Free Indirect Filmmaking

Balfour examines how Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, “arguably the best adaptation of an Austen novel for the silver screen,” comes closest formally to “revivifying” cinematically the “temporary uncertainty” of Austen’s signature stylistic innovation, the blending of “third- and first-person perspective in a single sentence, improbably conjoining objective and subjective elements in one and the same utterance.”

The Walter Scott Experience

Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.

Goya’s Scarcity

Clark meditates on the Spanish artist’s “unsparing vision of the degradation of humanity.” Clark not only revisits the images of humiliation, torture, and horror that engraved in this series, he asks what it means to “think Goya” today, a Goya who “imagines the worst and dwells with it.” Clark not only looks at the artist’s images but reads them, including the simple but arresting caption about seeing that Goya affixes to the engravings: “I saw it” (Yo lo vi). Clark’s Goya is the artist who not only confronts us with a horror to behold but who demands that we tarry uncomfortably with the images we behold and with the act of beholding. Clark concludes with a reflection on the notion of the political funeral of ACT UP as a form of mobilization profoundly proximate to the kind of thinking that Goya allows.

Painting Theory

Redfield examines Tansey’s iconic “theory paintings,” in particular the famous picture which depicts Derrida and de Man poised together in an “ambiguous dance-struggle” on a precarious precipice above an abyss that invokes visual representations of the Romantic sublime. As Redfield puts it, “the space-time of Derrida and de Man’s impossible encounter is that of a difficult, ambivalently agonistic act of reading.” Redfield demonstrates that Tansey’s painting is something much more than a “sign of the times,” not merely a hyper-realist representation of “theory in America” circa 1990.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Here, Now

“Willing Suspension” is, among many other things, the revisiting of a principal figure and phrase of the British Romanticism that constituted Spivak’s own critical point of departure. “Folded together (com-plicit), not just face-to-face with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Spivak reviews this Romantic complicity, the interpolated “heres” and “nows” of a critical trajectory stretching from Calcutta to Columbia. “Under the sign of the hurricane lantern,” Spivak follows the expedited route in Coleridge from “the willing suspension of disbelief” to “poetic faith,” one only made “complicit in dreams.”

Endymion

Jarvis explores, or more precisely, “tumbles into” the “deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques” of a “masterpiece” of “simultaneous archaism and innovation.” As a “slap in the face” of contemporary “public taste,” Keats announces with Endymion a “poetics [that] remains to be written.” Indeed, the craft of the poem might be a measure of its contemporaneity in that it opens onto possibilities of the “now” that are not reducible to its historical values.

Here There Is No After (Richter’s History)

Guyer examines Gerhard Richter’s painterly debts to Romanticism in general and to Friedrich in particular as a means of exploring the traumatic representations of history and the historical representations of trauma. Guyer zeroes in on Richter’s history paintings, specifically the 18.October 1977 series based on photographs of the Baader Meinhof Group.

The Pathology of the Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life

At once engaging de Man and revealing the ambivalent moves between futurity and non-development which saturate that famous reading, Edelman uncovers in Shelley a historical pathologization of the turn to life, and its attending complications. As a subtle critique of recent theoretical valuations of life in both Romanticism and biopolitics, Edelman argues for a tropic dismantling of the necessity of “life”: Shorn of the future-bound elements of those discussions, life is considered otherwise in terms of a darker movement that cannot be lived and yet at the same time, is inextricable from what we think normative “life” might be.

Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post-Romantic Literature

Mitchell’s essay explores the modes in which the machinations of the Godwin-Malthus debate illuminate Shelley’s novel; and it attends to the ways that the “uncanny resurrection” of that debate has made its own unlikely u-turn in the two-way street of contemporary popular political discourse.