SAMPLE CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
ENGLISH 595 | TRAGIC ECOLOGIES
The following represent sample successful abstracts from C19 scholars at various stages of their careers – from
early to late graduate student, with a few from assistant professors. Together they can be taken as a set of
generic coordinates for what good abstracts must do and how they might do them; they are not models,
however, and as with any genre the key to writing a superb abstract is to tweak the template carefully and to
your own purposes. My endless thanks to my fellow Victorianists Lara Karpenko, Kristin Mahoney, Stefan
Waldschmidt, and Anna Gibson.
Appropriating In Memoriam in G.H. Lewes’ The Physiology of Common Life
For NAVSA Pasadena, Fall 2013, Theme: Evidence
Stefan Waldschmidt, Graduate Student, Duke University
Recent biopolitical thought is largely concerned itself with the question of how lifein-general gets sorted into various forms of qualified life—bare life, precarious life, surplus
life, organic life, spiritual life—and how that sorting process feeds back into our
understanding of what “life,” in general, is. This paper will examine how one such process of
sorting and feedback works to establish the terms of biopolitical thought between the 1850s
and the 1860s, as Victorian thinking attempts to reconcile the seeming contradiction
between the ceaselessly productive and destructive, non-teleological character of organic life
and the progressive view of life that would see the spirit as moving towards ever-moreperfect forms.
In In Memoriam, Tennyson will present the difficulty of this schism by representing
these two views of life as only metaphorically linked; for him, the process of mourning will
be the process of trying to find metaphors that would transfigure the hostility of organic life
into a progressive spiritual afterlife. The affective charge of Tennyson’s In Memorium will
conceptualize itself as coming exactly from the tenuousness of those metaphorical
connections—links that always threatens to fail and thus must be all the more carefully held.
Yet the fragility of Tennyson’s metaphors will also make his lyrics uniquely divisible. When
G.H. Lewes will quote Tennyson’s “The babe new to earth and sky” in The Physiology of
Common Life, he will be able to use Tennyson as evidence for his own view of a decidedly
non-spiritual life-in-general by simply excising those highly divisible parts of Tennyson’s
poetry that would have made the metaphorical connection.
In as much as Tennyson will be opposing spiritual life to organic life in order to
represent the difficulty of wrestling with the reconciliation of non-teleological processes with
a concept of progress, so Lewes, coming to Tennyson’s work, will be able to find a readymade version of non-teleological organic life; all that needs to be done is completely sever
what was already a tenuous metaphorical connection in order to present Tennyson’s lyrics as
evidence for the possibility of conceiving life materialistically. For, in The Physiology of Common
Life, there is no life-afterlife opposition: only life and more life, the constant reorganization
of organic processes, with anything else being dismissed as the fantasies of an outdated
romantic vitalism.
What we can learn about mid-Victorian biopolitical thought from this moment of
appropriation is how later Victorian physiology found the poetic imagery necessary to render
its materialism comprehensible. As Tennyson’s vestigial Romanticism would advance a
qualified spiritualism by holding it up against the productive life that continues all around
him, so that Romanticism already contains a view of self-sufficient, productive, and wholly
organic processes that Lewes’ materialism can present as a new picture of life-in-general.
In the Beginning, there was “Zooks”: Browning’s Poetry as Thought in Process
Abstract proposal for “Browning’s Beginnings and Endings” panel with Mary Ellis Gibson at the "Robert
Browning and Victorian Poetry at 200" Conference in Waco Texas, Spring 2013. Stefan Waldschmidt,
Graduate Student, Duke University
Many a Browning poem begins with lines that are peppered with ellipses and dashes,
stutterings and exclamations—Lippi’s “Zooks” (3), Mr. Sludge’s “Aie—aie—aie!” (16), the
Spanish monk’s “Gr-r-r” (1). This paper will ask what it means for Browning’s poetry to
begin with these strange noises: what picture of thought-in-the-process-of-working-itself-out
is Browning trying to build with such non-signifying stutters? Such noises are not the “Oh”
that would signal the beginning of Romantic apostrophe—like Wordsworth’s “O gentle
sleep!”— because they are not the prelude for an address to some external transcendental
entity. Rather, as this paper will argue, these noises are included to show that the picture of
thought his poems present is a picture that is still in its raw form: it has not yet been cleaned
up, ordered or edited, it has not been—in Wordsworth’s terms—“recollected in tranquility.”
The only picture of thought that is worth capturing for Browning is the spontaneous
overflow of emotion as it is in the process of happening.
This is because, for Browning, there is an ethics to focusing on thought as it unfolds
with all of its excesses and ruptures. Indeed, to have only the completed recollection, as
honed by poetic genius, would mean having “The end ere the beginning” (“Parleyings with
Christopher Smart” 241). Taking such a shortcut would, for Browning, be an inexcusable
weakness of mind: it would be a poetry unsuited for thought because it would circumvent
the hard process of working through thought itself. Indeed, the succinct formulation that
Browning comes to at the end of “Parleying with Christopher Smart” begins with a
characteristically stuttering “It seems as if… or did the actual chance / Startle me and
perplex?” (1-2). Thus, for Browning, in order to reach any end, we must begin with the
beginning of thought: we must begin with thought that is still in the process of being
resolved into language and still strewn with unsignifying excess and peculiar exclamations.
Detection and Sensation: Francis Galton, Wilkie Collins, and the Forms of
Personal Identity
In 1892, Francis Galton culminated his research on personal identification with his
systematic study of fingerprints, in which he incorporated remarks by the director of the French
Penitentiary Department on the advantages of finger printing “to fix the human personality, to give
to each human being an identity, an individuality that can be depended upon with certainty,
lasting, unchangeable, always recognisable and easily adduced.” 1 Forensic methods of detection
that gained in popularity from the 1870s, including Galton’s own composite photography, are
inseparable from the work of detection in “sensation novels.” While purportedly interested in
unearthing a hidden truth about individual identity, novelistic detection was primarily engaged in
“giving” or “fixing” an identity upon each “human personality.”2 By focusing on narrative attempts
to “fix” identity in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Armadale and in Galton’s forensics,
this paper reads detection as a deductive formal technology for approaching the “human
personality” that is always confronted by a set of narrative evasions rooted in a constantlychanging sensory body. In order to show the ways in which “sensation” resists the fixing forms of
detection, I explore moments of narrative breakdown in which the body’s sensory (in)capabilities
shape the unfolding of a text and represent the self as responsive, unpredictable, and not
reducible to the determinative analysis of detection. This paper challenges a tendency in studies
of the Victorian novel to treat detection and sensation as either distinct or interchangeable generic
forms. Instead, I offer a framework for understanding how these forms develop alongside one
another as interdependent and yet contradictory narrative technologies for producing personal
identity, for imagining a body characterized both by its representable physical characteristics and
by a collection of sensory processes with their own performative and narrative capacities.
Anna M. Gibson
Department of English, Duke University
anna.gibson@duke.edu
(Note, Anna is a graduate student - NKH)
1
p. 169. Finger Prints. London: Macmillan, 1892.
In drawing together Galton’s forensic technologies and Victorian fiction, I build upon the work of Ronald
R. Thomas (Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004.)
2
“How Valour burns”: Occult Nationalism in the Work of Althea Gyles
Kristin Mahoney, Western Washington University
Victory! Home! Or life with the great dead!
How Valour burns!
--Althea Gyles, “The Farm Hand” (1914)
In 1898, W.B. Yeats published an essay in The Dome on “A Symbolic Artist and the Coming
of a Symbolic Art.” The subject of the piece was an Irish artist, Althea Gyles (1868-1949), a
figure, Yeats argued, who represented “a new manner in the arts of the modern world”
arising from a circle of “Irish mystics who have taught for some years a religious philosophy
which has changed many ordinary people into ecstatics and visionaries.” In Yeats’s eyes, the
works of Gyles contained a “visionary beauty,” and the “lithe figures of her art [quivered]
with a life half mortal tragedy, half immortal ecstasy.” While her work has now been largely
forgotten, she was considered by many to be one of the most interesting illustrators and
book designers working at the turn of the century. Oscar Wilde described her as “an artist
of great ability,” and Bernard Muddiman, in his Men of the Nineties (1921), referred to her
work as the “acme of the period’s realization of the weird.” Gyles designed the cover for
Yeats’s The Secret Rose (1897) as well as the 1899 edition of Poems and The Wind Among the
Reeds (1899). Her designs, which featured iconography related to Golden Dawn rituals,
reflected her growing involvement with Yeats’s brand of Celtic occultism. As her
attachment to Yeats intensified, Gyles became one of the most prominent women associated
with Order of the Golden Dawn. Aleister Crowley’s short story, “At the Fork of the Roads”
(1909) reveals that Gyles also played a key role in the struggle between Yeats and Crowley
for control of the Order of the Golden Dawn, operating as a site of masculine competition
as the animosity between the two men escalated. Her relationship with Yeats eventually
disintegrated as a result of his disapproval of her affair with the publisher and purveyor of
pornography, Leonard Smithers, but the impress of her association with Celtic occultism
continued to be evident in her later works.
In this paper, I will examine Gyles’s illustrations and book covers from the 1890s in
relationship to the war poetry she wrote in the years following her involvement with the
Order of the Golden Dawn and investigate how the Celtic occultism of the fin de siècle
informed Gyles’s enthusiastic representation of heroism and martyrdom. As Richard
Kearney has argued, Yeats’s investment in the occult seems to have facilitated his
endorsement of Patrick Pearse’s ideology of blood sacrifice. I will consider whether the
bellicose energies of Gyles’s war poetry should similarly be understood as an outgrowth of
her interest in occult nationalism. While Yeats’s interest in the occult has often dismissed as
escapist, as a retreat from the fraught political realities of his nation’s present, recent
criticism by, for example, Claire Nally has worked to uncover the complex ties between
Yeats’s nationalist politics and his spiritual beliefs. In addition, recent work by, for example,
Alex Owen has called for a new attentiveness to the links between occultism and modernity
at the fin de siècle. I will similarly work to take seriously the role that occult spirituality
played in the processing of national politics and modern events and in turn consider how
Yeats’s occult nationalism was transmuted and revised at the hands of Althea Gyles as she
responded to escalating national antagonism at the turn of the century.
Kristin Mahoney
Department of English
Western Washington University
516 High Street
Bellingham, WA 98225
kristin.mahoney@wwu.edu
Old Guard/Avant-Garde:
Vernon Lee and the Politics of Aestheticism in the Twentieth Century
I take of my hat to the old guard of Victorian cosmopolitan
intellectualism, and salute her as the noblest Briton of them all.
--George Bernard Shaw, review
of Lee’s Satan the Waster (1920)
We belong to a generation which has—to be blunt—passed away.
--Edmund Gosse to Vernon Lee in 1906
While it might have been much neater and simpler had all the members of the Aesthetic
Movement agreed to pass away in 1901, the fact remains that figures like Vernon Lee,
Arthur Symons, and Baron Corvo lived long into the twentieth century. Though they
incorporated elements of a new aesthetic into their works, they also retained a particularly
Victorian form of aestheticism in their approach to social and political concerns. What does
it mean then for yesterday’s avant-garde to become understood as an old guard? And what
kinds of cultural critique does this temporally marginal position enable?
In this essay, I read Gospels of Anarchy (1908), a work Lee referred to as “marginalia, mere
puttings into shape of the notes taken, often with a pencil on the poor defaced books
themselves, in the course of my readings,” in relationship to the marginalia in her copies of
socialist and psychoanalytic texts archived at the British Institute in Florence. Writing in the
margins allows Lee to materially foreground what Hilary Fraser has referred to as her
“interstitial identity,” her status as a sexual and national outsider. At the dawn of the
twentieth century, Lee’s outsiderism is compounded as she becomes the representative of an
outmoded Victorian avant-garde that refuses to disappear. From this marginalized position,
Lee articulates a critique of aggravated appetites, egoism, and violence, a critique that serves
as a foundation for the pacifist stance that she adopts in the years leading up to the war.
Writing in the margins of new economic and psychological texts and writing from the
margins of the new century, Lee expresses an interrelated set of concerns about the
distortion of time and desire in the early-twentieth century. She harps on Marx’s obsession
with the future and the significance of the past in Freud’s theories of identity. Her marginal
notes foreground the fact that both Freudian and Marxist theories rely upon a bizarre and
distorted conception of temporality and that, in both Freud and Marx, the strange way the
modern individual experiences time is linked to the way the modern individual wants. This
marginalia, which stands outside the development of new and problematic forms of appetite
and aggression, serves in turn as the conceptual model for the type of thinking Lee wished to
do in Gospels of Anarchy and in the more overtly political and pacifist work that followed, such
as The Ballet of the Nations (1915).
Lara Karpenko
Assistant Professor of English
Carroll College
100 N. East Ave
Waukesha WI 53186
(262) 524-7257
lkarpenk@cc.edu
“Deformities and monstrous aberrations from nature”:
Masculinity, Pathology and the Invention of Normality
This paper proposes to interrogate the concept of pathology in terms of Victorian
constructions of appropriate masculinity. More specifically, I will examine Adolphe Quetelet
and Francis Galton's statistical creation of normal masculinity in order to suggest that the
concept of pathology is inextricably intertwined with the concept of normality. In the first
movement of my paper, I examine Adolphe Quetelet’s A Treatise on Man, (English
translation: 1842). Arguably the first statistical study to take the human body as its subject,
Treatise seeks to define what Quetelet terms “the average man.” Though Quetelet, to some
extent, does use the term “man” in a universal sense, he dedicates almost every graph, every
chart and every calculation to measuring and quantifying specifically masculine bodies. As
Quetelet equates normality with masculinity he also paradoxically defines the average man as
one that represents “the type of perfection” and thus urges men to strive for normality.
Widely read and immediately embraced by the Victorian readership, A Treatise on Man’s
influence extended far beyond the relatively limited realm of statistics. With this in mind, in
the second movement of my paper, I examine Sir Francis Galton’s proto-eugenic composite
photographs and argue that composite photography borrows from statistical analysis the
impulse to categorize and type masculine bodies on the basis of physical markers. As
normality became associated with a very narrow and very specific type of masculinity, the
concept of the pathological thus proliferated and the definition of acceptable masculinity
became increasingly narrow. Through my analysis of statistics and normativity, I thus reveal
a complex social mechanism that profoundly influenced the experience of masculine
embodiment during the Victorian era.
Lara Karpenko
Assistant Professor of English
Carroll University
100 N. East Ave
Waukesha WI 53186
(262) 524-7257
lkarpenk@carrollu.edu
Application for INCS 2011: Speaking Nature
11/1/2010
DEFINING THE NATURAL MAN:
ANTI-CONSUMERISM IN GEORGE DU MAURIER’S THE MARTIAN
This paper examines the concept of nature in terms of late-Victorian constructions of
appropriate or “natural” masculinity. More specifically, through an examination of the
George Du Maurier’s final novel, The Martian (1897), this paper will explore the fractious
relationship between Victorian popular literature and masculine embodiment. Written in
response to the excessive popularity of his second novel, Trilby (1891), The Martian heartily
critiques consumer manias and suggests that only natural, healthy, and admirable men can
resist the disfiguring effects of consumer culture. Within Du Maurier’s story, the admirable
and heartily masculine Barty Josselin, (upon receiving inspiration from a Martian named
Martia) writes a series of incredibly popular novels. Though Du Maurier vehemently
critiques Barty’s unthinking fans and represents them as deformed, disfigured and unnatural,
he nonetheless suggests that Barty’s novels still posses inherent value. The worth of Barty’s
literature is guaranteed by his stable, handsome and normalized masculine. By the end of the
novel, I suggest that Du Maurier draws on the eugenic work of Francis Galton in order to
suggest the society will be improved and vulgar consumerism will be avoided if Barty’s
natural masculine body proliferates throughout England.
This paper is part of a larger project in which I build on the work of Brent Shannon and
David Kuchta and challenge the concept of the “Great Masculine Renunciation” of fashion
and popular culture and also complicate a long standing critical tradition that conflates mass
consumerism with the feminine. Although The Martian may critique mass consumerism, Du
Maurier's very anxiety reveals the degree to which the Victorian public “naturally” connected
masculine embodiment and popular culture. Ultimately, I will argue that the masculine body
became the site over which Victorians defined, negotiated and understood mass commodity
consumption.
“Sir Richard Burton,” Orientalist: Empire, Islam, and the Politics of Nonidentity
FOR NAVSA 2004
At the heart of Edward Said’s magisterial investigation of Western empire’s
Inside/Outside logic sits Richard Francis Burton, the celebrity explorer who for Said and
later critics embodies the very “voice of European ambition for rule over the Orient”
(Orientalism 196).
But the Orientalist found guilty in that paradigm-defining work had a curious -and heretofore unexplored-- relationship to the very logic Said is most interested in
critiquing. Burton was born in Ireland, grew up in France, constantly referred to himself
as a “gypsy,” and wrote of his family that “we never thoroughly understood English
society, nor did society understand us.” He would later achieve the rank of “master” in
the radically anti-individualist system of Sufi Islam, a sect whose teachings, for Burton,
described a continual ascent through difference that would culminate, he thought, in the
complete transcendence of identity itself. The explorer later renounced the very concept
of selfhood in a series of public speeches. This context informs my readings of Burton’s
more “literary” works, which describe in even greater complexity a similar, similarly
surprising theory of non-identity.
With close readings of Burton’s most striking meditation on imperial selfhood -and lack of it--, A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah (1864),
and with attention to The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, a long poem on refracted
identity Burton composed in 1853, this paper significantly revises current narratives of
Burton’s relationship to the epistemological apparatus of British Empire. Seen in this
new light, Burton’s movement, in the Pilgrimage, through what he calls “Moslem inner
life” need not be viewed simply as the narrative of ‘passing,’ of ‘going native,’ or even of
colonial ambivalence it might first appear to be. Likewise the Kasidah: Burton’s weirdly
polyvalent, ventriloquized poem on selfhood demonstrates formal complications that are
also inscribed, I argue, on Burton as an imperial subject more generally. On close
examination, what Burton once called his “queer conviction of divided identity” in fact
resolves into a fluid contingency where mere “division” or ambivalence no longer
describes the non-identity he narrates.
In combining close readings and intensive historical work with current political
analyses of power, my paper ends by proposing that Burton’s mid-Victorian refusal of
self addresses, proleptically, contemporary theories of non-identity – that radical concept
of Adorno’s whose most interesting current interpreters include Hardt & Negri and
Agamben. My approach to Burton, however, is not a theoretical one. But by using close
literary analysis and a wide array of archival evidence, I suggest that Burton’s acrobatic
disavowals of self engage with current debates interested in imagining a way out of, or
through, current understandings of the relationship between identity and power.
The Burton emerging from my analysis, then, is far from the singleminded
apparatchik of empire Said’s and later analyses figure him to be. Rather, the non-subject
we meet on close examination of the explorer’s life and works poses important
challenges, I think, to existing narratives of Victorian empire.
NATHAN K. HENSLEY
Duke University
Specters of Morgan, or the Critical Afterlives of Imperial Historiography
For MLA 2005
This paper evaluates Lewis Henry Morgan’s influence on contemporary critical practice,
tracing what his British colleague E.B. Tylor might have called the survivals of Morgan’s powerful
nineteenth century progress narrative in early twenty-first century literary criticism. Focusing
especially on Ancient Society’s famous three-stage system (savagery, barbarism, civilization), I show that
versions of Morgan’s developmental teleology continue to animate knowledge production in its
contemporary critical forms, despite the best efforts of recent critiques to decenter such approaches.
I ask, further, whether the persistence of this paradigm doesn’t identify an important but
undertheorized problem in literary studies: Can we have criticism without progress?
My paper begins with a close study of Ancient Society’s narrative structure. Here I extend
insights into narrative ethics by Paul Ricoeur and Georg Lukacs by calling attention to the political
significance of Ancient Society’s developmental plot. I note that trends in postcolonial studies have
objected to the double-violence such progress narratives produce. According to what has become
critical common-sense, that is, whether we romanticize the epochs and people consigned to the past,
as Morgan himself did, or whether we encourage “progress” to wipe them out more quickly, violence
ensues – either “epistemic” (as Spivak calls it), or quite real.
Having established what is at stake, politically and ethically, in Morgan’s imperial progress
narrative, I show that mediated or obscured forms of his tale underwrite influential theoretical
paradigms on the contemporary left. We know that Ancient Society’s three-stage structure, materialist
method, and conceptual apparatus underpin Engels’ famous thoughts on family, private property,
and the state. My paper briefly outlines that text’s own paradoxes, but focuses in more detail on the
contemporary uses to which Morgan, via Engels, has been put. I take as my central exhibit Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s influential, putatively non-teleological Anti-Oedipus (1972, trans 1977).
With a close reading of an important section called “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men” --a section
that borrows Morgan’s categories and method exactly without citing Ancient Society-- I argue that the
ghosts of Morgan’s historiography haunt even Deleuze and Guattari’s explicitly anti-progressive,
“rhizomatic” framework.
From Deleuze & Guattari’s 1972 text I move to a pair of more recent volumes, Michael
Hardt & Antonio Negri’s Deleuzian studies of globalization and power, Empire (2000) and Multitude
(2004), books Fredric Jameson has called “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new
millennium.” To the developmental ideologies their authors read in contemporary global empire,
these works look to offer a flattened, horizontal countermodel – a “break with teleology,” as
Multitude puts it. I argue that in tension with their stated aims, however, even these works cannot
help but re-deploy a narrative logic already set forward by Morgan and inherited by Deleuze. The
specters of humanity’s march to civilization animate, still, major paradigms on the contemporary left.
I close by returning to Morgan, suggesting that we might revisit Ancient Society as the staging
ground of a particularly current critical problem, namely the precise ethical valence of “progress.” In
this context, I argue that with its unresolved vacillation between approval of “development” and
romanticization of a lost past, Morgan’s own text might function as a kind of metacritical allegory
particularly useful to us in a moment when the legacies of intellectual progress appear so
simultaneously positive and negative – and, perhaps, inevitable. Put shortly: in Ancient Society’s
ambivalent rendering of an upward passage through states of knowledge, doesn’t Morgan sketch a
plot in which we all, as critics, can’t help but participate?
NATHAN K. HENSLEY
Duke University
nathan.hensley@duke.edu