That individuals hold power and property in their own person is a core tenet of liberal philosophy, which is grounded in, among other concepts, Romantic theories of sacrosanct, interior vitality. Even so, sovereigntist thinking, particularly about human agency, nearly always fails to account for inherent inequalities and fundamental unresolved questions about how selves come to be understood as free. This essay contributes to the broader study of nineteenth-century sovereignty by analyzing a specific set of sovereigntist assumptions in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 short story “Wakefield.” It reveals how privacy (viewed through Wakefield's attempt to be alone) and surveillance (as the narrator's penetrating authority) operated in Hawthorne's time as bases for different varieties of people: self-sovereigns with innate ability, free agency, and determining power, and non-agential, allegorical types, those yoked to social webs and adjusted by outside forces. Making use of the unique metafictional elements of “Wakefield,” the essay draws from literary criticism as it seeks to assert literature's significance within the broader, interdisciplinary study of sovereignty.
Time and space are integral conditions of Poe's transcendent sublime. This article traces the way disparate temporal registers and uncanny enclosed spaces create dislocations that are also invitations—experiences of escape and liberation for the artist. Using “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I analyze a clash of spatiotemporal orders, showing these to be salient features of the tale and the Romantic experience. In its brevity and unity, “The Fall of the House of Usher” provides a concentrated example of the capacity of mutually exclusive registers to coexist—one linear, chronological, and rational; the other repetitive, recursive, and uncanny. The effect is “ecstatic” and formal, a matter of artistic stricture that is unique to the properties of the brief tale. This essay combines a formalist and Bakhtinian analyses of “Usher” against the broader subject of Poe's modern and Romantic sensibility. Poe utilized his period's changing experience of time as well as Romantic notions of captive and isolating space to produce a uniquely morbid yet liberating aesthetic. Stricture, tightness, and spiral—the unification of disparate, irreconcilable registers—are shown to be the formal mechanisms of conversion that produce transcendence for Roderick Usher and the shape of Poe's sublime.
This essay addresses education's paradoxical binding to disciplinary and hierarchical formulas and to social change and personal transformation, an irony uniquely extreme within the prison classroom. It juxtaposes two pedagogical models — one conventionally liberal, the other significantly more radical — to question the purpose and potential of prison education. In the process, the essay measures close reading, a textual practice that is also the hallmark of literary study, against the highest possible liberationist goals of the prison abolition movement.
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