic figure that obscured the complex network of real social relations required to reproduce it. In this dissertation, I suggest that, as the service economy brings the production of social relations to the forefront of the reader’s consciousness, the novel has a much more difficult time representing subjectivity in the figure of a single individual. The novelists examined in this study—Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy—use the methods available to them as social producers in a service economy, including information and communications technology, to explore alternative techniques of reproducing workable social relations in the form of singular and eccentric characters.

This study argues that in the eighteenth century a discourse of risk management emerged that fundamentally reshaped the relation of man to the world by imagining that the individual was capable of controlling aspects of life that had hitherto been left to God or fate. This shift, moreover, established one of the defining characteristics of modernity, linking individual autonomy to the process of managing risk in a manner that not only remains with us today, but has been so thoroughly naturalized that we are no longer aware of how it shapes everyday life. When eighteenth-century fiction and philosophy first began to link selfhood to the ability to manage risk, the dangers an individual faced were all potentially lethal threats to the body: shipwreck, cannibalism, plague, kidnapping, rape. As the notion of individuality as a reflexive defense against the dangers of the world came to be better established, the nature of these threats changed. Rather than dangers to the body, social risks became the focus of authors I call risk theorists. Individual autonomy now meant policing the boundaries of a particular representation of oneself in society. This new formation of selfhood at first depended on a powerful anxiety about avoiding the emotional influence of others, but as this risk too came to seem manageable external threats melted away. What was left were the psychological operations of an individual forced to read social cues, knowing that failure to do so meant inviting the condemnation of others. The greatest risk to an individual now came from their own mind when they failed to discover and perform the right social procedures.

The study begins by focusing on the intermixed physical and economic risks that shape the works of Daniel Defoe, who established the need for a modern individual to circulate in a dangerous world in order to secure for himself better standing in society. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Defoe explicitly rejects the notion that one should take the safest path in life, forcing his protagonists to move through a world they know to be dangerous even when that choice seems superficially unreasonable. Samuel Richardson then translated these intermingled risks into sexual terms in Clarissa (1748), telling the story of a woman who knows that defending herself against a rapist means risking financial destitution. Rather than choose her virtue or her livelihood she charts a third course, valuing her sense of self over the safety of her body and dying in order to ensure that she controls how her story is told.

In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, periodical writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele began the process of rendering risk in social terms by establishing a discourse of taste which Adam Smith takes up in both his moral philosophy and economic writings. Smith sees the logic of good taste through to its natural conclusion in A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) when he defines the modern individual through his ability to seal himself off from the poor judgment and excessive emotions of others. Smith then brings the moderation and reserve of the individual to an economic and thus global scale in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Finally, Jane Austen completes the internalization of risk management in Emma (1815), where the ability to confront the dangers of the world is rendered in fully psychological terms. Emma’s evolution as a risk manager depends not on her capacity to seal herself from the outside world, but on her ability to correctly read the intentions and desires of others and judge whether and how they can be compatible with her own.

My argument is that the rise of biology at the start of the nineteenth challenged the individualism of the Enlightenment, and that it fell to the novel to enable readers to reimagine themselves in light of the resulting contradictions. Chapter one considers how the eighteenth-century individual was dismantled, chapter two looks at the human organism erected in its place, and chapter three accounts for how human organisms form communities. By factoring fiction into the break between natural history and biology that Foucault identifies in The Order of Things (1966), I consider the effect of that epistemological shift on the history of subjectivity. In my first chapter I use Gillray’s satirical cartoon, The Cow-pock (1802), to show how the concept of a human being who is at once individual and organism was an unlivable contradiction, and how that contradiction played out in the cultural conflicts of the time. In the next chapter I use Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to argue that the novel reimagined life within that contradiction by reconfiguring individuation into an uncertain process whose goal is both unattainable and dangerous. Finally, I use Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) to show how the novel developed a new conception of community suited to the self-contradiction of the individual as organism.

“The Complete Bentham: Rationality’s Afterlife in Victorian Literature,” focuses on one of the nineteenth century’s most contentious attempts to imagine the social good in quantitative terms: Jeremy Bentham’s proposal to measure and manage “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” The last time literary studies took Bentham seriously, the guiding assumption was that his Panopticon prison trained individuals in the routines of self-policing that liberal government required, and that the novel carried that disciplinary training to the reading public. I show that this argument considers only a small part of Bentham’s massive corpus and so misses both the radical reformulation of liberal government that he was proposing and the aesthetic possibilities that his utilitarianism opened up as a result. The Victorians certainly thought there was something caustic in Bentham’s system of cost-benefit analysis, a worry expressed in charges that Bentham was an emotionally deficient thinker who would, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, “weigh and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you what it comes to.” This critique, I argue, has its basis in the Victorian recognition that Bentham’s logic challenges liberalism’s normative commitments including the individual’s right to own property and the primacy of the family as the fundamental unit of society. When Bentham asserts that the only way to manage a population of rational individuals is to maximize pleasures and minimize pains, no matter their source, he imagined a form of cost-benefit analysis that makes any particular right or social norm expendable in the name of producing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Rather than show how the novel appropriates Bentham’s panoptic apparatus to reinforce the norms of liberal society, I argue that Bentham’s excessive reason is the means by which nineteenth-century literature found its way outside those norms. When Victorian novelists join liberal thinkers in chastising Bentham for translating qualities of life into quantities of pleasure and pain, they also memorably preserve the perverse implications of utilitarian rationalism and imagine new qualities of life. Even so obvious a caricature of Bentham as Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind offers a vision of a life passionately animated by the compulsion to calculate.

In order to see what became of utilitarianism’s calculating rationality in the Victorian cultural imagination, each chapter of my dissertation considers how a different novelist takes up one aspect of Bentham’s multi-faceted theory in order to contemplate its radical consequences. My first chapter, “Calculating Pleasure,” begins with Bentham’s assumption that individuals who imagine future pleasures and pains can be governed by means of a carefully calibrated threat of future punishment. Shelley’s Frankenstein takes up this calculating logic in order to reverse it: the more Victor and his creature imagine their futures, the more ungovernable they become as their disappointment and hope lead them to increasingly antisocial behaviors. In my second chapter, “Expanding Bureaucracy,” I show how Dickens enacts a different reversal when considering the universal suspicion that motivates Bentham’s plans for a universal bureaucracy. While Bentham, ever distrustful of government functionaries, insists on layering one level of government inspectors on top of another until the whole population is involved in monitoring bureaucratic institutions, Dickens’s late city novels (no less suspicions of government functionaries) see these bonds of mutual surveillance as the basis for forming bonds of trust and mutual aid. My third chapter, “Panoptic Economics,” returns to Bentham’s famous Panopticon prison in order to argue that even as it establishes the protocols for disciplining individuals it also imagines an alternative socialist economy that would care for and manage all unemployed people. While Wilkie Collins’s detective fiction has often been read in terms of totalizing panoptic surveillance, a revised understanding of the Panopticon allows us to see that these novels also imagine a utopian condition of full employment where everyone becomes the possessor of potentially valuable information no one can be dismissed as part of a disposable surplus population. My final chapter, “Sexual Irregularities,” considers the queer potential of Bentham’s utilitarianism. I show that Bentham’s little-known defense of homosexual, bestial, and necrophilic acts joins the aestheticism of Walter Pater in promoting pleasures that belong, not to the reproductive future of the bourgeois family, but rather “give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” Taken as a whole, my dissertation offers us a way of seeing the word “utilitarian” as something other than the catch-all term of derision for a practical, depoliticized, and unaesthetic education that sometimes appears in op-eds bemoaning the “Death of the Humanities.” By returning to Bentham’s contentious place in the Victorian cultural imagination I hope to show just how impractical, political, and aesthetic utilitarianism can be.

The sixties have long been regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American novel. In the seventies and eighties critics tended to assume that the era dealt a deathblow to social realism and, by extension, the dream of the Great American Novel. Today the prevailing view is that no such thing occurred; on the contrary, as black, feminist, and queer voices took center stage in American life and fiction during the sixties, the novel enjoyed something of a renaissance. While this assessment of sixties literature holds true, it needs to be expanded to account for how the novel diversified in other important ways. The Death and Life of the American Novel: Radicalism and the Transformation of U.S. Literature in the 1960s shows how sixties novels, including those by women and people of color, shifted the locus of political life away from the industrial proletariat to figures previously deemed superfluous to class struggle—housewives, welfare mothers, outlaws, students, and queer bohemians. This shift revealed possibilities for revolutionary agency overlooked in traditional proletarian literature and orthodox Marxism. In the sixties, novelists discovered the feminine domestic sphere, the culture industry, and the administrative state as axes of false consciousness and radicalization. Framing their work in terms of its diverse explorations of political subjectivity not only brings to light how they found new ways to represent class struggle’s imbrications with racial and sexual identity, but also how they engaged critically with twentieth-century social protest movements.

A great many Victorian novels were originally written, published, distributed, and read in parts over time—that is to say, serially. Yet today we rarely read those novels in serial format. Nor do we consider that format in any way equivalent to what we mean by the form of the novels in question. Only rarely do we consider the material fact that the novel was not in the first instance—and perhaps even later—supposed to be understood as a “whole” product so much as a process of articulating parts that appeared over a year or more. With the exception of the Brontës, most of the Victorian novelists whom we now consider worth reading, teaching, and treating as the subject of literary criticism published many if not all their novels in serial form. In that this claim holds true for Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and George Eliot, it follows that, at the very least, we should entertain the possibility that the serial form was indeed one and the same as that of the Victorian novel itself. Each of these novelists had a hand in developing the serial formats in which they published, as each sought his or her route to developing what can only be described as a world in pieces. Where Charles Dickens experienced his greatest successes in the serial publication of long novels of twenty parts that appeared independently over nineteen months, churning out weekly novels only when the finances of his own journals demanded that he do so, Wilkie Collins thrived in the weekly format. Setting out to bring the polite literary readership into the same company with the mass readership he called “the unknown public,” Collins favored sensational plots that relied on doubles, mistaken identities, and long-buried secret scandals that were both exposed and further entangled from week to week. My first chapter shows how Walter, a befuddled art teacher to daughters of the landed elite, gets entangled in a conspiracy that operates by dispersing, replacing, and falsifying the certificates guaranteeing identity and position in the world, and how then, in the second half of the novel, Walter serves as both detective and information worker, moving from installment to installment and removing each obstruction in the path of an open information system. Installment by installment, he shines the sunlight of public knowledge on the closed and intentionally deceptive control of information by aristocratic pretenders who have forged the documents allowing them to corrupt the rituals of country house society. Collins makes it possible for his readership to participate in reversing the flow of information as the novel uncovers and circulates this account of the consequences of disinformation among its readership. My second chapter shows how Trollope succeeded in opening up the world of the traditional country house by extending its membership exclusively to those that observed its protocols for speech and behavior. The network expands the preserve of taste beyond those of the hereditary elite to those who serve them professionally as well as to those who can amuse them. As hubmasters of the country house, however, representatives of the heredity elite not only consume the information emanating from the metropolis, dramatizing the readership’s vicariously information-dependent relation to the social world, the Pallisers are also there to entertain us. Trollope’s country house is the setting for a spectacle to provide polite entertainment for what has clearly become a metropolitan society. Trollope suggests, moreover, that the spectacle of what is becoming primary a cultural rather than a political component of society is nonetheless necessary to government. In this way, Trollope expanded the imagined community not just to those who could actually hope to attend Lady Glencora’s parties, but to those who could enjoy the spectacle of such a party as a form of entertainment, a fantasy of vicarious inclusion. Though distinct from either Dickens, Collins, or Trollope in how she construed the reader she hoped to reach, George Eliot was a formidable serial novelist in her own right, as my third chapter will demonstrate. Although her literary reputation does not make her the first author to come to mind when we think of Victorian serial novelists, she experimented with both the traditional three-volume novel and the monthly periodical publication that suited Trollope. By the time she set out to write Middlemarch, Eliot was committed to forging her own serial path. To succeed in the marketplace while achieving literary status, she developed a format for publishing a novel in eight half-volume parts at two-month intervals. Bringing together the discrete communities of discourse defining the country town, on the one hand, and the landed gentry, on the other, Eliot forges links between their respective discourses while allowing them to retain their distinctive modes of social interaction and political belief. Eliot takes on the task of changing the means of circulating information as well as its social character in the wake of the Second Reform Act (1867). By setting Middlemarch a generation earlier, in the years immediately leading up to the First Reform Act (1832), she transforms the intractable political conflict between town and gentry constituencies divided by cultural taste, political interest, and social practice into a negotiable merger of print culture. Eliot elaborates for us how townsfolk and landed gentry might come, however provisionally and uncomfortably, to coexist in a shared community, but the larger stakes of this model of sociality lie in the fact that it is theoretically scalable and transferrable: if shared print culture can bind rural town and country, then perhaps it can connect metropolis and countryside, or even metropole and periphery of empire. This model of a conditionally shared culture is open to a common reader who can consider it from any number of perspectives and locations. With access to a print culture that can disseminate information across divergent social communities and cultural spaces, a reader can imagine even different, distant peoples as civil interlocutors in a common knowable community. Each of the authors to whom I have devoted chapters developed quite different narrative techniques that rerouted the information exchanged within the traditional country house through the new commercial-industrial city by routes that forged links among the various segments of Victorian society. Dickens is, by contrast, an unapologetic city novelist; only his Hard Times neglects to reroute the information comprising its various storyspace through the metropolis of London into its storyworld. Rather than the odd man out among the great Victorian serial novelists, I will insist, Dickens’s novels reveal the other side of the same coin, namely, an urban world that operates as a noisy hive of disinformation, information that is concealed, misdirected, falsified, or misconstrued. My effort has been to show how three of his contemporaries, each of whom strikes us as singular if not eccentric in their exercise of the serial imagination, form an ensemble that, in concert with those perhaps less dependent or adroit in manipulating the serial format, can be held responsible for a major change in the novel during the 1860s and 1870s. This transformation generated the notion of “form” that earned them all, with the exception of George Eliot, the derisive label of baggy monsters. Together, the pioneers of the new serial form exploited the capacity of the weekly or monthly format to attract and hold the attention of a diverse readership with the oddity of divergent demographic groups and enthrall them with the architecture that enabled one sequentially to experience wildly different spaces for storing curious objects and the aberrant people who lived among them. Whether the electrifying touch of an unknown woman, an unfinished story overheard in the parlors of the elite, or the struggle it took to publish from a country house a newspaper that can circulate in the town and eventually the city, the serial form relies on “connectors,” plot devices that establish ties among social groups that lack the social and familial bonds that would otherwise make them a community. As for character, the most memorable characters of the novels that serve as my sample texts can themselves be called “connectors”: Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe face off as respectively good and bad conveyers of information in The Woman in White; Lady Glencora Palliser serves in the role of participant-observer who doubles as hostess and spectator to keep the Palliser series on track; and Will Ladislaw is fashioned as a conduit between archaic and emergent modes of producing and circulating print culture. Each novelist, I maintain, owes his or her enduring reputations in great part to developing signature iterations of the serial imagination.