What middle path can we take between New Materialism on the one hand, and historicist curation on the other? Some answers have appeared in “Material Fictions” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (31.1-2) and the collection on Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (2018), revitalizing materialist theoretical thinking across the humanities. Our panel hopes to bring these insights to bear on several nineteenth-century texts—some canonical, others less well-trafficked—to use materiality as a mode of inquiry that opens up crucial questions for the future of our collective discipline.
Spanning the period and the hegemonies of the North Atlantic, our panel includes papers highlighting a range of media and genres: novels, music, money, newspapers and other periodicals, even nonfiction naturalist writings. These different sources push us to stretch and test the way a given text can yield certain material objects for study. But beyond simply diversifying the kinds of works we read, our panel seeks to use these sources to think through larger conceptualizations of and relations to the material world— its acoustics, its vulnerabilities, its inscriptions, its affects, its politics. Our inquiries yield commentary on the ways in which ontologically unstable materialities and those often regarded as ostensibly immaterial might be approached as constitutive of nineteenth-century material culture.
This panel will be structured around four presentations, each 12 minutes, followed by a 5 minute preliminary response by Dr. Priti Joshi, and 15 minutes of Q&A. We will require all panelists to provide accessibility copies of papers, to keep presentations within the allotted time, and as an accommodation for audience members. The range of topics covered by the speakers will encourage us and the audience to take a big-picture look at materiality and how we might re-theorize it in our work. This difficulty—of finding a definition or conceptual center capacious enough to apply to this range of talks yet specific enough to hold a coherent and stable meaning—is precisely the productive problem we hope to engage.
Elizabeth Weybright will begin by placing George Eliot’s fictional representations of sonic sensation and correlative nineteenth-century discourses surrounding acoustic physics into a long narrative of musical aesthetics. In emphasizing the vibrational materiality of sound, Eliot anticipates twenty-first-century sound studies by imagining audition as a form of ethically inflected aesthetic experience. She places her characters in emphatically embodied relationships to what Michel Chion terms the “auditum,” sound as heard, encompassing, on an ontological level, the listener’s self-reflexive sense of how they hear it. Weybright argues that Eliot uses vibrational sensation to signify both sexual desire and moral impulse, suggesting that sonic materiality mediates in peculiar ways between psychological interiority and corporeality.
Dr. Vesna Kuiken will emphasize materiality that does not always center the human subject. Where nineteenth-century fiction often asks us to think of social worlds in human terms, Kuiken takes up two texts by Melville and Thaxter, which take place in the non-state place of the sea, to imagine different material aggregates and interactions. Materiality demands, marine stories teach us, that we attend not just to classifications of matter, but to temporality, animation, and ethics. Not only must materiality theory be able to account for non-urban and non-Western sites, but it must also be able to straddle the disciplinary divide between humanistic and scientific understandings of the physical world.
Sarah Ross approaches materiality by zeroing in on its vulnerabilities. Nineteenth-century Britain saw an uptick in the standardization and centralization of record-preservation, whether in the museum, the state document archive, or the Bank of England. But shifting the financial system, and relatedly the inheritance system, to paper spawned new insecurities. By looking at instances of deliberate destructive burning of financial documents in novels, Ross considers how novels know something essential about the material world and its hazards, namely that that which is preserved materially may be destroyed materially, and that any history or system which relies on the endurance of documents may be doomed to suffer from the violence to as well as of the archive.
Srimayee Basu’s presentation will move discussion to a rethinking of book history and periodical culture, and how these can lead not just to revelations about the production of particular kinds of paper or records, but also about the production of subjects—at once legal, legible, and yet fugitive. Reinvesting a materialist discourse with the political life of a given time period, Basu turns to fugitive slave advertisements of Antebellum America to ask how race was made—that is, how the human attributes of enslaved peoples were imprinted and circulated through the material medium of periodical print.
Finally, Dr. Priti Joshi will offer closing remarks that bring these disparate threads into a shared fabric of thinking. Joshi will reflect on the diverse mediums and genres of the material texts and ephemeral archives discussed by the panelists, a crucial enterprise when we consider that these objects and sites are difficult to track down, indeed, too often, invisible. How can we begin to imagine the creative work that comes with rethinking our relation to materiality? What should the future of materialist study look like, given this re-theorization, such that those absences, erasures, and exclusions are no longer common or accepted?