Ali Madani introduces the long history of aesthetics’ role as a counterpoint to politics by turning to that period in his creative life when Edmund Spenser took time away from the allegorical mode in writing his very long mangum opus,The Faerie Queene to write something more explicitly factual, historical: A View of the Present State of Ireland. And at least in part because of the extraordinary aesthetic achievements of the former, critics, Madani shows, have neglected to consider the frank historical interests that Spenser demonstrated in the latter. Here, Madani assesses the affordances of privileging the historical as a mode of scholarly apprehension, suggesting that doing so offers an opportunity to confront more directly early modern empire and its conditioning of literary form.
In assessing the confrontation between these apparent antitheses, Jesse Cordes Selbin accelerates us back into the vocabulary most familiar to contemporary critics, while showing that vocabulary’s illuminating nineteenth century precedents. Focusing on the writings of American transcendentalist editor Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her collaborator, Samuel Grey Ward, Selbin retrieves the consciousness of the political stakes of criticism in a fashion that anticipates and even obviates the contemporary postcritical “method wars.” The uptake of German idealism in the first half-century of the early republic, according to Selbin, showcases the democratic affordances of cultivated sense perception.
Ethan Plaue, in turn, urges attention to the material history of aesthetics’ apparent cleavage from the historical—or simply, in this case, the news. Of particular interest in his account is the speeding-up of the news industry in the late nineteenth century, exemplarily in the postbellum United States. Focusing on a little-read novel by Henry Francis Keenan, The Money-Makers, Plaue attends to the self-consciousness that this novel and its contemporaries shows of the importance of money-making in determining style—and not only journalistic style, but the style that common readers appreciate in novels, too. Observing this, Plaue proposes that we can most clearly see these changes in attending to how novels depict scenes of “common joy,” and, furthermore, that the American novel of the nineteenth century learns from the modern journalistic mode how to bring the common joy into view.
Karen Steigman, finally, traces the exhaustion with history into the experimental minimalism of the late twentieth century and its elision-happy style. Steigman shows how prose fiction writers like Didion, Adler, and Hardwick developed an alternative novelistic style marked by a poetics of aphorism, parataxis and white space. “Female paranoia” is one name for this turn in an era marked by stagflation, conspiracy, and suspicion of the feminist second wave. Against Martin Amis’ dismissal of this style as one running out of steam, Steigman argues that the formation of the seventies experimental minimalist novel is in fact a crucial instance in the literary history of aesthetic exhaustion, one that continues in recent works of prose fiction by writers like Kate Zambreno, Jenny Offill, and Sarah Manguso.
In her synthetic remarks as presider, Ana Schwartz will invite respondents to engage with the effects of history on the literary archives from which panelists have drawn their insights--on the access these authors' contemporaries may not have had to historically enduring representation given categories like race, gender, class. Following insights from Black Studies and Indigenous studies, she will further invite panelists to speculate on the aesthetic forms other than writing these marginalized thinkers and critics might have deployed.