Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies

Cahill, Edward; Larkin, Edward T.

doi:10.1353/eal.2016.0038

Cited by 25 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…In recent years, a resurgent interest in formalist studies of aesthetics has emerged in opposition to the narrow Foucauldian interpretative rubrics of power that have dominated the academic humanities for the last three decades. The weight of this dominance has been felt acutely in the case of literature, which is often reduced to being merely "indexes to empirical realities or discursive sources of sociopolitical ideologies and identities", as Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin put it [8]. Against this overdetermination of the aesthetic by the historical and political, a growing number of critics have attempted to reclaim a language for structures of feeling and sensibility in relation to formal objects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Enjoyment of Being Had: The Aesthetics of Masquerade in The Confidence-Man

Godley

2024

Philosophies

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Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Enjoyment of Being Had: The Aesthetics of Masquerade in The Confidence-Man

Godley

2024

Philosophies

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“…According to Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, aesthetics promises "insight into the shape and consistency of private interiority and public collectivity that defy empirical assessment; the nonrational premises out of which rational thought and action emerge; and the idealist projections that are, for the artist, the only true mea sures of the real." 17 The queer sublime foregrounds the erotic potential of "nonrational premises" and "idealist projections." This messiness speaks to the inchoate queerness animating Crayon's sketchbooks that, when taken together, demonstrate…”

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Crayon, Looking: Washington Irving and the Queer Sublime

Badley¹

2022

J19

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The truth is, we generally make love in a style and with sentiments very unfit for ordinary life: they are half theatrical and half romantic. By this means we raise our imaginations to what is not to be expected in human life.-Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Spectator, no. 479 Whether one goes by the coinage of the word "homosexual" (typically dated to 1868), the press coverage of same-sex criminal activity, or the rise of sexology, most historians of sexuality agree that the so-called invention of the homosexual 1 occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. 2 Recently, scholars have sought prehistories and prototypes of queerness avant la lettre in ways that frequently diverge from the well-trodden path of same-sex desire. From Greta LaFleur's environmental theory of sexuality to Jen Manion's "female husbands" and C. Riley Snorton's history of Black trans identity; from Natasha Hurley's exploration of circulated queerness to Travis Foster and Timothy M. Griffiths's positioning of queer thought as an outgrowth of nineteenth-century women's writing-it now seems commonplace to accept that queerness preceded the invention of the homosexual, even if, as Peter Coviello reminds us, these experimental or ephemeral forms often failed to make the cut in terms of the homo-/heterosexual binary that crystallized by century's end. 3 Within this archive of speculative queerness, one encounters what Coviello designates as "an erotic self in the twilit moment before the arrival or

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Early American Literature in the World

2018

American World Literature

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Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies

Cited by 25 publications

References 45 publications

The Enjoyment of Being Had: The Aesthetics of Masquerade in The Confidence-Man

The Enjoyment of Being Had: The Aesthetics of Masquerade in The Confidence-Man

Crayon, Looking: Washington Irving and the Queer Sublime

Early American Literature in the World

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