Comparative Literature Panel: “The Future/Ends of Narrative/Theory”
Chair: Mark Pettus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Competing and
Cooperating Predictions in Wells’s Time
Machine”
Jesse Wolfe
University of Wisconsin-Madison
H.G. Wells’s Time Machine blends two predictions, which represent two strains of the author’s thought: socialistic critique and evolutionary fatalism. Wells’s theoretical commitments (to Fabianism and to Huxleyan science) motivate each prediction, but in each case The Time Machine embodies the prediction in narrative form, the better to impress a popular audience.
The two predictions are formed “out of the present moment,” but in different ways. The political prediction—according to which late-nineteenth-century working people evolve into Morlocks, and decadent Victorian elites evolve into Eloi—arises from present conditions and constitutes a prophetic warning, a common gesture in dystopic fiction. The scientific prediction, according to which the earth is inherited by giant crabs, arises from a present state of knowledge and gives narrative voice to the then-current speculation that evolution would eventually entail a regression to lower life forms.
The novel’s view of history, then, is neither neatly cyclical nor neatly linear, but a palimpsest of competing philosophical inclinations. Its social(istic) critique assumes human power to “check the political process.” To the degree that the warning can be efficacious, this theory participates in its theoretical object by helping to prevent that object from becoming reality. But its scientific prediction entails less faith in human ability to “check the cosmic process.” This prediction humbles the readership but without offering an implicit suggestion for self-preservation.
The two predictions’ combined humbling effects counteract the novel’s can-do attitude, its faith in the enlightened Englishman’s ability to apply his scientific skills to the most outlandish challenges. The future, in both its late-human and post-human phases, looms ahead of the confident English intellectual, not necessarily compelling a negative attitude toward the present, but certainly making it difficult to conceive of the present as occupying a place of any evolutionary or cosmic privilege.
“Narrating and Mobilizing
a Utopian Political Science in Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis,”
Kate Merz
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The narrative form of the utopia is, among other things, a thought experiment, at once political and epistemological, imaginary and (if only theoretically) philosophically and politically authentic. In the scientific utopias of the early seventeenth-century, we find not only social systems at stake, but the status of knowledge itself, as well as the methodologies through which knowledge is acquired and the institutions through which it is implemented and disseminated. The experimental narratives of Thomaso Campanella and Francis Bacon, The City of the Sun (1602) and The New Atlantis (1626), are at once hypothetical and urgent, intimating that their audiences (and patrons) may test out and implement their narrators’ claims, through astrological or empirical observation, and institutional experimentation. Their narratives thus participate in a discourse of prediction, prescription, and “progress,” but one that remains, in the space of the narrative, teasingly potential.
Most urgent of all, I argue, within this space of immanent potentiality, is the intersection between utopianism and nascent imperialism. Like the practice of the latter, utopian discourses posit the discovery or foundation of communities upon newly “discovered” geographical spaces. As the nexus joining discourses of science, navigation, and utopia, the trope of “discovery” attains a privileged but overdetermined status.
In our journey from Campanella’s City to Bacon’s New Atlantis, we experience a transition from an astrological utopia of analogy and mimesis, to an empirical realm of mechanical causes—a world of agitation and manipulation that might be translate upon the nonfictional globe as well. When studying a mouthpiece for discovery like Bacon, however, we must beware projecting onto him a postleptic, post-Baconian reading of scientific revolution. We must rather inquire what his “science,” no more privileged than Campanella’s astrology, signifies when it is still hypothetical, unendorsed, and far from institutionalized.
“Heidegger’s Being,
Fragmented: Unconcealing and Covering-over after Being and Time”
Jason E. Cohen
University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Heidegger’s Being, Fragmented” restores the attention due to being-in-the-world in order to complicate scholarly debates over Heidegger’s “originary ethics.” The current essay resists those arguments that claim to extract an ethics directly from his texts by positioning Heidegger’s turning (Kehre) within its philosophical, historical, and political contexts. Working with a mixed
methodology of rhetorical analysis and philosophical close-reading, the inquiry exposes new consequences for Heidegger’s deletion (Streichung) in 1953 of the1927 promise to complete Being and Time. Further, the essay reads these covered-over consequences as a denial of the tensions sustained by Heidegger’s reliance on moving “our Dasein [unser Dasein]” in the Introduction to Metaphysics (1953). The essay argues finally that these tensions must be read philosophically and lingually. It consequently repositions Heidegger's conception of humanism
in order to disrupt reductive
articulations of ethics and the Kehre in the
"Letter on Humanism" (1946).
“Reviewing the Kiss
in Early Modernist Critical Writings: It’s Nothing
New”
Sophia Estante
University of Wisconsin-Madison
This research, drawing from a host of primary source material from the early 1900s, addresses the difficulties early modernist writers, including Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound, faced while attempting to reconcile the modernist definitional foundations of “the new” with the necessity of repetition; in other words, there was always, it seemed, another “new” thing, and thus the new was problematically never truly original and different.
By focusing on the editorial and critical reviews of Margaret C. Anderson, the editor of the Little Review, this paper argues that the circulation of small magazines, as publications such as the Little Review were called, offered a solution to the cyclical conundrum of newness. Anderson, by publishing a preponderance of contentious critical reviews—and the responses to those reviews—defined the new not as original or different, but as an us-against-them or this-against-that rhetorical position that played up the new in terms of its revolutionary and oppositional qualities. For Anderson, the divide was often generational: the early modernist “Advanced Garde” (her term), or avant garde, against the ebbing fin de siècle mentality of the late 1800s.
Thus, Anderson’s editorial work contributes to the modernist debate by treating critical writings not as objective or informative pieces of writing—as they may appear in newspapers, for example—but as the starting points for controversy.