Romantic Microethics

Ethical thought typically aims to provide a general account of the good. This essay explores a form of localized ethical attention through British Romantic writing that eschews that aspiration, privileging individual cases in all their detail and particularity. This form, which I term “microethics,” is small in two senses, permitting extremely close observation of individual cases and limiting itself to equally small conclusions. It is most recognizable in poetry but recurs across fiction, drama, and philosophical prose. Considering such thinking allows us to assess and extend recent arguments for the value of Romanticism's small and marginal forms. While Romantic microethics develops in opposition to emerging utilitarian thought and the politically repressive conditions of the 1790s, it anticipates a range of later forms, from Adorno's ethical fragments to deconstruction to anthropological method. At once literary and philosophical, it binds both writing and reading practices to acts of singular attention.

Fetal Personhood and Voice in Medieval French Literature

This essay examines medieval French literary representations of fetal speech and proposes a new understanding of medieval conceptions of personhood. Placing passages from the Roman de Fauvel, Histoire de Marie et de Jésus, Pelerinage de Jhesucrist, and Tristan de Nanteuil in conversation with elements of thirteenth-century theological, encyclopedic, and scientific discourses, as well as with contemporary sound studies and theories of the voice, this essay shows that emergent human personhood is constructed in medieval texts as an audible social phenomenon. Medieval personhood is a notion reliant on sound and speech, and thus on the presence of an audience: a person is a composite of body and soul occupying a social and vocalic space shared with other persons. This relational understanding allows for a redefinition of personhood: not as a quality originating at a fixed point in human development but as a social and sensory experience.

Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form

This essay contests the antinarrative foundations of queer literary studies. Antinarrativity understands narrative as a conservative form that abets heteronormativity by imposing a coherence and linearity on subjectivity and meaning. By contrast, this essay reframes narrative as a relational form rife with affordances for figuring and sustaining queer bonds. I trace these affordances through contemporary queer kinship narratives, including Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and Renee Gladman's Calamities. These texts reveal unexpectedly queer potentials within address, contiguity, closure, and even linearity, which queer theory misses when it defines narrative as inherently teleological and when it locates queerness primarily in transgressive ruptures. This essay discovers queerness instead within mundane and messy attachments that endure across time and space. Queer narrative theory thus emerges in this essay as a relational formalism well-suited to debates about the shapes queerness takes now.

Springtime for Ulysses

Why did Mel Brooks name one of the main characters in The Producers (1967) after James Joyce's Leopold Bloom? Tracing the meanings of that name over the course of a half century, from Joyce's Ulysses (1922) to the stage adaptation Ulysses in Nighttown (1958) to Brooks's film, illuminates how the landmark modernist novel not only acquired outsize significance for American Jewish readers but in fact became a Jewish text. Having affiliated itself with highbrow Joycean modernism in a bid for respectability, Jewish culture discovered in the source of that respectability something not so highbrow and hardly respectable at all: an enjoyable perversity rooted in popular comic performance. The Jewish form and content of both Ulysses and The Producers turn out to celebrate ethnic, racial, sexual, and class difference in defiance of Christian norms of taste, health, and citizenship; and it is in Brooks's popular citation of the literary that this defiance becomes visible.