Beyond Historicism: Antebellum Fiction Out
of Place
Session Organizer: John Schlueter,
“No More Tears: Sentimentalism Against Itself in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Carina D. Pasquesi,
Whether critics of antebellum American literature find socio-political
potential for women in sentimentality, or argue against its pervasive,
infantilizing gag on those who advocate for an adult-centered sociality and
politics, not many move beyond the critical embrace or outright dismissal of
this dominant mode of literary expression. Many critics have not engaged
the dark, “negative” dimension of sentimentality and its potential to bring
down the privatized domestic edifice the genre’s “positive” side invites us to
inhabit. For instance, the unsympathetic and murderous Cassy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been overlooked in
readings that focus solely on the enabling or disabling affects of
sentimentality, not allowing Stowe’s fantasy of a slave woman to work against
the author’s predominant interpellative, sympathetic
logic. This paper then reads the sentimental logic of antebellum romance
against itself by foregrounding sadistic, feminized characters in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin who until recently have been read as flat caricatures whose
chief function is to make Eva, Tom, and St. Clare look good. Such reductive
interpretations of characters like Cassy overlook the
negative affects out of which different social models might emerge. Cassy’s sadistic pleasure, constantly reconfigured within
the plantation’s libidinal economy, forces us to move beyond readings that
solely rally against the victimization of slave women, which only turns them
into objects, and to consider instead the complex social and subjective
dynamics that informed what some call the first sexual revolution in the
“Chronic Problems in American Romanticism”
Rick Rodriguez,
Against immanentist
conceptualizations of history that emphasize the inherent identity, however
contradictory, of text and context, this paper argues that historicism's commitment
to contingent, particular genealogies that isolate events and eras from one
another, in fact, betrays its own presentist
anxiety about the groundlessness of history. Insisting that the past must
be understood in its own terms, thus reducing analysis to the articulation of
temporal coincidence, historicism is unable to comprehend history as that which
the archive cannot contain, in other words, what brings into being the emplotting of the historical event into a meaningful
symbolic pattern. This paper finds "failed" attempts to come to
terms with historicity in the work of Melville and Poe, writers associated with
that most transcendent ("escapist") of literary rubrics,
Romanticism. In "The Encantadas" and
"
“Speaking Marks:
Writing”
John Schlueter,
This paper begins with a selection of quotes from various contemporary critics that indicate a (con)fusion of speech and writing. For example, in The Shape of the Signifier Walter Benn Michaels constantly refers to hypothetical persons who literally speak “marks.” I then propose that this confusion of speech and writing has a long history, beginning prior to the Civil War, and using Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter I will show how this confusion indicates a modern subject who is, from a phenomenological perspective, both present and absent and so never fully either. I will conclude by suggesting that this history of the confusion of speech and writing has legitimated an institutionalized study of “language” and propose that the cultural agency critics have “discovered” in language, or “discourse,” is a sign of our ignorance of the history I am trying to trace, thereby historicizing, through literature, a tool commonly used to historicize the literary object itself.