RIP Seamus Heaney

GUTS - Canadian Feminist Magazine

This weekend saw the launch of a new project that I've been involved with over the past few months: GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine. Many of my contributions have been visual in nature -- I designed the banner, argued about layout/formatting decisions with the editors, and provided a handful of illustrations for the first issue.

Of course, I'd like to plug the rest of the content as well. There are several strong articles featured in GUTS's first issue, not to mention a provocative and revealing letter from the editors.

Reading and the Early Modern Liberal Subject (revised)

*The following is a working abstract that's currently being prepared for submission.

England's seventeenth century included a prolonged parliamentary struggle, a civil war, a period of republican experimentation, a restoration of its monarchy, and a constitutional revolution that would keep intact a Protestant state church. Centuries later, Christopher Hill famously argued for a reading of these events as the unfolding of England's "bourgeois revolution," the result of which was to establish conditions that were increasingly favourable to capitalist development. Alongside this socio-economic reorganization, liberal political thought, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, posited a model of the individual as a self-possessed, autonomous agent.

This essay engages the correspondence of bourgeoning liberal and literary histories in both the critical and contemporary reception of the later works of John Milton and emphasizes the role of reading as a crucial element in both histories. Through its fixation on the act of reading, Milton's poetry and prose reveal a link between the cause of self-possessive freedom and the hegemonic interests of the emerging bourgeois subject. Areopagitica (1645), for example, articulates the close relationship between conditions of reading and conditions of exchange within the marketplace, treating the threat of censorship as a disastrous intervention that is conceptually indebted to the threats of the Catholic institutionalism on the one hand and state-sanctioned monopolies on the other. In this case, reading becomes a constitutive activity of the Reformed English subject who relies upon open access to a plurality of texts in order to exercise individual choice and discernment.

This essay argues that Milton's late poems install reading as an overdetermined activity through which a modern, liberal subjectivity aligns itself with literary discipline. The term "literary" in this case refers to socially valued forms of writing that gain their support not simply from material conditions but from a historical network of circulation and reproduction; by literary discipline, I mean a specific conception of reading that is both represented and conditioned by Milton's late poetry, and by liberal subjectivity, I point ahead to the bourgeois individual who today remains a residual product of early modern England's socio-economic upheaval.

Already fraught with theological and economic significance, reading assumes an intensified political significance in Milton’s post-Restoration writing. Of True Religion (1673), his short essay on religious toleration, came late in the poet's career, but its argument for a theory of religious freedom based on "searching the scriptures" reveals the underlying logic of reading set out in Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). For Milton, the act of reading is necessary for salvation, not because reading somehow accomplishes God's work, but because without textual engagement one cannot be prepared to recognize and receive salvation as a free gift. To this end, Paradise Lost establishes interpretative activity as a prelapsarian, prehistorical reality: it thus naturalizes a liberal paradigm of ambiguity, competition, and discernment.

First published together, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes further this project by directly addressing the material conditions of reading in a hostile political climate. Through their joint format, Milton’s final poems lock their audience into a posture of reading that becomes tautological and, in this way, rehearses the contradictions of liberal ideology. Rather than a stance of tolerance and openness, Miltonic readers find themselves in an irreducibly active space of interpretation. While some contemporary critics have celebrated the activist content of Milton's poems, they have ignored the way in which it functions ideologically within an emerging capitalist environment.

Beginning with a genealogy of reading in Milton's early writing, I locate liberalism's ideological origins within a distinctly Protestant approach to interpretation. By focusing on Milton's late poems, I explore early modern reading as an active form of individual trial, increasingly disconnected from its social surroundings. I suggest that Milton's post-Restoration poetry develops a distinction between "fixed" and "fit" forms of reading, which corresponds to a capacity for individual and collective mobility despite what Milton perceived as the closure of England's political horizon. What first appears as a politically, theologically, and ethically overdetermined site of struggle in Milton’s writing returns as a versatile aspect of liberal ideology.

Fiona Apple - "Hot Knife (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

At the time of its release "Hot Knife," the closing track from The Idler Wheel (my favourite album of 2012), was an unexpected move, a brilliant way to end an already brilliant album. It's a catchy, upbeat, R&B-infused, almost-accapella battle between Fiona Apple and her ego. More surprising, however, is her new video and its acclaimed director, her ex-partner, Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed several of her best videos back in the early 2000s. The result is restrained, but just about as conflicted as you'd want it to be.

A new project

I've decided to put my thesis research to good use and assemble a chapter for the following book project. Of course, I first need to get my abstract approved. I'll be sharing bits and pieces of the project as it comes together. For now, here's the CFP that got the ball rolling.

We invite proposals for a collection of essays on the relationship between the history of literary history and the history of liberalism. If both concepts—literary history and liberalism—emerged in the late seventeenth century and if both concepts seem obsolete, outmoded, or eclipsed in the twenty-first century, then what can we learn from the history of their entanglements and estrangements? As abstract concepts whose modes of valuation have far-reaching and closely-felt material effects, literary history and liberalism are disciplinarily and ethically distinct—after all literary history is elitist and ties us to the culture of the past while liberalism imagines progress towards individuality, equality, and universality. Yet liberalism and literary history are mutually implicated in the secular and democratic projects of modernity, and the premise of this project is that a thick description of their shared history is both timely and possibly revelatory of the telos of that history. Does their apparently mutual demise herald a new era in both politics and culture—or does this prospect of demise constitute a recurrent, persistent feature of their ongoing history, rather than the end of their history as such? We seek to avoid rehearsing debates about aesthetics and politics, or the elite literary field versus material history, or ancients versus moderns. Instead we endeavor to historicize the relationship between literary history and liberalism, in order to uncover the factors that have tied their destinies so closely together and thereby to shed light on a present moment when the futures of both seem so uncertain. The post-humanist and post-secular turns, the focus on eco-critical and biopolitical modes of analysis, and the seemingly inexorable eclipse of literary history by cultural studies pose striking challenges to the modes of valuation and cognition that the nexus of literary history/liberalism undergirded—making analysis of this nexus all the more pressing. 

Contributions to the project might venture specific case studies in the entanglement of liberalism and literary history, or might focus more conceptually on some specific aspect of the relationship between the two. Possible topics include: 

· the tempestuous relations of literary and political epistemologies, hermeneutics, and critique
· the periodization or the temporalities of literary history and liberal history
· aesthetic judgment, ethical judgment, and the lures of disinterest
· liberal histories of the book/histories of the liberal book
· literary circulation and/as liberal circulation
· secularization, liberalism, literary history
· literary sovereignty/liberal sovereignty
· evidentiary genres
· liberalism, literary history, and ecological critique
· neoliberalism and literary history
· failure and/as resilience in liberalism and literary history
· afterlives of liberalism and literary history

UJ3RK5 - The Anglican

Julian Lynch - "North Line"