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"Great powers Fiction."
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The nobody people
When Avi Hirsch learns that his daughter Emmeline has special abilities, he tries to shield her against an increasingly hostile society. Carrie Norris can become invisible, but all she wants is to be seen by the people she loves. Fahima Deeb has faced prejudice her entire life, but her uncanny connection to machines offers her the opportunity to level the playing field. These are just a few of the ordinary nobodies with astonishing gifts who must now band together against bigotry and fear, even as one of their own actively works to destroy a fragile peace. Will their combined talents spark a much-needed revolution--or an apocalypse?
Book
Ingenuous Subjection
Helen Thompson'sIngenuous Subjectionoffers a new feminist history of the eighteenth-century domestic novel. By reading social contract theory alongside representations of the domestic sphere by authors such as Mary Astell, Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan, Thompson shows how these writers confront women's paradoxical status as both contractual agents and naturally subject wives. Over the long eighteenth century, Thompson argues, domestic novelists appropriated the standard of political modernity advanced by John Locke and others as a citizen's free or \"ingenuous\" assent to the law. The domestic novel figures feminine political difference not as women's deviation from an abstract universal but rather as their failure freely or ingenuously to submit to the power retained by Enlightenment husbands.Ingenuous Subjectionclaims domestic novelists as vital participants in Enlightenment political discourse. By tracing the political, philosophical, and generic significance of feminine compliance, this book revises our literary historical account of the rise of the novel. Rather than imagining a realm of harmonious sentiment, domestic fiction represents the persistent arbitrariness of eighteenth-century men's conjugal power.Ingenuous Subjectionrevises feminist theory and historiography, locating the genealogy of feminism in a contractual model of ingenuous assent which challenges the legitimacy of masculine conjugal government. The first study to treat feminine compliance as something other than a passive, politically neutral exercise,Ingenuous Subjectionrecovers in this practice the domestic novel's critical engagement with the limits of Enlightenment modernity.
eBook
Empowering the Feminine
Ty examines three late 18th century female authors coming from different social backgrounds but all grappling with a desire for female empowerment to show how supposed female weaknesses were portrayed as potentially active forces for social change.
eBook
Redressing Power Through Hasidic Drag
This essay analyzes the video dance work of contemporary Jewish performance artist Julie Weitz through analysis of her seven-minute short The Great Dominatrix (2018). Inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s critique of fascism in The Dictator (1940), Weitz mocks modern-day political power in Hassidic drag with Chaplin-esque physicality and layered cultural reference. Curls unfurl from under the fur of a traditional man’s hat as golem enters in white tights and leotard, wrapped unorthodoxly in religious tefillin. She mounts a plastic inflatable globe as quick cuts speed through the myriad ways she sexualizes the prop. In one sequence, the artist gesticulates her white-caked face and body with exaggerated expressions of surprise, disgust, and desire while watching iPhone clips of Trump and Chaplin’s Hitler playing with his own oversize globe. Satirizing today’s rulers and their greed for world domination while libidinizing the sci-fi figure of Jewish folklore, Weitz embodies an ethnogender drag she describes as curiously empowering, if often misunderstood. Prioritizing these multiple mis/identifications as contestatory performance plays in porcelain slip, I argue that the artist deploys competing tropes to dethrone dictatorship while exaggerating antisemitic extremes to sculpt the Modern Jewess in bodily negotiation of (her own) power.
Journal Article
The importance of feeling english
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850?
InThe Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American \"re-writings\" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation.
The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style,The Importance of Feeling Englishreveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
eBook
Forbidden fruit
Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.
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The ideas in things
While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages. The Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood here reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels—the mahogany furniture in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations—Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside the novels’ symbolic systems. A valuable contribution to the new field of object studies in the humanities, The Ideas in Things pushes readers’ thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.
eBook