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Lauren Goodlad: The
Way We Historicize Now
Friday 1 February, 2013
4 - 6pm, $0
4 - 6pm, $0
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4406
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4406
This lecture draws on a forthcoming study, The Victorian
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty and Transnational Experience, to
reflect on the emergence of neoformalist, “descriptive,” and “surface”
approaches to reading literature and culture, inspired partly by Bruno Latour’s
ontological turn to actor-network theory. As a study of realism, The Victorian
Geopolitical Aesthetic is itself a species of neoformalism but one that resists
the idea that contextualization is a fatal distraction from “what is in plain
view” (Felski). Both deeply synchronic and invested in the importance of
elucidating globalization’s longue durée, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic
looks at serialized realism in its nineteenth-century as well as present-day
instantiations. Although Victorian liberalism and today’s neoliberalism differ
substantially, both share a fascination with the trope of the racialized alien
within, a figure conducive to the realist narratives of capitalist
globalization of Gustave Flaubert, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and today’s
“quality” television. The call for an ethically and aesthetically attentive
critical practice is most welcome; but, like a swing of the pendulum, a too
adamant rejection of “suspicious reading” reproduces a new "paranoia"
without attending the substance of Eve Sedgwick’s judicious mid-90s critique.
By helping both to form histories and historicize forms across spatial networks
and long and short durations of time, the notion of the geopolitical aesthetic
works against the critical stalemate that pits a surface-focused ethics of
reading against a depth-focused politics of reading.
