Posts in category: Fictions of Autonomy

Last year I participated in a symposium at the University of Utrecht on The Ethics of Autonomy. Many of the contributions to that symposium now appear in revised form in a special issue of the Journal of Dutch Literature, edited by the symposium organizers, Frans Ruiter and Wilbert Smulders. I contributed a response to the whole, Autonomy Proliferates. The issue is in English, but all the titles have Dutch versions as well, and I particularly appreciate the rather more poetic-sounding version of mine, “Autonomie bloeit.”

Most of the essays discuss the work of the Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans, a writer for whom literary autonomy was, as Ruiter and Smulders argue in their own contribution, a central concern. But the journal issue is really very wide-ranging, both in terms of approaches and in terms of the subject matter which the pretext of autonomy makes possible. A number of essays take up the cultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu: Ruiter and Smulders draw close parallels between Bourdieu and Hermans; Thomas Vaessens makes a provocative argument against accepting what he calls Bourdieu’s “faith in autonomy”; Laurens Ham complicates Bourdieu’s framework in his study of the continuing struggles over autonomy in contemporary Dutch literature from Multatuli to the present; and as for me, well—no surprises about my theoretical touchstones, if you know me for the fanboy I am.

That’s not to say that the contributors are all in lockstep. In addition to the controversy between Ruiter and Smulders and Vaessens about autonomy and responsibility, strikingly different views of autonomy emerge in the other essays, by Derek Attridge, Aukje van Rooden, Marc de Kesel, and Arnold Heumakers.

Hermans was a new writer for me and a great pleasure to explore, even if only in translation. His output is mostly unavailable in English; Ina Rilke has translated two of his novels, The Darkroom of Damocles and Beyond Sleep. I glance at the latter in my contribution to the special issue. The JDL special issue also includes English translations of two short pieces of Hermans’s writing: a biting manifesto, “Unsympathetic Fictional Characters” (trans. I. Rilke), and an enigmatic early story, “An Emancipation” (trans. M. Hutchison).

[Edited 12/27/15: Ham’s essay, “The Specialism of Unspecificity,” is not only about contemporary writing—nor, of course, is Bourdieu his only theoretical interlocutor, any more than he is for any of the other scholars here.]

Over the winter break came the terribly sad news of the sudden death of Daniel Albright. His own web site has a notice and a brief biography of this remarkable scholar and teacher; the Harvard Crimson also published an obituary. (If I find other notices and memorials I’ll edit this post.) I’m thinking of him and of all the people close to him.

He was my teacher for one semester in my last year as an undergraduate, when I took his seminar on Beckett and Auden (“Early Postmodernism”). I’m sorry to say I didn’t keep in touch after I graduated, but in thinking about Daniel Albright these last few weeks I’ve realized he made a big mark on me, which I wanted to briefly trace here by way of tribute.

This Thursday and Friday, I’m participating in a symposium on The Ethics of Literary Autonomy organized by Wilbert Smulders and Frans Ruiter at the University of Utrecht. The description of the event is here in Dutch; the full program is in English (pdf). I’m giving a lecture on Friday morning which I’m calling “Autonomy without Ethics: Strangers in the Literary Metropolis.” It’s based on my work in Fictions of Autonomy with some bonus material on G. V. Desani, because Desani.

Given that my principal theoretical claim is that artistic autonomy is always defined in relation to particular social and historical contexts, I’m particularly pleased to be discussing autonomy in contexts that will be quite new to me. I’ll try to post some notes on the symposium here after I return next week.

And if you’re in Utrecht, stop by…

Fictions of Autonomy is now available digitally via Oxford Scholarship Online. It’s particularly exciting to be the author of a book with a DOI: doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199861125.001.0001. I’m grateful to the anonymous (re)digitizers of the text at Oxford University Press for their work. The digital form is a clean, streamlined set of webpages with my text—not page images. The text is handily searchable (via the whole-database search), and all the citations in the footnotes are also hyperlinked to your local library catalogue. I think the physical codex is still better for serious reading, note-taking, and so on. But I would, wouldn’t I?

Yesterday I had a great discussion with the Comparative Modernisms Workshop at Northwestern about my book, Fictions of Autonomy. I’m grateful to Harris Feinsod and Rebecca Johnson for the invitation and for facilitating such a lively event. I was particularly pleased to have had undergraduates from the lit-theory interest group (with excellent, searching questions) as well as grads and faculty at the discussion. Everyone who read my book had generous-spirited, thoughtful things to say. May my book find more such readers.

After the jump, a lightly edited version of my introductory remarks, plus a little esprit de l’escalier.

One more reminder: I’ll be discussing my new book, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, with the Comparative Modernisms Workshop at Northwestern University tomorrow, Monday, January 14.

The discussion will be held at 5:15 p.m. in the Seminar Room at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities (Kresge Hall 2-370; map). Contact Prof. Harris Feinsod for copies of the advance reading from the book.

After the event I’ll post my introductory remarks on this blog.

So now that my book is in print (read it! buying links on the book page!), I wanted to indulge an urge to look back at the technical, or rather TeXnical, aspects of producing the book. I had the quixotic determination to write the book in LaTeX and to take advantage of what LaTeX can do right through production, and, through the hard work of various parties at Oxford U.P., I had the chance to do so.

This is going to be a nerdy post. You’ve been warned. I’ve also added an equally nerdy e-colophon page describing the technology I used to make the book.

My book, Fictions of Autonomy, is available at the Oxford Unversity Press display at the MLA conference taking place right now in Boston. Behold, peruse, acquire!

On Monday, January 14, 2013, I’ll be discussing my new book, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, with the Comparative Modernisms Workshop at Northwestern University. Copies of the book will be available at the event.

The discussion will be held at 5 p.m. in the Kaplan Humanities Institute Seminar Room (Kresge Hall 2-370). Contact Prof. Harris Feinsod for copies of the advance reading from the book.

[Edit 1/3/13: added room info.]

My book, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, will be published in late 2012 by Oxford University Press in the Modernist Literature & Culture Series.

Update, fall 2012: You can read more about this study on my research page and on the Oxford University Press website. You can pre-order the hardcover now from Oxford or from amazon.