Abstract This essay reviews three recent studies of right-wing politics and culture by David Golumbia, Quinn Slobodian, and Alberto Toscano. It situates the authors within a century-long debate amongst the political left over the relationship between fascism and capitalism. Although all three of these works are not explicitly devoted to highlighting that relationship, this essay argues that all three generatively add insights to this long-standing conversation. Each in their own right, the authors highlight the convergences of libertarianism and authoritarianism and the levels of both ideology and lived, political practice. They also help to show how fascism and libertarianism converge through compatible notions of “freedom” that situate agency outside of democracy.
Abstract This essay reconsiders Lionel Trilling’s concept of sincerity by situating it within the ethical and political tensions of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. Against narratives that trace a linear movement from postwar seriousness to postmodern irony, it identifies a crucial mid-century moment in which sincerity becomes inseparable from ambivalence, hesitation, and self-doubt. Reading Sincerity and Authenticity (1971) alongside Trilling’s essays on culture and Jewish identity, the essay argues that sincerity is not a stable moral quality but an ongoing negotiation shaped by conditions of belonging and estrangement. In doing so, it revises Trilling’s place within a Jewish assimilationist framework, showing that his work does not simply endorse cultural assimilation but registers a more conflicted and unresolved relation to belonging. Through his engagement with figures such as Isaac Babel, the essay demonstrates how ambivalent sincerity—often dismissed as a form of political weakness—can instead function as a mode of ethical awareness
Abstract This essay examines the history of moralistic criticism, the oldest and most enduring of all modes of literary criticism. From antiquity to the twentieth century, criticism entailed the evaluation of a text’s moral content, and for literally millennia, critics were charged with protecting vulnerable young readers from potentially harmful literary influence. Moralism finally fell from grace at the hands of the New Critics, who insisted that morality had no role to play in literary criticism. This essay argues that, despite the New Critics, moralism continues to exert considerable influence on literary criticism, both in the academy and in the wider public.
The relationship between psychoanalysis and queer theory has been a vexed if at times inspiring one. Certainly queer theory's insistence on studying sexuality beyond the confines of identity has found resources in Freud, Lacan, and/or Klein even as concerns about the pathologizing impulses and racialized blind spots of the psychoanalytic clinic have never been put to rest. But it has been within queer theory that some of the most contentious debates have been staged, as scholars have wrestled with what the priority psychoanalysis gives to sexuality entails for attending to and understanding race and racism. The primal scene of this contestation is the "anti-social thesis," which has garnered a reputation for pitting the intersectional demands of queer of color critique against a race-blind view of sexuality as ontological negativity. Avgi Saketopoulou's Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, and Traumatophilia bears the imprint of this contestation and offers a tacit resolution by deploying Jean Laplanche's metapsychology to build a theory of sexuality as "normative perversity" without ignoring race or analogizing it to sexuality (40). The tensions that emerge are as important as the queer pleasures the text offers in configuring "aesthetic experience" as the vehicle for coming into contact with sexuality's ego-shattering force (14). This review essay looks first at Saketopoulou's seductive inventiveness in crafting a traumatophilic approach to both clinical and cultural work before turning toward a broader consideration of the critical consequences and conundrums of the book's polygamous queer commitment to a theory of sexuality differentiated from and yet attentive to race.
The trope of the broken slave family emerges in the pages of antislavery newspapers in the early 1830s, figuring all that is wrong with slavery in terms of slavery's distance from an idealized domestic family form. In the ensuing years, antislavery media aggressively overrepresented enslaved social relations in terms of those that congeal into what we now call heterosexuality, thereby projecting a norm powerful enough that some of its non-enslaved and even white audiences began to fashion themselves in its image. Drawing examples from Sarah Forten, William Lloyd Garrison, and Sarah Grimk & eacute;, this essay surveys the initiation and rhetorical construction of what would become a significant antislavery trope, the media platform through which a public could develop such a trope, and the reifications of the trope that assumed a life beyond the printed page. It concludes that antislavery media might be understood as a historically significant part of what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have called "the project of normalization that has made heterosexuality hegemonic."
This essay reclaims Asian North American literature's regional origins. I turn to the case of Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954), a complicated figure in Asian North American literary history. Although Eaton herself was of Chinese and British ancestry, for years she adopted the Japanese persona Onoto Watanna and published Orientalist popular romances. In 1917 Eaton moved to Alberta, began publishing regionalist fiction, and rebranded herself as Canadian. Eaton's biography, literary experiments, and Canadian publications destabilize the central tenets of Asian American literary history: its relationship to transnational geographies; its ties to the political; and its literary forms. Drawing together Asian American, Asian Canadian, and regionalist scholarship, work on the cross-border publishing market, and archival research, I link Eaton's regional forms to US, Canadian, and Asian literary and political dynamics. The first two sections analyze Cattle (1923), a book that blends techniques of nineteenth-century regionalist fiction with experiments in queer modernist form. The final section analyzes unpublished manuscripts in Eaton's archive. Eaton thought of herself as a professional writer, and more specifically, a novelist. Her regionalist work was informed by a period in which the threat of yellow peril was a cross-border issue, and her desire to reimagine the genre of fiction.
This essay offers a response to three recent contributions in early American studies relating to the issues of textuality, literacy, and colonialism in the trope of the "talking book," as well as to the relationship between science and literature in the early Americas.
This essay considers the theoretical, methodological, and ethical stakes of reading W.E.B. Du Bois's 1905 unpublished novel "Scorn" as a failure. Between publishing the landmark collection Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), W.E.B. Du Bois drafted a three-part, genre-defining historical romance set in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the expansive body of research on Du Bois and his fiction, "Scorn" is either overlooked or read as a predecessor to Black Reconstruction (1935). Rather than seeking to recover "Scorn's" literary and political merits, this essay offers a reading practice that takes seriously "Scorn's" failings-from its plots to publication plans-without attempting to resolve or redeem them. Approaching failure as a material reality, rather than a political posture, "Scorn" emerges as a text that indexes a particular moment in Du Bois's early twentieth-century thinking when he was trying, and failing, to reconcile the novel's formal demands with his burgeoning philosophy of history.
This article illuminates the unexpected contributions of Puritan intellectual culture to the scientific practice of modeling. At the intersection of American literary history, the history of science, and the history of architecture, this article stakes the claim that Puritan model thinking contributed at once to a scientific willingness to be selectively wrong and to the epistemologies of ignorance that are central to early American colonialism. In the first section, the article contextualizes Puritan sermons on models for ethical behavior within a longer conceptual history of modeling in Europe and America to show how early American settlers refashioned model thinking into an epistemological practice for explaining material inequality in colonial society. In the second, the article explores how analogy-or, the literary device most explicitly shared by Puritan aesthetics and scientific modeling-sharpens the connection between the history of modern science and colonialist ideologies surrounding the selective admittance of error. Ultimately, a literary and intellectual history of colonial New England shows how this willingness to be adjacent to the truth is a mental attitude that interweaves scientific explanation, poetic analogy, and the cognitive foundations of settlement.
In this article, I read slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, Ellen and William Craft, and Silvia Dubois, as theory alongside black feminist and trans theory to tease out an underlying thread of thought that often goes unnoticed in the work of both-a critique of the gender performance of white supremacy grounded in its material reality of slavery rather than its ideological legacy of normativity. Much work has been done to examine the gender variance that antiblack racism imposed upon the enslaved. This article shifts perspectives to ask: What was the gender performance of white supremacy under its own crafted and designed conditions of slavery? How did this material reality create the conditions under which enslaved people were subsequently racialized as gender deviants? In an era just before the solidification of gender and sexuality as categories of personhood in the field of "sexology," material practices in the antebellum South reveal that white gender and sexual behavior in the slave economy upended prevailing social ideologies about gender roles in enslaved communities and in white southern households, flying in the face of the contention made popular by Gone with the Wind (1936) that normative domesticity congealed in this latter space.
This review essay considers three essays that tackle questions of form, meaning, and genre across three distinct sets of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Across both well-known narratives and more obscure published and unpublished works, these scholars contend with the difficulty of these texts and the demands they make for alternative methods of interpretation. Spanning slave narratives, a "lost" novel by W.E.B Du Bois, and a virtually ignored novel by Canadian writer Winnifred Eaton, these essays detail the application of expansive and contrary analytical frameworks, such as failure, region, and gender-making. In doing so, these essays suggest that when texts do not neatly align with the bodies of knowledge used to situate them within fields, the onus should be on rewriting the borders of those disciplines, rather than the texts themselves.
This article revisits the literary history of the talking book trope and argues that it should be read as a trope of Black and Indigenous encounter. By focusing on the use of the trope in the writings of John Marrant and Ottobah Cugoano, I highlight how Indigenous people were crucial to early formulations of Black literature and Black political thought. By using the talking book trope, Marrant and Cugoano intervened in a New World literary history centered around representations of European and Indigenous American encounter. However, Marrant and Cugoano do not simply slot themselves into the dominant role historically occupied by the white European; in fact, by turning a trope of European and Indigenous encounter into a trope of Black and Indigenous encounter, they fundamentally change the way the trope works. The logic of power and negation the trope has historically formalized-master/slave, colonizer/colonized-doesn't translate when the principal actors are Black and Indigenous. From its inception, colonial literature could only conceive of Black and Indigenous people in relationship to Europeans. When Marrant and Cugoano insisted on an American history that centered Black and Indigenous encounters, they challenged one of the constitutive silences of the colonial literary tradition.
Drawing on the history and philosophy of science while addressing a topic on the margins of affect studies, this essay discusses the feeling of science in mid-nineteenth-century literature, paying particular attention to Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Edgar Allan Poe. Whereas Humboldt, Darwin, and other nineteenth-century scientific thinkers struggle to confront unpleasant feelings of epistemological failure and uncertainty, Poe recognizes that the irritating affect of being wrong is vital to scientists and artists alike. Anticipating fallibilists such as Charles Peirce and current problems with scientific authority, Poe-almost like a sentimental author-can help us think right by feeling wrong.
Comics studies as a field has increasingly invested in innovative forms of scholarship to meet the demands of our object of study: a multimodal literary/artistic artifact that defies canonical conventions. In this essay/review, I examine how In Visible Archives (2023) and Raw, Weirdo, and Beyond (2022) distinguish themselves from traditional academic models in the US, eschewing aspects of normative scholarship in favor of alternative approaches. In Visible Archives creates a dialectic in which the archive not only reconstitutes the history of the foundations of a literary form, but also uses major figures in the fields of comics and other visual-textual hybridizations as a way of centering peripheral communities. Raw, Weirdo, and Beyond, by contrast, builds its own archive of an exhibition, which itself was an archive of sorts, and then, in a metahistorical move, centers the created archives within studies of alternative comics. The archival turn in comics studies has, rather than replicating literary studies’ or art history’s own archival scholarship, instead reimagined the space of the scholarly page, and these volumes illustrate two of the pathways by which comics scholars can adapt the form of scholarship to the form of comics.
