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Epistemology and Affect in Literary Studies

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Epistemology and Affect in Literary Studies I’ve Got a Bad, Bad Feeling: Epistemology and Affect in Literary Studies A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Amy C. Fairgrieve IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Andrew Elfenbein, Adviser April 2020 © Amy C. Fairgrieve, 2020 i Acknowledgments To my committee members. To Andrew Elfenbein, who helped me discover what I was actually interested in, and whose feedback on my work has been consistently top- notch. To Brian Goldberg, who has been so good at helping me understand what my own writing is about, and who has been a model of good humor and humanity in academia. To Amit Yahav, whose generosity and scholarly rigor have both impacted me directly and modeled a path for my own growth. To Juliette Cherbuliez, who takes graduate students seriously, a simple fact that mattered greatly to me as I was starting my dissertation process, and who showed me how to be ambitious and human at the same time. To my mom, Nancy Fairgrieve, who has been there all along the way, cheering me along and reminding me how capable I am. And to my dad, Jim Fairgrieve, who has supported me throughout my degree through lots of kind and patient listening to my descriptions of each step in this process. To my in-laws, Clyde and Sandy Andrews, whose enthusiasm and diligence in their own work is so admirable, and who have welcomed me into their family with kindness and generosity. To the staff at Common Roots café, whose provision of a sunny and welcoming place to hunker down and work has been invaluable. To Wes Chapman, whose humanity, curiosity, and intelligence showed me the kind of person I wanted to become. He spent many, many hours with me, and I am a better scholar and human being for it. To Bryan Plucar, whose consistency and care have been invaluable for both the completion of this dissertation and, more importantly, my own well-being. ii To my friends, many of whom sat across from me typing away at their own dissertations as I wrote this, and all of whom made it possible for me to complete it. To Yon Ji Sol, Abhay Doshi, Sungjin Shin, and Jennifer Jodell, whose presence and friendship brightened my time in graduate school. To Kate Krieg, whose whip-smartness, no-nonsense attitude, and unrelenting care have carried me through good times and bad. To Jenna Dreier, who is a model for me of intelligence, toughness, and professionalism, and who has a gift for making me feel seen. To Elena Gambino, who helped teach me what it means to be a generous, present friend. I have more integrity and am a smarter, more observant person because of her. To Katie McCarthy, who I can’t even write this sentence about without tearing up, and whose insistence on pursuing her work with intelligence and ambition without sacrificing care and community has been a lesson to me many times over. To Kristina Popiel, who has stuck with me with loyalty through all things, and whose silliness and ability to make us all laugh is unmatched. To Zoë Rodine, my work buddy for the final day of this dissertation; and whose enthusiasm for friend times, loyalty, and abundance of good sense have buoyed me up again and again. And to Fio Haire, who met me in the crazed state of working full time while dissertating and became friends with me anyway; they are an island of brightness and care in an often- difficult world. To my partner, David Andrews, who has helped me weather every spiral of doubt and rejoice in every moment of joy. He has cooked, he has proofread, he has offered hugs, he has reassured me, he has encouraged me to take the day off. Honestly, it might be faster to list the few things he hasn’t done than to try to enumerate all that he has. iii Table of Contents Introduction: Pleasure in the Midst of Apocalypse 1 1. Made, Making, Makeable: Epistemological Pleasure in Wordsworth and 15 Literary Criticism Now 2. Janeites, Critics, and the Contradictions of Nostalgia, Then and Now 54 3. Anxiety in the Archive: Carlyle’s Editor in Sartor Resartus and 99 Literary Critics Now 4. The Spectre of Uncertainty in The Mysteries of Udolpho and 139 Literary Criticism Now Bibliography 181 1 Introduction: Pleasure in the Midst of Apocalypse This dissertation project was born out of a question that dogged me during the middle portion of my doctoral degree: “is anyone getting any joy out of this?” After all, particularly for graduate students and early career scholars, the professional prospects of this field are grim. Since, as Leonard Cassuto has pointed out, “most prospective graduate students did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday” and know the bleak truth about the state of the field, it stands to reason that most of us pursue it professionally because we have found some aspect of studying literature pleasurable, joyful, or nourishing (qtd. in Pettit, 8). Many may continue to do so throughout their academic careers, but if that’s the case, I felt at a loss to find that pleasure manifested in the work of most of the critics I was reading. Literary studies, I thought, operates by a set of rules and assumptions very different from those of lay-readers—but in losing some of the permissions of uncritical reading and interpretation, must we also lose all of the pleasures? What’s important to me in this question comes from the immense pleasure that I’ve experienced in my own reading life—academic and otherwise—butting up against what I perceived to be the affective state of the field, a state that I found at best lacking the joyfulness and pleasure I had previously associated with reading and interpreting literature, and at worst detrimental to the health and well-being of its practitioners. Since then, the focus of my work has moved beyond a search for pleasure in literary-critical work to encompass a broader range of affects. In moving beyond addressing a perceived lack of pleasure in literary studies, I also moved beyond a focus on ideological critique, a focus that began from my adventures with critics like Rita 2 Felski, Lisa Ruddick, and Eve Sedgwick,1 all of whose work features recurrently in this dissertation, and all of whom have argued that techniques of ideological critique generate negative affects. Although this dissertation takes as its starting point conversations that claim critique’s role in producing negative affect, my goal in writing it is not merely to add another voice to a growing chorus advocating for changes in literary studies that would lead to more positive and less negative affect. Rather, I consider a number of points of connection between literary-critical epistemology—what constitutes knowledge in literary studies?—and literary-critical affect—what collective feelings, emotions, and moods do our interpretations produce?2 The critics I’ve cited above take one particular epistemological assumption—the assumption that texts harbor ideological underpinnings that must be exposed (that creating literary-critical knowledge means discovering and describing these underpinnings)—and connect it with a set of similar affective outcomes—paranoia, suspicion, and other affective states that come along with assuming something is always hidden and that negative surprises are always lurking. While literary studies generally operates from English departments and therefore might appear to outsiders to be a unified field, many critics still don’t agree on the basics of what literary 1 While these critics and a number of others appear recurrently throughout my dissertation, I don’t mean to argue here that they’re necessarily representative of the field as a whole. Rather, their frequent appearances in this dissertation speak to their shared concerns with the question I started this dissertation wondering about; these scholars are concerned with why there’s such a lack of joy and pleasure in literary studies. As I admit at the end of this introduction, the source of the affective state of the field goes beyond the shared epistemological and methodological commitments of any particular corner of literary studies. 2 I use the term “affect” broadly throughout this dissertation to include emotions, feelings, and moods that can generally be described as either positive or negative. While affects are experienced by individuals, and while I frequently write about them as such, the impetus for this project also came from thinking about affect collectively, and of negative affect in particular as a pervasive state of the field, a practice not uncommon in the critics whose work I address here. 3 knowledge should be.3 In my dissertation, I aim to examine some critical assumptions about what literary knowledge is and how we should go about making, discovering, or generating it (the possibility of many metaphors for how literary-critical knowledge comes into the world is key here), and the fact of this variability is itself important in shaping my dissertation’s place in the literary-critical conversation I’m jumping into: literary studies is broader and more varied than critique, and the many types of assumptions we find there about literary knowledge help shape the affective possibilities of the field. Rather than singling out one particular epistemological position with its accompanying methodological commitments (the assumption that ideology consistently masks itself and the resulting set of practices labeled alternatively as “critique,” “symptomatic reading,” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion”), I diverge from other critics by exploring several different assumptions and practices in literary studies that impact affective outcomes in the field.
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