This panel explores nondualist approaches to early modern English literature: ways of reading that resist the oppositional polarities through which we often see the world, including spirit vs. matter, mind vs. body, subject vs. object, correct vs. incorrect, liberating vs. oppressive, self vs. other. It interrogates how dualistic assumptions structure our critical conventions and reading practices. For example, we tend to impose distinctions between criticism and creative writing; between history and speculation; and between past and present. What might it mean, what interventions might it produce, to release ourselves from these dualist assumptions and habits?

Recent theoretical work has demonstrated the necessity of querying a dualistic worldview centered on the human subject, and the beliefs that have conditioned it over the past three centuries. Early modern texts are a generative site for these emergent lines of thought, before the ascendancy of Cartesian dualism occluded alternative formations (many of which persisted, but became harder for later eyes to perceive). We are particularly interested in questioning literary history’s privileging of a linear causality that sets the past and present apart in a dualistic relationship -- at times presuming a narrative trajectory of progress, and at other times idealizing the past. How might disrupting the assumption of linear temporality bring into view other kinds of productive relationships that emerge across -- or outside of -- time? How does linear historical time fall short in making visible all that there is to be noticed and experienced in a literary text?

Our three papers partake in nondualist methodologies, calling into question binary oppositions and problematizing normative hierarchies of knowledge production. We consider what might be gained from a temporally queer methodology that authorizes intertextual readings across disparate historical contexts. We also ask what views of the past are opened up by relinquishing our ability to know past or present. Moving beyond a wish to make texts “talk to each other” across time, these papers represent a deeper methodological grappling with the temporalities that inform literary criticism. We seek to take account of how the models of historical causality on which our discipline has relied have a politics, one that is ripe for interrogation and disruption. We ask what alternative models might bring to light, and to what ends.

The presenters will each give 15-minute papers, leaving ample time for discussion. Christine Varnado’s paper engages with the theory of feminist physicist Karen Barad, who posits that queerness can be understood to reside “in the very nature of spacetimemattering,” to parse the figuration of apparitions, visions, and hallucinations on the early modern stage (Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet) and in poetry (Donne’s lyrics). Barad’s quantum theory offers a radical reworking of the idea of difference itself, informed by Derrida, in which space and time, “past” and “future,” are iterative, enfolded phenomena: not pre-existing distinctions, but dynamic material entanglements. Causality, then, is not unidirectional, but rather takes collaborative, uncanny forms. Varnado ultimately argues for using apparitions, and the questions of materialization and interpretation they pose, as methodological portals to new models of time and causality not yet articulated, but intuited, in premodern texts.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt considers how early modern fiction furnishes a model for criticism by providing access to different metaphysical worlds, through its affinity to dreams, psychedelic drugs, and altered states of consciousness. She examines how A Midsummer Night’s Dream theorizes fiction as a portal between coexisting worlds, releasing us from the strictures of time and space. She then demonstrates how an intertextual reading of the play against Helen Oyeyemi’s 2015 What’s Not Yours Is Not Yours illuminates a similar reliance on portals and keys as devices that expose the co-presence of multiple realities and the artificiality of dualist boundaries that attempt to distinguish fiction from reality.

Lauren Shohet engages a different kind of intertextual reading practice by examining the ways that Philip Pullman’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century His Dark Materials spins its speculative cosmology from inherited texts, including the works of Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Calvin, Luther, and Leibniz. Shohet argues that Pullman offers a model of queering the central categories of this panel – temporality, causation, subjectivity, ontology – by playing out a range of historical counterfactuals that unfold the consequences of moving some less-traveled early-modern roads from the periphery into the center. Ultimately, His Dark Materials goes beyond asking “what if” to also reveal ways that occulted possibilities queerly persist in mainstream Western modernity, challenging crisp or uni-directional distinctions.