24327 results in Literary texts
6 - Veganism, Gender, and Queerness
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter translates to a literary context the theoretical findings of my previous work on queer veganism. In my 2012 essay “A Queer Vegan Manifesto,” I write that the fact that vegans concern themselves “with species other than the human directly expresses a desire to transverse not to say disrupt the boundaries that uphold and police the categories that separate the human from the nonhuman” (Simonsen 54). Carol J. Adams has noted that since ethical vegetarianism was embraced by the British Romantics in the late eighteenth century, abstaining from animal products has been considered deviant in the Western world (152). Building on Adams’s seminal work, I define queer veganism as a concept that “institutes a gap in the communal bond inherent to sharing and feasting on the flesh of nonhuman animals” (Simonsen, “Manifesto” 57). As Benjamin Westwood points out, negating “pleasure, nature, sociability, responsibility, pragmatics, empirical science, or capitalism (the list could go on), vegans are cast [in contemporary Western culture] as killjoys, ascetics, and masochists” (176). C. Lou Hamilton echoes this sentiment in her book Veganism, Sex, and Politics, but – pushing back against “the neoliberal truism that links enjoyment to excess and instant gratification” (194–95) – she asserts that “veganism allows us to rethink what we understand by pleasure and to reshape our identities” (195).
Veganism is inherently relational, and it thus intersects with the etymological definition of “queer” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously calls attention to in the foreword to Tendencies (1994): “the word ‘queer’ means across – it comes from the Indo-European root –twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart” (viii). In this essay, I reignite the meaning of “queer” to activate the trans potentiality inherent to the word. In my previous work, I focus on the possibility of forming vegan community on the basis of deviancy; principally, I argue that, “It is by negating the idea of identity as teleology that we might learn how to share our ‘selves’ across species boundaries” (Simonsen, “Manifesto” 66). This line of inquiry can be extended to a trans sense of kinship that “crosses” multiple lines of belonging: biological, historical, sexual, ethical, dietary, and so on.
This essay employs Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 Frankissstein as a literary case study that explicitly demonstrates the possibilities and potentialities of a trans queer reading of veganism.
7 - Robots: Gendered Machines and Anxious Technophilia
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
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Summary
The concept of the robot or humanoid machine has always been closely bound up with notions of sex, gender and reproduction. In Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., whose 1923 English production first introduced the term ‘robot’ to the English language, the humanoid machines are presented as a ‘sexless throng’ (Čapek 1961: 78). Outwardly gendered along binary lines in order to cater to consumer demand (for ‘female’ domestic servants, notably), they are nevertheless devoid of biological sex and lack sexual desire; indeed, their inability to procreate, to reproduce themselves, is what differentiates them from and makes them dependent on humans. Čapek’s play brings out a number of threats posed by this imagined technology: we see on stage the disastrous consequences that ensue when technology built to serve us escapes our control, when the apparently servile robots begin to think for themselves and overcome their human masters. And yet it is the robots’ disruption of categories of sex and gender that is most central to the play’s apocalyptic scenario, as the very existence of the ‘sexless throng’ mysteriously engenders an epidemic of infertility amongst humans, a phenomenon presented in the play as a kind of ‘punishment’ for humans’ hubristic meddling in nature (41).
Although R.U.R was not created under the aegis of any modernist movement or sensibility, I begin with it here principally because it raises a number of intersecting concerns that can be traced through a broader late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century technological imaginary. In its suggestion that the destructive power of machine technology (which finds its ultimate expression in the imagined figure of the robot) lies in its ability to destabilise or undo categories of sex and gender, Čapek’s play evokes the spectre of a ‘civilization without sexes’ – a notion which, as Mary Louise Roberts (1994: 4) has shown, haunted the French cultural imagination during the First World War and its aftermath. Fears about a degenerate technologised society, in which the status quo of sexual relations would be upended, may have been particularly prevalent in France in this period. This was due to a number of factors, including, first, a crisis of masculinity related to the technologies of war, which not only significantly dented the male population but subjected soldiers to psychological disorders disarmingly close in appearance to the ‘female’ disease of hysteria (Showalter 1987: 167–74).
Notes on Contributors
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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Dedication
- Francesca Bratton, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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- Visionary Company
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- 30 September 2022, pp xiv-xiv
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20 - Utopian Fiction
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- By John Miller
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Summary
Introduction
In The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey notes that “Not many writers have tried to imagine utopias for other creatures besides humans” (380). Undoubtedly, Homo sapiens is the center point of the utopian tradition, but there are exceptions. The example Carey gives of an animal utopia is Rupert Brooke’s poem “Heaven,” in which fish imagine the appealing prospect (to them) of a world with “no more land” (380). Moreover, many texts which focus restrictedly on the human good also contain significant reflections on human–animal relations. While Thomas More’s foundational Utopia (1515) is concerned primarily with human interests, at many points it illustrates the connection of human and nonhuman animal lives in a way that is critical of species violence. The Utopians, for example, “look on the desire of the bloodshed, even of beasts, as a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty” (108). Earlier in the text in the section which focuses on the failures of European societies, More provides an extended critique of the social impacts of sheep farming and specifically the practice of enclosure through which “the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions” (44). The focus on animal agriculture here anticipates the significant number of utopian texts that, even if they do not say much about what the future lives of animals might be like, do imagine vegetarian and vegan societies. In Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), for instance, the inhabitants abstain from eggs on the basis that “to eat a fresh egg was to destroy a potential chicken” and from milk “as it could not be obtained without robbing some calf of its natural sustenance” (230), though the Erewhonians’ vegan culture emerges as part of a satirical structure that makes it hard to take their pro-animal orientations at face value. A more recent, and more straightforwardly committed, vegan utopia is Simon Amstell’s mockumentary Carnage (2017) in which the carnist present is seen through the lens of a vegan future. A third example – and one with a particular claim to literary historical significance – is Mary Bradley Lane’s feminist utopia Mizora: A Prophecy, serialized in The Cincinnati Commercial in 1880–1881 and subsequently published in book form in 1890.
5 - ‘They have been lost’: A Year in Mexico City
- Francesca Bratton, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary
‘Mexico killed Hart’, declared fellow Guggenheimer Lesley Simpson, in one of the crudest summaries of Crane’s final year. Crane’s time in Mexico has generally been considered to have been deeply unproductive and self-destructive. He arrived in Vera Cruz from New York, via Havana, on 12 April 1931, making his way to Mexico City by train. His trip was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship – the only major award of his career. Dispatched to the committee on 29 August 1930, Crane’s application outlined a vague plan to explore European literary traditions ‘classical and Romantic’ (his ‘plans for work’ section simply requested ‘European study and creative leisure for the composition of poetry’). His resulting work, he wrote, would contrast European strands of influence with ‘emergent features of a distinctly American poetic conversation’, continuing themes from The Bridge and his negotiation with Eliot. Crane’s application was supported by references from Waldo Frank, Otto Kahn and Eda Lou Walton, a professor of English at NYU. Crane was informed of his success in a letter dated 13 March 1931. At the last minute, however, after discussions with recent returnees Malcolm Cowley and Waldo Frank (Frank having published America Hispana that January), Crane spontaneously decided to travel to Mexico. He hoped to research and write a long poem that he had first imagined during work on The Bridge, centring on Cortés’s violent colonisation of Mexico. Crane met with the Guggenheim Foundation Fund’s principal administrator, Henry Allen Moe, and was assigned to a group of Latin American Fellows.
The Guggenheim was one of a handful of markers that Crane’s reputation was rising. In the last years of his life he published in nationally distributed, mass-circulation magazines and was featured in Vanity Fair in 1929. This chapter discusses this shift in his reputation through an examination of his engagement with the ‘smart journals’, his attempts to raise his profile as a reviewer with new commissions at Poetry, and his drawing together of Key West: An Island Sheaf.
Crane’s letters, read alongside ‘Nopal’ which I have identified in the archive of his friend, former IRA Assistant Chief of Staff Ernie O’Malley, offer their own resistance to the prevailing narrative of his time in Mexico City, and the ease with which this year has been read back retrospectively from his death in April 1932.
7 - Veganism and Postcolonialism
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
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Summary
“Might does what might will do, whether it was humans beating you for pissing or Atticus insisting that dogs should not speak.”
Benjy, in Fifteen Dogs (61)Prefatory Note: On Genre
This essay pairs intimate reflections about my relationship with a dog named Akbar with a reading of Trinidadian-Canadian author André Alexis’s novel, Fifteen Dogs (2015). My fusion of memoir with critical contemplation exemplifies autotheory, the interdisciplinary practice that foregrounds individual experience to shatter hierarchical knowledge-production. For Rea McNamara, autotheory “dismantles vertical pipelines of colonial thinking” and is “a way of thinking through ‘high’ cultural theory via our physical, embodied selves.” bell hooks, a pioneering practitioner of autotheory, describes “the ‘lived’ experience of critical thinking” (2) wherein there is no gap between theory and practice. While self-reflective, hooks emphasizes that theorizing everyday life is ultimately a strategy for collective liberation, for it furnishes the production of a healing, revolutionary space enabling her to “imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently” (2). Recent, notable examples of autotheory within critical animal studies scholarship include Chloë Taylor’s conceptualization of transspecies disability. Taylor’s inquiry into “crip time” is grounded in an analysis of Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s care for a wild snail while bedridden with a neurological disorder as well as Taylor’s own relationships with the abandoned cats she fosters during a period of acute depression. In another instance, blending personal and critical meditations, Kathryn Gillespie ponders her ministrations to an infirm hen and dog to conceptualize what she calls a multispecies doula approach to animal death (“Provocation”). Gillespie demonstrates that nurturing attendance to an animal in their transition, and public display of grief following their death – including the production of her article – speak to a life and death that matter, subverting our mainstay relation to other species.
Autotheory is ideally suited to critical animal studies perspectives since it allows for an exploration of veganism and animal liberation as embodied practices. It is uniquely generative for an exploration of postcolonialism because it is an inherently anticolonial methodology. In this essay, privileging caregiving and grieving for a dog is a strategy for rebuking the hierarchical human/animal relationship and the conceit of dominion that is foundational for postcolonial structures of domination. Piecing together Akbar’s biography redresses nonhuman animals’ erasure from imperial histories and serves specifically as a landing pad for the itinerance of the “stray.”
15 - The Exposé
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
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Summary
We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat.
Leo Tolstoy, “The First Step,” (45)The world runs … on the fuel of this endless fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.
Karen Joy Fowler (232)Introduction
The purpose of the exposé form is to expose, to bare, to bring to light, to disclose, display, uncover, unmask. Exposé is often an attempt to reveal truths deliberately kept hidden. In the case of exposé related to the impacts associated with human consumption of billions of nonhuman animals each year, exposé has the challenge of exposing violence to a human populace pretending not to know; or to expose the systems of power that hide violence and lull society to complacency. Musician Sir Paul McCartney is often quoted as saying, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would go vegetarian.” But what happens when the exposé writer who encounters those glass walls refuses to fully see through them, or sees but does not go vegetarian?
This chapter looks at the form of exposé through a vegan literary lens that is inclusive of multiple perspectives including those of animals, labor, immigration, feminism, and the environment. By looking closely at four texts, this chapter shows how the vegan literary exposé seeks to wake a population pretending to be sleeping. Two of the popular literary exposés written by omnivores – Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009) – will be in conversation with two academic exposés by vegan writers who explore the ethical challenges of the form and of bearing witness – Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (2011) and Kathryn Gillespie’s The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (2018). This essay is also itself a form of exposé, exposing the fictions and omissions made in Pollan’s and Foer’s texts and the ways in which they reinforce strategies of concealment.
Index
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
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23 - Infrastructure: Women Writers Confront Large Technological Systems
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
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Summary
On 17 November 1847, Senator Daniel Webster gave a speech to commemorate the ‘Opening of the Northern Railroad to Lebanon, N.H.’. Although the occasion for his speech was the extension of the railway, Webster does not limit himself to a discussion of train travel. He also invokes steam boats and telegraphy, as if these systems are interrelated. Using the first-person plural, he includes his listeners in a shared experience of awe: ‘We see the ocean navigated and the solid land traversed by steam power, and intelligence communicated by electricity. Truly this is almost a miraculous era’ (Webster 1858: 419). He yokes electricity and steam together because they changed the way that he and many of his contemporaries moved through space, conceptualised time and understood progress.
Senator Webster’s example typifies the dominant narrative about technological development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New systems – however disparate – seemed to signify in aggregate that machinery and scientific knowledge could render the chaotic world more controllable to the individual user. Much has already been written about this understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century systems. For example, Stephen Kern (1983), Wolfgang Schivelbush (1997) and Armand Mattelart (1996) – to name only a few – have chronicled how the railway and other new systems altered the way Americans understood time. Schedules for arriving and departing trains homogenised the way towns marked time. And, although they function by dramatically different mechanisms, the steam engine and electric communication could make distant spaces seem more readily accessible. Communication and transportation systems also changed conceptualisations of space. As Robert MacDougall has shown, ‘One of the nineteenth century’s great clichés was that the rail and wire would “annihilate” space and time’ (2014: 9). Analysing the violence inherent in that word choice, he adds,
The pace of change in this era was exhilarating and at the same time wrenching and alarming to many Americans. Each advance in communication technology gave new powers to its users yet compounded the ability of distant people and events to affect those users’ lives. (9).
Advertisers, system builders and people who perceived themselves as benefitting from technological development promulgated narratives about large-scale systems as progressive and modernising. Indeed, in the chapter that precedes mine, Janice Ho argues convincingly that infrastructures helped to reshape the idea of the nation as a space that coheres through infrastructural flows.
4 - Subways: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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Summary
Entering the System
Scholars of modernism are accustomed to thinking about how technologies reorganise perception of time and space. Subway systems built from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth transformed passengers’ perceptions of city space in modernist metropoles such as New York, London and Paris. Through their spatial organisation and the behaviours they encourage, modern subways model a new kind of movement that is at once physical and imaginative. Though these subways differ based on local geography, track layout and the like, they share a key structure: they connect distant points within city space without showing passengers the intervening sights and so ask the passengers to construct a kind of flexible, telescoping mental image of the city. The art and literature of the subway produced in this period reflects this modern experience formally and thematically through its unexpected shortcircuits and transfers between seemingly distant places and registers of language. In The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen identifies the many ways that modernist writing has been characterised by its compression (2013: 57). From posters to poems, the cultural production of this period argues for the parallels between the spatial compression of the subway and the rhetorical and narrative compressions of modernist literature. Both ask us to navigate underground connections.
Following Wiebe Bijker, I investigate in this chapter how the early twentieth-century subway fits together as a ‘sociotechnical ensemble’ comprising mechanical, cultural, social and behavioural components (Bijker 1997: 274), an ensemble in which shared spatial and mechanical traits interact in complex ways with the particularities of urban space and history. Self-consciously experimental writing of the period, especially poetry, illustrates and explores the ways that the subway builds up a sense of place. In the sections that follow, I consider the ways that modern poets use the subway to represent new forms of mobility and perception, new attitudes toward the crowd and new citational practices, among other changes. Where conventional forms of wayfinding have failed, both subway riding and subway writing model new forms of orientation.
To start with a definition of terms: in order to understand the subway’s relation to modernism, it is helpful to understand what is meant precisely by a subway.
16 - Realism
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
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Summary
What is it that frightens us about a “novel of causes,” and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not be politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so—it’s a drag to be lectured to—but what does that imply about the attitudes toward intellectual inquiry? … I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman’s fallopian tube.
Ruth Ozeki, “A Conversation with Ruth Ozeki”Introduction
There is no missing the political message of Ruth Ozeki’s 1998 novel My Year of Meats. As protest literature, the novel lodges a vigorous critique of the meat industry: from its abuse of workers, to its treatment of animals, chemical and hormonal poisoning of consumers and residents near sites of industrial farming, and work as an extension of US imperialism. The epigraph above comes from an interview with Ozeki appended to the novel. She responds to the unnamed interviewer’s question about whether she worried that My Year of Meats would turn into a “novel of causes,” a pejorative label attached to literature that reeks of the political, the didactic, the prescriptive. The division between aesthetic and political literature summons Ozeki’s recitation of “literary taste,” a metaphor that, beginning with David Hume, equates gustatory appetite with aesthetic appetite (Hume 231–58). Yet to politicize the appetite is considered poor literary form. As an interpretive strategy prescriptive of how one should eat, vegan literary studies may seem like bad literary criticism, reducing complex or ambiguous meaning to a single political and ethical agenda. Good literary criticism has become synonymous with extending ambiguity, refusing political takeaway, and attending to questions of form or genre. Ozeki reworks this division between the aesthetic and the political to envision a continuous interconnection of the private with the political, of gustatory appetite and aesthetic appetite, of conditioning that folds questions of aesthetic taste onto political conditioning. In My Year of Meats, the political seeps into the biopolitical, creating an indistinguishability between the politics and art that shape consumers.
The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
- Edited by Laura Wright, Emelia Quinn
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- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 07 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022
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Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the 'animal turn' in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience.
This collection of twenty-five essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies.
14 - Music: Modernist Remediation and Technologies of Listening
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- By Josh Epstein
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
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Summary
Ludwig van Beethoven, if not exactly a modernist, offers ample fodder for modern artists looking to defend – or expand – their turf. While producing City Lights (1928), Charlie Chaplin responded to the newly popular ‘talkies’ by proclaiming that ‘Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics’ (qtd in Crafton 1999: 296). It might be tempting to retort that Beethoven’s last symphony did have lyrics – and still turned out okay – but taking Chaplin’s maxim seriously is more useful (if less instantly gratifying) than the easy dismissal. Chaplin, who composed the score to City Lights, understood the supple relationship between image and music even in the ‘silent’ picture (which, as film historians repeatedly note, was never truly silent). Music in 1920s film was increasingly tasked with sustaining the narrative development, on-screen action and extra-diegetic affect of films such as City Lights, itself part pantomime and part melodrama (literally, ‘music-drama’). Chaplin’s later score for Modern Times (1936), a sort of semi-talkie, enhanced these tensions: the main love theme, influenced by Puccini’s Tosca and written to narrate the Tramp’s refuge from technology in the arms of sentimental domesticity, attached to the popular imagination two decades later as the popular song ‘Smile’. From operatic melodrama to silent film melodrama to melos without drama, this music was churned through a dialectical factory-wheel to which lyrics added considerable exchange value.
Emerging alongside Chaplin’s melodramatic pantomimes were ‘city-symphonies’ by Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), Walter Ruttmann (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927), Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927) and Alberto Cavalcanti (Rien que les heures, 1926), as well as avant-garde experiments such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique, which features Chaplin (‘Charlot’) in puppet form. Even without the noisy accompaniment of George Antheil’s score, composed and performed independently for pianolas, sirens, electric bells and percussion, the film’s gestures to Chaplin invoke the rhythmic physicality of a ‘mechanical ballet’ and disrupt any pretence to pure formal abstraction. Films had sound, whether they ‘needed’ it or not: the presence of music and speech was not silenced by film but reanimated by it and helped to act on the sensorium in unexpected ways.
This chapter examines how modernist radio and film remediate musical expression, not only leveraging music’s appeals to sentiment but representing music as a media technology in its own right.
Conclusion: Emily Brontë’s Udolphics: The Gondal and Non-Gondal Poems
- Olivia Loksing Moy, Lehman College, City University of New York
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- The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry
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Summary
In this book, I have proposed, and hopefully shown, that reading 1790s Gothic novels helps to make us better readers of Victorian poetry. The claim is a challenging one because it demands reading long, eight-hundred-page Gothic novels seriously—reading them closely, and formally—without necessarily reverting to familiar patterns of paranoid reading or suspicious hermeneutics. Nor does it lean on statistical reading from a distance, counting off the number of Minerva titles published or tallying the salaries of women writers in a single decade. The crux of this study, in suggesting we read these baggy containers for their formal value, undercuts the prominence of Gothic themes to focus instead on Gothic forms and structures. Such a formal approach unifies disparate shapes across seemingly non-complementary units and containers. Moving from novels to poems, crossing from Romantic to Victorian, Gothic forms travel and transform as they do their work. Those Gothic forms—of confinement, guilty overhearing, shock and swap, and wavering, as discussed in each of the preceding chapters—embody constructs of restraint and excess. As we have seen, the machinery of confinement and liberation are often bound together in tangible, embodied ways: Where the characters stand, hidden from view, enact triangulation. How a poem’s lines wrap around the page can seem to stifle a poem’s speaker. The physical experience of close reading Gothic form becomes inextricable from its content, where the stuff that fills unwieldy “lyric buckets” and “well-wrought urns” asks readers to undergo contortions. The speaker, poet, and reader, all parties involved, might twist, writhe, and waver. That Gothic reading experience prevails in readings of even the most canonical Victorian poems.
The argument of this book has progressed chronologically across the nineteenth century, chapter by chapter, to explore the Gothic forms hidden in plain sight, often within poems where Gothic themes may not be detectable at all: in Browning’s early dramatic monologues (contemporaneous with Tennyson’s) from the 1830s; in metasonnets by Elizabeth Barrett and Christina Georgina Rossetti from the 1840s; in picture poems and doubled works from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1860s second phase; and in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the 1870s and 1880s. For this concluding chapter, I break the chronology to visit an earlier moment, turning our attention to the poetry of Emily Brontë.
8 - Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
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Summary
‘Useful matter’ is the definition the materials scientist Christopher Hall proposes of the topic of this chapter. According to Hall, materials should, in the first instance, be taken to include obvious ‘engineering stuff’ such as steel, concrete, rubber, plastics, wood, glass and aluminium. But the term also extends to oil, gas, foodstuffs, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, explosives and textiles, as well as ‘oddball things like ivory and invar, graphite, grease, porcelain, and paint’. All these substances have an evident use (Hall 2014: xiii). My concern here is with the representation of useful matter in modernist writing. What might the representation of useful matter tell us about the distinctiveness of literary modernism? What might literary modernism tell us about the distinctiveness of the uses to which particular materials were put in cultures undergoing widespread economic, social and technological transformation?
Useful matter has customarily been examined with the aid of the concept of ‘material culture’, which has over the last thirty years or so shaped a wide range of enquiries in the arts, humanities and social sciences. In archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, where the concept first took hold, the focus has remained on the object or thing: that is to say, more often than not, on the artefact. People make things, things make people (Miller 2010: 42–78). Much the same could be said of highly informative studies of modernist material culture from Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects (1998) to Juli Highfill’s Modernism and its Merchandise (2014) and beyond. There, too, the artefact is key. But what about the materials out of which the things are made that make people? Hall rightly reminds us that, with some notable exceptions such as ceramics, manufacture has, for the most part, been a two-step process: making the material, making the artefact. A ship is made of steel, a garment of fabric: someone makes the steel or the fabric; someone else acquires it and makes a ship, or a garment. The two steps create a division of labour and skills, between ironmaster and shipwright, weaver and garment-maker (Hall 2014: 83). It is not self-evident how research into representations of that first step in the process of manufacture might further the enduring ambition of material cultural studies to ‘connect people and things’ (Deetz 1967: 138).
1 - Gothic Overhearing: Inquisition, Confession, and Accusation in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues
- Olivia Loksing Moy, Lehman College, City University of New York
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- Book:
- The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 33-89
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Summary
That song has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen in the next.
J. S. Mill, “What is Poetry?”And yet God has not said a word!
Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover”“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.” So vaunts the wealthy Duke of Ferrara in Robert Browning’s famous dramatic monologue, alluding to the young wife whose likeness he captured in a painting before commanding her murder. Cunning, collected, and ruthless, the Duke is a master of nuanced speech and emotions; he controls the pacing of his speech as he does the suspenseful plot that unfolds. As readers, we feel frightened of his machinations but also culpable as unwitting spectators to his understated crime—much like the poor unsuspecting page who brokers the Duke’s next marriage. In many ways, the Duke from “My Last Duchess” looms as a gatekeeper to this book, standing as an imposing presence in Victorian poetry, but also as a symbol of Gothic villainy. He joins the ranks of cruel, unsavory speakers from many nineteenth-century poems, including Tennyson’s “St. Simeon Stylites” and Browning’s 1842 collection, Dramatic Lyrics.
But such memorable villains are not native to nineteenth-century lyrics. More than just a landmark figure in the development of the dramatic monologue, the Duke embodies the Gothic character of the iniquitous patriarch. Here we have an Italian aristocrat who celebrates, with elegance, the expediency of his wife’s murder. He gestures towards the figure of a woman who has been silenced, murdered, and frozen within a frame. His confession takes the form of calculated boasts. He recalls the murderous villains from spectacularly popular Gothic novels of the 1790s, including those by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, from The Mysteries of Udolpho’s evil Count Montoni to Father Schedoni of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. When it comes to the Victorian dramatic monologue, critics have, for the most part, been oblivious to the fact that Gothic villains have been staring us in the face the entire time.
14 - The Philosophical Essay
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- By Josh Milburn
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 222-230
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Summary
Introduction
In her contribution to the 2018 collection Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture, Sara Salih recounts the challenges of teaching animal studies in a literature department. She began a class with a work of philosophy and, in her chapter, asks:
What was a bunch of literature and creative writing students supposed to make of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, the first book on our reading list? Instead of engaging with the book’s uncompromising moral message, the students focused on Singer’s rhetorical strategies, which some of them dismissed as polemic. I now understood I had unconsciously wished to shock, perhaps even convert the students taking my course, and I felt disappointed and stupid when I saw how they responded to the text as any other text – a literary artefact to be analysed and assessed. (Salih 63)
The vegan students had heard it all before, recounts Salih, while the non-vegans became instantly defensive (63). Salih “thought of withdrawing from” her own class, and drafted an email to Singer – but this was never sent. “[T]he class,” she reports, “quietened down when we got onto the more familiar territory of literary texts” (64).
Philosophical exploration of the ethics of human–animal relationships – what we can call animal ethics – forms part of the prehistory of vegan (literary) studies (see Wright, “Doing” xv; Vegan 11), and remains an important touchstone for scholars of veganism in literature (Quinn and Westwood 16; Milburn). It is thus not surprising that Salih included animal ethics in her course. But the response of her students, and her consequent frustration, is understandable, too. To what extent does it make sense to group philosophical essays within or alongside more conventional literary texts? Should scholars of vegan literature respond to philosophical essays “as any other text” (Salih 63)? This chapter interrogates – without necessarily answering – these questions.
It is first worth saying that there are multiple traditions of philosophy that may be of interest to vegan literary scholars. We can first distinguish between the so-called “continental” and “analytic” traditions of philosophy. Continental philosophy has its origins in French and German thought, and is at the foundation of much contemporary literary theory. The philosopher Jacques Derrida is a recognizably continental philosopher who is a frequent source of engagement for vegan literary scholars (see, for example, Schuster).
Frontmatter
- Anita Wohlmann, University of Southern Denmark
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- Book:
- Metaphor in Illness Writing
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp i-iv
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Series Editor’s Preface
- Anita Wohlmann, University of Southern Denmark
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- Book:
- Metaphor in Illness Writing
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp viii-viii
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Summary
Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine Series Editor: Gavin Miller
Over the last fifty years or so, texts and other cultural productions on illness, health and medicine have flourished across a variety of genres and media. This book series fosters critical readings of such cultural productions, with an openness to variety in genre, medium and cultural capital. The series expects scholarly rigour and theoretical acumen, but no single theoretical or methodological standpoint is stipulated. Readers will encounter innovative and sustained critical readings that respond to the cutting – or bleeding – edge of contemporary cultures of illness, health and medicine.