Theory to die for: lunging at the arras in Wilde’s the portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889) and James’s 'The Figure in the Carpet' (1896)

In this article I argue that Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” shares remarkable structural similarities with Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Although both works have often been read as parodies of literary critics, they both also toy with the serious possibility that the pursuit of a literary theory might resemble an erotic obsession, and might result in, not the death of the author, but the death of the critic. To better understand the ways in which Wilde and James approach literary criticism in Portrait and “Figure” I consider their shared investment in Shakespeare, who figures in both authors’ work as a larger-than-life exemplar of authorial mastery, while simultaneously functioning as a textual corpus extractable from its author, a space that opens up creative possibilities for the critic. James’s late works on Shakespeare (his short story, “The Birthplace” (1903) and his preface to The Tempest (1907)) reveal a central conflict between James’s devotion to an autonomous artwork and his desire for an all-masterful author. Reading James’s late writings on Shakespeare, in conjunction with the ways his stories about literary criticism prefigure one strand of New Criticism-- Wimsatt and Beardsley’s positing of the intentional fallacy-- can help us understand the apparent paradoxes in James’s relationship to Shakespeare, and in his portrayals of literary critics, and literary criticism

Bringing Nanda forward, or acting your age in The Awkward Age

Henry James’s 1899 novel, The Awkward Age posits the adolescent girl’s movement forward into the future as an acute problem for the fin-de-siècle. The novel’s titular pun equates the awkward, individual, in-between time of adolescence with the awkward, collective, in-between time of the fin-de-siècle, leading us both towards the turn-of-the-century ‘invention’ of the modern adolescent, and towards James’ exploration of the culturally constructed nature of age as an identity category. The conflation of individual ages with historical ones is significant; James’s novel appeared on the cusp of a new century, at a moment when adolescence was in the process of being consolidated as a modern identity category by medical authorities, educators, and psychologists. The novel’s deploying of technologies such as the telegraph and the photograph, that mediate presence, speed time up, slow it down, and freeze it, posits the adolescent girl as cognate with modernity; both of her time and ahead of it. In the novel, adolescence is an awkward, unnerving presence, and a significant absence: an identity in the process of being formulated, and an age category to come. In this article I explore the ways in which the rhetoric of modernity that resonates throughout the book relates to the awkward age of the adolescent. If we refocus our attention on age in The Awkward Age, we can begin to see the ways in which age itself becomes a creation of James’s, a staging of possible relations (sexual, conversational, economic, theatrical, performative, even utopian-collective) between older and younger interlocutors who swing between being ‘adults’ and ‘children,’ with the fin-de-siècle invention of the adolescent as a hinge for this process

Optimal claim behaviour for third-party liability insurances or to claim or not to claim: that is the question

It is proved that the optimal decision rule to claim or not to claim for damage is of the form: ‘to claim for damage only if its amount exceeds a certain limit’. Optimal critical claim sizes are derived, and a sensitivity analysis is given with respect to changes in (the parameters of) the distributions of the number of claims and the claim size

Sympathy

The Victorians inherited powerful languages of feeling as a source of right action from the eighteenth-century moral philosophers and the Romantics. Sympathy was amongst the most important of such langauges, and was powerfully mobilized as a response to the material and social challenges of industrialism. Elizabeth Gaskell made it the medium for binding within, and reaching across, class and gender boundaries in both Mary Barton and North and South. For Gaskell, sympathy is supported by the Christian principle of God’s self-giving love. However, sympathy was also, and increasingly, co-opted into secular debates. This chapter argues that, by the 1870s, sympathy was under conceptual strain as a result. Evolutionary and related theories presented it as a hardwired product of natural selection, while George Henry Lewes declared sympathy a great psychological ‘mystery’, as yet unexplained. It was, of course, George Eliot who had done as much as any other Victorian writer to redefine sympathy as a moral force for secular times. In Middlemarch, she provides her most finely textured portrait of a sympathetic woman in Dorothea Brooke. In her next and final novel, Daniel Deronda, however, sympathy is no longer an unquestioned good for the novel’s male protagonist, Daniel. But nor is it clear that sympathy can help save Gwendolen Harleth. Burdett argues that, in Daniel Deronda, Eliot pushes sympathy and realism beyond their limits, leaving both Gwendolen and the domestic novel in a fragile and unsettled place

Il meticciato nell'Italia contemporanea. Storia, memorie e cultura di massa.

L'idea diffusa degli "italiani brava gente" e della diversit\ue0 della nostra storia rispetto alla storia USA, segnata da razzismo istituzionale, si fonda sul silenziamento del passato coloniale e razzista italiano. Il ripudio della categoria di razza da parte dell'Italia repubblicana e la smentita scientifica dell'esistenza biologica della categoria non hanno cancellato la presenza della razza, formazione storico-culturale che paradossalmente esiste e non esiste. Priva di referenti oggettivi nella realt\ue0, la razza produce in essa effetti significativi, opera sia come categoria sociale e strumento di esclusione, sia come costruzione simbolica e istanza identitaria. A fronte del silenziamento del meticciato storico nell'uso pubblico della storia e nella memoria nazionali del secondo dopoguerra, il saggio sottolinea la presenza diffusa del meticciato nei prodotti della cultura di massa italiani contemporanei e ne indaga i significati con gli strumenti degli studi critici sulla razza e in prospettiva comparata tra Italia e Stati Uniti

Friendship, Tradition, Democracy: Two Readings of Aristotle

In a short speech published in 1988 entitled The Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida concluded with a distinction between two models of friendship, exemplified by Aristotle and Cicero on one hand and Montaigne on the other, and suggested that these two models lead toward different notions of politics: The Greco-Roman model [of friendship] appears to be marked by the value of reciprocity, by a homological, immanentist, finitist, and politicist concord. Montaigne (whom we are reading here as the example of a paradigm) doubtless inherits the majority of these traits. But he breaks the reciprocity therein and discreetly introduces, so it seems to me, heterology, asymmetry, and infinity . . . . Shall one say that this fracture is Judaeo-Christian? Shall one say that it depoliticizes the Greek model or that it displaces the nature of the political? (Derrida 1988: 643-4) Thus, if hesitantly and only in the form of a rhetorical question, Derrida seemed to oppose the Greek model of love between finite men with another model, foreign to the humanism of the Greeks: the Judaeo-Christian model of love of an infinite God

Freud's stepchild: adolescence in psychoanalytic history

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