Critical Approaches to Literary Performance

Session Organizer: Sarah Mesle
Northwestern University
215 University Hall, 1897 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
s-mesle@northwestern.edu

Shorthand and Performance in the Sermons of Henry Smith

In this essay, I examine the tensions between ministerial performance and the emergent technology of shorthand writing in late 16 th century England. The focus of my analysis is the Puritan divine Henry Smith, a popular preacher at St. Clement Danes in London whose sermons were recorded “by characterie” and widely—if imperfectly—published by his parishioners. Suggesting an important (and undertheorized) link between typology and typography, versions of these flawed works were reprinted again and again, always drawn from “a more perfect copy than heretofore.” It is in the context of corrupted (yet perfected) texts and mis-transcriptions that I read Smith’s “A Treatise on the Lord’s Supper.” Although the sermon is nominally about conceptual problems in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, Smith persistently dramatizes cultural anxieties about emergent technologies of short-hand and cryptographic writing, especially with respect to incarnation, sermonizing and the possibility of saintly emulation.

William Huntting Howell
Northwestern University

Identification, Behind the Scenes: critiques of social identity in nineteenth-century American literature

In a now familiar nineteenth-century American literary rendering of a "fall" into racial identity, an enslaved black child and a free white child, raised side by side on a plantation, are intimates. The black narrator recalls no idea of racial difference until s/he finds herself in a spectacle that dramatizes the central components of psychoanalytic theories of the formation of the subject. The black child comes to see herself as an other, forced into a dis-identification with her friend, and cast out of the unity that she once enjoyed. In this paper, I argue that Elizabeth Keckley, confidante of first lady Mary Lincoln, and a former slave, turns the generic scene inside out. Like Freud’s discussion of “screen memories,” Keckley’s Behind the Scenes comes at subjectivity not from the vantage point of an infantile fantasy of lost unity, but rather from the perspective of an adult. While the generic scene has lent itself to readings in which subjectivity and social identity go hand in hand, Keckley’s story of subjectivity is unhinged from identity. Rather, Keckley provides a literary model of identification in childhood that sets the scene for a model of adult sociality and politics in which aggressivity will figure.

Dana Bilsky
Northwestern University

Signs of the Zodiac? No, Signs of the Times: Figuring Transgender in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins

Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins explores late-Victorian sexual double standards through two provocative scenes of cross dressing which are performed by the youngest and most transgressive of its three "New Women" protagonists.  Examining these scenes in the historical context of fin-de-siecle descriptions of "sexual inversion," as well as the generic context of the children's pantomime (which included stock transvestite roles), this paper seeks to recuperate how the fictional child-figure's gender indeterminacy both reproduced the binary thinking of sexual science and offered a mode of resistance to Victorian heterosexuality.  In using the child-figure to stage late-Victorian responses to gender instability, it argues, The Heavenly Twins tests two models of gender indeterminacy: one which I term "hermaphroditic" and the other which I term "androgynous".  Although both models are associated with youth, only the androgynous model articulates a subjective agency that is shown to be politically powerful.

Carrie Wasinger
Northwestern University