Wendy Anne Lee

Failures of Feeling

Insensibility and the Novel

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book examines the unexpected power of dispassion to incite the passions of sentimental literature, restoring the conversation between Enlightenment philosophy and fiction to the history of emotions, and reframing our contemporary theories of mind and of the novel.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Oktober 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 153mm x 228mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 380g
• ISBN-13: 9781503615014
• ISBN-10: 1503615014
• Artikelnr.: 59318859

Autorenporträt

Wendy Anne Lee is Assistant Professor of English at New York University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1A Brief History of the Prude
chapter abstract
This chapter locates an unlikely precursor to Bartleby in the stock figure
of the prude, whose ubiquity in early print culture attests to a primary
connection in the history of the novel between insensibility and gender.
Diving into an elaborate, seventeenth-century taxonomy of female subjects,
this discussion highlights the précieuses, a fraught libertine construction
that registered the political and social discomforts generated by women's
writing. Eighteenth-century English prude fictions, this chapter argues,
extend the feminocentric threat of the précieuses (to estate, sovereignty,
and conjugality) and import the punitive script of their transformation, a
story line dedicated to the violent exposure of female feeling. The chapter
concludes with a reading of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, a
breathtaking novel that revises and redeems Descartes's account of desire
in The Passions of the Soul.
2Clarissa's Marble Heart
chapter abstract
This chapter explicates Samuel Richardson's prime demonstration of the
doomed logic of insensibility in European fiction, Clarissa; or, The
History of a Young Lady. The so-called father of the psychological novel,
Richardson distilled narrative purpose into the probing of female
interiority. Newly framed by early prude fictions, Clarissa, this section
argues, can be understood through a long-standing and deeply gendered
anxiety about dualism, or the metaphysical gaps between sensation, speech,
and action. Drawing on John Locke's concept of "indifferency" and Frances
Ferguson's crucial theorization of rape and the psychological novel, the
chapter spotlights the embedded narrative of Clarissa's life as an urban
rape survivor. Insensibility, it argues, embeds a trenchant countermodel
within a Richardsonian project.
3The Man of No Feeling
chapter abstract
This chapter turns to sentimental fiction's man of feeling, radically
reinterpreting his fine-tuned sensibility as a late iteration of sovereign
contempt. In a close look at the insensible who loomed largest over the
eighteenth century, Charles I, this discussion takes up the phenomenon of
laughter, what Hobbes controversially defined as a triumphant glorying in
the infirmities of others. Reconnecting power to humor, the analysis
focuses on Oliver Goldsmith, a Grub Street writer who exploited his
period's tipping point between satire and sentiment. Dissatisfied with what
he regarded as the distinct humorlessness of the novel, Goldsmith turned to
theater's ready-made insensible, the hero of comic misrule, Puck. Arguing
for the political transformations of that figure in early modernity, the
chapter depicts the "insensible cub" Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer
as the fictional force that reanimates sovereign laughter.
4Sense, Insensibility, Sympathy
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 features the figure of godlike dispassion who presides at the
apex of the novel form, Jane Austen. The case of Austen's insensibility
exemplifies the ways in which failures of feeling are entwined with
narrative failure and how the charge of contempt so often marks a
disruption to protocols of fiction. This analysis focuses on the curdled
plot of Sense and Sensibility, whose stalwart Elinor Dashwood has been
identified with Austen herself. Examining David Hume's Treatise of Human
Nature, a text considered to be the philosophical companion to Austen's
oeuvre, this chapter examines the qualities of resemblance, contiguity, and
causation that conduce to sympathy in Hume's account, or what in Austen's
novel makes emotion a contagion, or one sister's pain feel distressingly
like the other's.
Conclusion: Death Wish for the Novel
chapter abstract
I conclude this study of insensibility with George Eliot's Daniel Deronda,
a late nineteenth-century novel that draws together the different strands
of the Bartleby problem presented by the book: the ridiculed dream of
female sovereignty in prude fictions, the anxious and sadistic logic of the
Richardsonian plot, the inevitable burnout of the man of feeling, and the
compromising ethics of intimacy in Jane Austen. Eliot, this reading argues,
brings these elements to bear in order to euthanize a genre that relies on
the now thoroughly pathologized principle by which insensibility inflames
the passions. Featured here is the character of the Alcharisi, a brilliant
conflation of Diderot's paradoxically dispassionate actor and Defoe's
flagrantly unmaternal mother, revived by Eliot to call out the constraints
of the novel form.
Introduction: The Bartleby Problem
chapter abstract
The introduction lays out the book's theory at large through a reading of
Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," which
features fiction's most infamous insensible, a motionless young clerk who
would prefer not to. The analysis here draws on the writings of Thomas
Hobbes, Adam Smith, and contemporary affect theorists to showcase and
explain that signature feeling of unfeeling: contempt. Reframing the
Bartleby problem from a picture of capitalist abjection to a fundamental
philosophical problem about narrative, this introduction returns to the
riddle of the unmoved or prime mover as the instigator of all motions and,
it argues, emotions.