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Ore-Issue-8-Omission-V2.Pdf , 1 2 Oxford Research in English Graduate Research Journal Faculty of English Language and Literature, The University of Oxford oxford research in english Graduate Research Journal Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford https://oxfordresearchenglish.wordpress.com ISSN: 2397-2947 Editor-in-Chief william kroeger Editorial Committee 2018–19 lakshmi priya, Secretary ann ang, Peer Review Facilitator james misson, Production Editor carina rampelt, Assistant Production Editor felix taylor, Submissions Editor eleanor baker, Communications Officer sophie barber, Features Editor zachary garber alexandra braverman Special Features Reviews lakshmi priya & sophie barber Peer Reviewers ann ang, eleanor baker, alex braverman, angelica de vido, joan etskovitz, zachary garber, lillian hingley, kim hyei jin,mariachiara leteo, audrey southgate Founding Members camille pidoux callum seddon jennie cole Contents 7 Foreword Omission bill kroeger 9 ‘‘Improper words’: Silencing same-sex desire in eighteenth-century general English dictionaries stephen turton 37 Race, place, and urban space: Teju Cole and Ta-Nehisi Coates in relation to the sociology of the streets maddie mitchell 55 Becoming everything: constitutive impurity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness carissa ma 77 Publication without a Publicity of the Self: The lyric ‘I’ in Emily Dickinson and Claudia Rankine fernanda lai 97 Double Vision, Split Gaze: Prison Writing and Metatheatre susan zhang maginn 117 Reviews 133 Special Feature A Little Gay History – Professor Richard B. Parkinson sophie barber 137 Special Feature The Art of Omission in Theatrical Practice: An Interview with Professor K.S. Rajendran lakshmi priya balakrishnan 143 Notes on Contributors Foreword bill kroeger mission, more than simple absence, is a weighted term, laden with the moral and (for some) religious tone of culpability. The 2018 Oxford English Graduate Conference invoked such normative connotations, Oinviting papers about exclusions and other ‘sins of omission’, but also encouraging attention to productive, playful omissions – textual, poetic, and dramatic – gaps in scholarship and conceptual spaces ripe for critical exploration. This, the yearly conference issue of Oxford Research in English, includes some of the colloquium’s most stimulating contributions: representing both types of omission, we have attempted to create a forum where these related but often separate discourses intersect. Omission implies lack. Definitionally, it is never simply nothing, but rather a something that is missing or excluded. Concrete exclusion of facts, narratives, and experiences - a lack of accountable accuracy – thus alters personal and political histories. Many of the papers and features in this issue and the books reviewed herein address such verifiable, concrete exclusions, and perform the important work of filling in gaps by supplying untold stories or supplementing incomplete accounts. Competing ontologies, philosophies, and psychologies tend to propose common origins for such experiences of lack, developing structural hierarchies based on the norms they impose, but critics have challenged these foundations for millennia. Aristotle argued that Plato’s forms could not simultaneously instantiate and describe, for example, exposing a founding gap in Platonic idealism.1 Saussure, exploring linguistic structures, and Mauss and Levi-Strauss, documenting structures of social relationships, each identify a primary absence or 0 value that establishes equivalence, an initial signifier that makes further reference possible. In her account of this originary absence, Catherine Diehl compares poststructuralist thinkers and how they analyze the functions of ‘lack’ (Derrida) and ‘space’ (Deleuze) in establishing structuralism’s ‘finite field’ or ‘floating signifier’. 2 Apart from extremist discourses of suspicion and paranoiac 1 Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, translated by Joe Sachs, (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999), 1038b14–1038b37. See specifically Aristotle’s claim that attributes cannot be primary to the things or animals they describe, (1038b28). Also see Plato’s ‘Parmenides’, 132d4–134; Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961). 2 Catharine Diehl, ‘The Empty Space in Structure: Theories of the Zero from Gauthiot to Deleuze’, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 38.3, 93–119, pp. 97, 104–105, 106, 109. 7 foreword projections of shimmering simulacra, these theorists agree on an epistemological and social/linguistic non-convergence or non-totality, a gap between the world and how we describe it. This rupture, reiterated in object oriented ontology’s subsequent description of the object’s withdrawal from human apprehension, alerts us – as critical readers, media consumers, and citizens of the earth - that the seemingly seamless alignment of narratives with realities is always founded on omissions, of alternative perspectives and of the social dynamics constructing the hierarchies we inhabit.3 For the essays of this issue, such omissions often become a source of agency. Stephen Turton’s investigation of excluded words for same-sex desire in eighteenth century dictionaries specifies not only what was omitted, but where it could be found, and what took its place, tracing the instances and shapes of a historical exclusion. Sophie Butler’s feature interview with Egyptology Professor Richard Bruce Parkinson considers his book A Little Gay History and its companion exhibit ‘No Offence’, exploring a longer historical arc of socio-sexual norms and their impacts on artistic expression. Maddie Mitchell compares Ta-Nehisi Coates’ and Teju Cole’s experiences in the streets of Baltimore and New York, challenging de Certeau’s concept of the urban flaneur on the grounds that it fails to consider conditions faced by black inner city youth. Carissa Ma, in her descriptive theoretical analysis of Roy’s The Ministry of Untold Happiness, explores purity and grievability, potential sources of violent cultural omission and exclusion, and in another instance of multiple, intersecting omissions, Luke Doughty notes that Greta LaFleur’s The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America investigates a historical conflagration of race with sex and sexuality. Other contributions encounter concept, drama, and text, linking formal omissions with significant human impacts. Colton Valentine’s review of Daniel Wright’s Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel questions its method, structure, and characterizations of sexual identity. Lakshmi Priya interviews Professor K.S. Rajendran about the techniques and critical implications of intercultural, interepochal theatre. Fernanda Lai analyses use of first and second person pronouns in Emily Dickinson and Claudia Rankine, tracing an omission of authorial presence or ‘publicity’, and Susan Maginn explores metatheatricality in plays by Beckett and Fugard that interrogate the prison as a site of omission. Considering omissions intentional and accidental, concretely local and paradigmatically foundational, this issue of ORE calls your attention to instances of the unseen, unnoticed, and unexpected. 3 Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (UK: Penguin, 2018), p. 192. 8 ‘Improper words’ Silencing same-sex desire in eighteenth-century general English dictionaries stephen turton A literary lady expressing to Dr. J[ohnson] her approbation of his Dictionary, and, in particular, her satisfaction at his not having admitted into it any improper words; ‘No, Madam,’ replied he, ‘I hope I have not daubed my fingers. I find, however, that you have been looking for them.’1 his apocryphal tale was recounted in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1785, a year after Samuel Johnson’s death; a variation of it appeared in Beste’s Personal and Literary Memorials in 1829, in which the ‘literary lady’ was Treplaced with two ladies, but Johnson’s riposte went unchanged.2 In both versions, the implication remains the same: a reader should not seek out certain kinds of knowledge in a dictionary any more than a lexicographer should record them. The ‘orchestration of ignorance’, to adopt a phrase from Sedgwick,3 is an activity in which both the dictionary-writer and -user should seemingly be complicit, in order to suppress the transmission of any knowledge deemed to be ‘improper’. Such wilful ignorance is not simply a matter of linguistic propriety. Cameron argues that the normative treatment of language is ‘not just about ordering language itself, but also exploits the powerful symbolism in which language stands for other kinds of order—moral, social and political’.4 Imposed ignorance and silence may be used to reinforce hegemonic structures around what, or who, 1 ‘Dr. Johnson at Oxford, and Lichfield’, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle, 55.1 (1785), 288. Original emphasis. 2 Henry Digby Beste, Personal and Literary Memorials (London: Henry Colborn, 1829), pp. 11–12. 3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 5. 4 Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 25. 9 improper words is permissible in respectable discourse and reputable society, and who or what is unacceptable and unspeakable. Attempts by lexicographers at organizing the English language in dictionaries are inevitably shaped by broader social mandates about the ordering of decency and morality. In
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