North Carolina had been stolen, and its compromising contents soon turned up in colonial newspapers. As the confidential business of imperial administrators entered the public thoroughfares of print culture, the British Empire's control over communication seemed fragile and incomplete. More than two hundred years later, state secrets of the American empire have been exposed across digital superhighways, thanks to the insouciant journalism of WikiLeaks. It is perhaps more predictable than ironic that the twenty-first-century nation-state that emerged from those eighteenthcentury colonies now finds itself unable to regulate the dumping of confidential cables involving everything from military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to unguarded statements from Tony Blair and Hillary Rodham Clinton. To date, the most damaging material released by WikiLeaks has been decrypted video footage of a US Apache helicopter firing upon and killing a Reuters journalist and several others in a public square in Iraq. 1 The point of this historical collision is not to make WikiLeaks appear old-fashioned, nor is it to make eighteenth-century correspondents out to be precursors of digital activists. Rather, by drawing together the handwritten letters of mercantilist functionaries and electronic communiqués from what Manuel Castells calls "the network society," this essay seeks to Bob Levine and Mark McGurl provided generous feedback that greatly aided the development of this article. I would also like to thank the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for its recommendations and guidance. 1. The video is widely available on the web, most notably at collateralmurder.com.
By examining the repeated appearances of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” at Occupy Wall Street protests, this essay examines public modes of literary criticism. In calling upon “Bartleby,” how does Occupy Wall Street interpret and make use of American literature? If the demonstrators who invoked “Bartleby” were not interpreting or analyzing the short story in ways that were immediately recognizable, what then were they doing with it? The essay’s aim is not to read the protests but rather to read how Occupy reads. It is an endeavor that also entails some reflection about how professionally trained readers read. Taken together, these inquires can illuminate some important differences between activist citations of “Bartleby” and the protocols of professional literary criticism, which are often seen as proximate to political activity, if not political activity themselves.
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