Paterian Cosmopolitanism: Euphuism, Negativity, and Genre in Marius the Epicurean

In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of "Euphuism" in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while simultaneously subjecting those discourses to an intensely self-reflexive process of questioning and scrutiny, performing what G. W. F. Hegel famously called “the labor of the negative” upon his own theory of literary style. By doing so, Paterian Euphuism fundamentally disrupts the logic that underlies any cultural category that threatens to become solidified or essentialized. In Marius, these categories not only include Arnold and Tylor’s racial thinking, but also the literary form of the historical novel

“Sinister Exile”: Dionysus and the Aesthetics of Race in Walter Pater and Vernon Lee

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic's role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater's “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee's “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanuel Kant's understanding of race as a matter of aesthetic perception, yet call into question his attempt to maintain distinct and essential racial categories. By affirming the universality of anti-rationalistic Dionysian experiences, Pater and Lee interrogate the racial logic of Kantian aesthetics on primarily aestheticist grounds, as part of their commitment to dismantling rationalistic intellectual frameworks that place unnecessary limits upon our perceptions of the world and of each other

Weird Sex: Teleny and the History of Sexuality

In this article, I argue that that a close examination of the most sexually explicit scenes in the anonymous gay pornographic novel Teleny (1893) reveals that they do not anticipate the bourgeois, individualistic liberal gay subject described by Michel Foucault, but are instead more closely related to the cosmic horrors found in the genre of weird fiction. The novel represents all sexual acts as ‘passions full of rage and hatred’ that are inscribed in a discourse that forecloses the possibility of sexual liberation through the rights-based logic of liberalism. Its very raison d’être as an explicitly pornographic text is to inscribe, in vividly grotesque terms, the destructive logic of sexuality itself, forcing readers to think beyond the binaries of man/woman, gay/straight that were hallmarks of Victorian social and scientific discourse. That a novel demonstrates this level of awareness at the supposed inaugural moment of modern homosexual identity should give historians of sexuality pause. Teleny invites us reimagine the history of sexuality not as a teleological movement away from the repressive hypothesis, but instead as a constantly reiterating investigation of desire’s inherent capacity for destruction

Teaching Queer Theory beyond the Western Classroom

This article develops a theory of postcolonial queer pedagogy through reflections on teaching nineteenth-century literature at the National University of Singapore. Students draw on their experiences living in a culture torn between liberal and illiberal tendencies and recognize that such contradictions exist in both the Western and non-Western world

Negative Eroticism: Lyric Performativity and the Sexual Subject in Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W. H."

This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde's novella "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel's performative theory of lyric negativity to advance his homoerotic reading of William Shakespeare's sonnets. This reading expresses the insight Wilde gains from Hegel's theory: namely, that language's limited ability to capture the truth of erotic desire need not undermine the fundamental perdurability of individual subjectivity. In contrast to much recent work in queer theory, Wilde's novella demonstrates the ability of homoerotic desire to ground, rather than undermine, a notion of reflective freedom

“The rarest, most complex & most lately developed form of aestheticism”: Olive Schreiner, decadence, and the aesthetic education of the senses

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her own position as a progressive woman writer from the global periphery. While she rejected the exclusivity, individualism, and celebration of sensual indulgence for its own sake found in much canonical Decadent writing, she was nevertheless inspired by its deployment of the aesthetic to retrain the body to appreciate alternatives to a sensus communis of the kind described in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). She saw Decadence encouraging the discovery of new ways of perceiving reality beyond the apparent “common sense” of Victorian liberal humanism. Like the Decadents, but in her own way, Schreiner challenged the aesthetic norms that helped to secure the hegemony of bourgeois European culture, contributing to the late nineteenth century’s broad eruption of interest in art’s role in both producing and contesting the prevailing liberal order

Unsettling the Normative: Articulations of Masculinity in Victorian Literature and Culture

This article provides an overview of the academic study of Victorian masculinity. It argues that the pioneering work of feminist and sexuality studies scholars in Victorian studies during the 1970s and 1980s made it possible to discuss manhood critically as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It then presents a reading of major works on Victorian masculinity from the 1990s, organized around two major themes: studies that brought to light and analyzed a suppressed history of masculinities that departed from cultural norms (especially homosexual masculinity), and studies devoted to the reassessment of mainstream Victorian manhood. It concludes by looking at a selection of work from the past decade in order to outline recent developments in the field. These studies, which have been able to take for granted that manhood is a valid and coherent subject of inquiry, have been able to integrate the study of masculinity into a variety of Victorian topics, even though there are now fewer works devoted exclusively to masculinity

E.M. Forster, the Clapham Sect, and the Secular Public Sphere

Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth-century evangelical Anglicanism set in motion a historical trajectory that led secular modern intellectuals to retreat into their own privacy, a position exemplified by Forster’s contemporaries in the Bloomsbury Group. One can thus look back to A Passage to India (1924) and understand how the novel’s spiritual themes articulate a politically relevant alternative both to Clapham’s rationalized religiosity and Bloomsbury’s secular insularity. Forster depicts the Hindu religious festival of Gokul Ashtami as promising an alternative form of social cohesion that resists translation into secular, rational language

Do Queer Theory and Victorian Studies Still Have Anything to Learn from Each Other?

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick's late-career turn to the more modest notion of “reparative reading,” strong knowledge claims are necessary to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that systematically renders both racism and heteronormativity invisible. Rereading Epistemology in light of postcolonial theories of comparison, I argue that, although Sedgwick does not address how the late Victorian “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” takes place within the overall colonial system of power, she nevertheless inhabits a critical position remarkably similar to what Walter Mignolo calls “the border epistemology” of “decolonial thinking.” This entails making universalizing claims that promote the emancipation of disenfranchised groups but also rejecting the imperialist fantasy of critical neutrality in favor of political commitment and historical self-awareness. I end by putting the Sedgwick of Epistemology in dialogue with critical race theorist Sylvia Wynter to suggest how scholars might integrate their respective critical approaches by analyzing the figure of “the human” in Victorian literature and culture

A biophysical model of cell adhesion mediated by immunoadhesin drugs and antibodies

A promising direction in drug development is to exploit the ability of natural killer cells to kill antibody-labeled target cells. Monoclonal antibodies and drugs designed to elicit this effect typically bind cell-surface epitopes that are overexpressed on target cells but also present on other cells. Thus it is important to understand adhesion of cells by antibodies and similar molecules. We present an equilibrium model of such adhesion, incorporating heterogeneity in target cell epitope density and epitope immobility. We compare with experiments on the adhesion of Jurkat T cells to bilayers containing the relevant natural killer cell receptor, with adhesion mediated by the drug alefacept. We show that a model in which all target cell epitopes are mobile and available is inconsistent with the data, suggesting that more complex mechanisms are at work. We hypothesize that the immobile epitope fraction may change with cell adhesion, and we find that such a model is more consistent with the data. We also quantitatively describe the parameter space in which binding occurs. Our results point toward mechanisms relating epitope immobility to cell adhesion and offer insight into the activity of an important class of drugs.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure