Search Results for self

...Patrick Mullen This essay uses the figure of Lily Bart in terms of the trope of self-management in order to consider relations among forms of gendered and embodied consciousness, formations of knowledge, and the contradictory flows of capital at the turn of the twentieth century. The author argues...

... survive such a condition without committing one- self to that condition voluntarily? This is a question which I could not resist posing to myself and on which I would like to concentrate in this presentation with a view to the general problem of "the poiesis of the subject." I will read three...

...RUTH MACK PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), pp. 256, $36.00. WOLFRAM SCHMIDGEN, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 274, $65.00. Copyright © Novel Corp. 2003...

...Gordon Fraser Recent criticism of Pauline Hopkins's now canonical final magazine novel, Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–3), can generally be separated into two broad categories. On the one hand, critics such as Susan Gillman and Shawn Salvant have interrogated the ways in which the novel...

... traditions of self‐conscious narration within the context of twenty‐first‐century social and technological mediation. At a time when digital media compels written literature to take stock of its print lineage, this article argues that narrative reflexivity is accompanied by a reflexive materiality...

..., vis‐à‐vis her pregnancy, and the endless possibilities her future self and her future child can take. By using a narrative form—autofiction—that embodies the relational, fluid self of a queer, diasporic, Black subject, Wenzel's novel best captures Black Lives Matter's desire to center those folx who...

.... These novels, which contrasted the profligacy and neglect of absentee English landlords with the idealized social harmony and economic self-sufficiency of the homegrown Protestant Ascendency, allowed an Anglo-Irish readership to imagine a self-sustaining body politic, invulnerable to an unevenly developed...

...Scott Black This essay argues that modern, realist ways of reading fail to satisfy fully their own claims about the novel as a genre self-consciously located in history. Rather, novels cycle through the kinds of narrative named by Ian Watt and Northrop Frye and show how each is necessary...

...Patricia E. Chu This essay discusses Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex as a project in the American immigrant tradition, about the (self) making of its protagonist. The project is narrative (Callie/Cal is the narrator, even of things that happened before she/he was born), biological (Cal must...

... to theorizing this new humanism, which would be based in a politics of interpersonal difference rather than in the assumption of human universals, Douglass practiced a form of cautious self-presentation that underwrote his politics. His tendency to draw a veil across certain pivotal scenes of intimate violence...

...Jules Law This essay examines the concept of the inhuman as it develops across a set of Victorian novels ( Villette, Little Dorrit , and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ). The post-structuralist and postmodern idea of the inhuman, I argue, develops out of two primal scenes: the self...

...Nancy Armstrong This essay looks at the form of sovereignty that Alexis de Tocqueville saw as uniquely American in relation to the form of self-sovereignty that had developed in eighteenth-century England and France. By 1840, American democracy had, in Tocqueville's view, become the perfect...

... 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...

... of small talk, which emerges in her fiction as a self-accenting style of racial embodiment and a bold revision to the American novel of manners and to early twentieth-century etiquette manuals. Drawing on sociolinguistics and microsociology, this essay argues that Larsen unsettles the cultural tendency...

...Jane Elliott Abstract This essay examines the relationship between dominant trends in contemporary popular aesthetics and the microeconomic imagination of human behavior, which centers on individual allocation of finite resources to self-determined ends. I argue that this way of modeling human...

...) and locates control within the self as one entity among equals; verticality, in contrast, is linked to rationality and locates control in an asymmetrical relationship of superiority and inferiority that is decried as tyranny. I offer a comparatist interpretation of these concepts in aesthetic play in Jacques...

... subroutines as self-interested beings allows Proust to apply the principles of biological selection to these psychological entities, imagining the mind as an ecosystem in which great personal upheavals—for instance, Marcel's loss of Albertine—figure as extinction events that wipe out large populations...

... . . . cannot hope to take the smallest step.” Such a limit is seemingly crossed in one of the most difficult and quite possibly the strangest of passages in J. M. Coetzee's fiction: the ending of Foe . This book's self-conscious re-presentation of the origins of the English novel (and of Defoe's inauguration...

... by the aesthetic requirements of novelistic emplotment writ large. In this light, literary characters who engage in plotting stand at a site of conversion, where an aspect of fiction seen as narrowly aesthetic becomes a technique for representing structures of social self-consciousness cultivated under conditions...

... therefore gives us an alternative way of understanding Victorian working women in fiction, and the effort to depict the inner life of a person whose work profoundly alienates her from her inner self accounts for the extraordinary literary innovations of Brontë's last novel. In its simplest form, we can...