Papers by Cindy Weinstein
A New Literary History of America, 2012
When Pierre was published one year after Moby-Dick, expectations were high. Readers expected—and ... more When Pierre was published one year after Moby-Dick, expectations were high. Readers expected—and Melville delivered—adventure, humor, and brilliance. Magnificent and strange, Pierre is a richly allusive novel mirroring both antebellum America and Melville’s own life.
American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 2008
Cindy Weinstein's Introduction considers the novel's autobiographical, historical, and li... more Cindy Weinstein's Introduction considers the novel's autobiographical, historical, and literary contexts, and the tension between the seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century sensibilities. It also examines how its themes intersect with women writers of the time.
Page 1. THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HARRIET BEECHER STOWE Edited by Cindy Weinstein % Page 2. Page... more Page 1. THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HARRIET BEECHER STOWE Edited by Cindy Weinstein % Page 2. Page 3. The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher ...
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2010
Jane F. Thrailkill's Affecting Fictions not only dares to commit the affective fallacy; she insis... more Jane F. Thrailkill's Affecting Fictions not only dares to commit the affective fallacy; she insists on the intellectual necessity of doing so given the consistency with which texts of American literary realism collapse any clear-cut distinctions between the mind and the body. The "mindful corporeality of affective experience" (7) and "the interanimation of the human mind and body" (8) in works ranging from Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner to Kate Chopin's The Awakening to Henry James's The Wings of the Dove demand a theoretical position, which is also deeply historicist, that recognizes the key role played by emotions in navigating the complicated circuitry of the mind and body. "What happens when we feel our way into works of fiction?" (8) is the problematic that organizes Thrailkill's account. Indeed, one the most satisfying aspects of this analysis-at least to this historically trained reader-is that it is also the question posed and probed in the novels themselves, as well as in the vast historical archive ranging across Williams James (Affecting Fiction's putative hero), John Dewey, and Arthur Schopenhauer, to name just a few, that Thrailkill brings to bear in her readings. Thrailkill's contribution to our understanding of American literary realism is significant for many reasons. First, she does a brilliant job of demonstrating the absolute link between her theoretical defense of the affective fallacy and the philosophical tradition of radical empiricism that underwrites that defense. In addition, she has current developments in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind on her side. The writings of Antonio Damasio and Daniel Dennett, for example, are ably enlisted in order to interpret texts in relation to a "neurologically networked human body with its astonishing capacities for thought and appreciation" (21). Second, she develops a new model for reading realist texts, one that consistently establishes these texts in relation to the language of aesthetics and, in doing so, marshals a powerful argument against a critical approach that "associates [literary realism] with cultural work rather than aesthetics, with objectivity rather than subjectivity, and with the rational mind instead of the feeling body" (21). It is not that Thrailkill is against the idea of literature doing cultural work, but as is the case with a new wave of literary criticism that focuses on aesthetics, her analysis does not begin with the assumption that "cultural work," Jane Tompkins's key term for the interventions made by sentimentalism in the antebellum period, is historicist and aesthetics is not (see Tompkins). In fact, Thrailkill's analysis is well aware of the importance of sentiment in mid-nineteenth-century fiction (and the critical conversation about sentimentalism), which makes her account of feeling in the postbellum period and beyond all the more powerful and informed. She convincingly demonstrates that the category of aesthetic experience in the later decades of the nineteenth century was being defined and redefined by psychologists, philosophers, scientists, and novelists. Third, Thrailkill provides an account of the mind-body relation that has profound implications for how we read. By this I mean that the claim about the connectedness of the psychological and the physiological has important consequences the moment we might think of the text as an "object" with a content separate and apart from the emotions represented in or projected onto it. She makes this point quite cogently in her analysis of (and analysis of analyses of) "The Yellow Wallpaper": "Recasting interpretation as decryption reconfigures Novel
American Literature, 1996
American Literature, 1993
Melville's Mardi committed a number of sins, the most egregious being its challenge to the wo... more Melville's Mardi committed a number of sins, the most egregious being its challenge to the work ethic-one of the ideological centerpieces of nineteenth-century American culture. The work ethic combined a belief in hard work with the promise of reward-sometimes material, sometimes spiritual, sometimes both. It had provided a coherent framework for both the economic and moral development of American society and a reliable American self-one that could be constructed and measured according to the values of hard labor-but at midcentury it was beginning to unravel under the combined pressures of mechanized and specialized labor and the development of an American working class. In this context, allegories like Mardi seemed to threaten the middle-class construction of American identity because the form's two-dimensional characters uncomfortably reminded readers and reviewers that working- class Americans were increasingly being deprived of agency and identity by the repetitive nature of their work. The literary notion of allegory thus became a discursive site through which middle-class reviewers and readers expressed their commitment to a stable work ethic and their anxieties about its dissolution. Mardi, I shall argue, transgressed the ideology of the work ethic on a number of levels-from the audience's relation to work and leisure time, to the author's relations to the work of writing, to the characters' relation to their work in the fictive economy. Reading the failure of Mardi in terms of the dissolution of the work ethic, we discover that its reception can no longer be dismissed as an anomalous event in one writer's career, but rather must be seen as an exemplification of the power of nineteenth-century ideology.
The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, 2018
Many of Poe’s stories are allegories of reading or misreading or the impossibility of reading. Th... more Many of Poe’s stories are allegories of reading or misreading or the impossibility of reading. The first sentence of “The Man of the Crowd” intones “it does not permit itself to be read.” Here, Poe is citing a “certain German book,” though which one has eluded critics since the story’s publication in 1840. Perhaps the most obvious reason it cannot be read is because the book simply does not exist. Such a superficial but overlooked explanation would certainly fit with Poe’s penchant for sabotaging readers’ expectations. But critics have correctly used this statement of unreadability as Poe’s self-conscious gloss on his own writings, which feature all kinds of reading material, as it were, including documents that are sometimes purloined, hieroglyphs, anagrams, and specific letters in the alphabet. My essay will discuss images of unreadability in Poe’s oeuvre with special attention to Pym, which contains both a narrative of white superiority and a critique of it.
This book brings together leading critics in American literature to address the representation of... more This book brings together leading critics in American literature to address the representation of time throughout a wide range of genres, methodologies, and chronological periods. American literature, from its beginnings to the present, provides a particularly rich set of texts to examine in this regard, with its interest in history, modernity and progress. Each essay considers how time embeds itself in a variety of textual representations, including Native American rituals, Shaker dances, novels, poetry, and magazines in order to provide readers with a capacious view of time's constitutive role in American literature. The essays are organized into four sections - Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. Each section reflects a particular approach to the question of time, but taken as a whole the volume makes visible unexpected temporal patterns that cut across time period and genre.
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby Part 1: Aesthetics and the ... more AcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby Part 1: Aesthetics and the Politics of Freedom Liberty of the Imagination in Revolutionary America, by Edward CahillThe Writing on the Wall: Revolutionary Aesthetics and Interior SpacesStephen Crane's Refrain, by Ivy G. WilsonLyric Citizenship in Post 9/11 Performance: Sekou Sundiata's the 51st (dream) state, by June Ellison Part 2: Aesthetics and the Representation of Sexuality Aesthetics Beyond the Actual: The Marble Faun and Romantic Sociability, Christopher CastigliaHenry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Figure in the Carpet, by Dorri BeamSexuality's Aesthetic Dimension: Kant and the Autobiography of an Androgyne, by Christopher LoobyFrom Hawthorne to Hairspray: American Anxieties About Beauty, by Wendy Steiner Part 3: Aesthetics and the Reading of Form When is Now? Poe's Aesthetics of Temporality, by Cindy WeinsteinReading in the Present Tense: Benito Cereno and the Time of Reading, by Trish LoughranWhat Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Critical Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge, by Jonathan Freedman with an addendum by Nan Zhang DaUpon a Peak in Beinecke: The Beauty of the Book in the Poetry of Susan Howe, by Elisa New Part 4: Aesthetics and the Question of Theory Warped Conjunctions: Jacques Ranci re and African American Twoness, by Nancy BentleyAesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century, by Dorothy HalePostwar Pastoral: The Art of Happiness in Philip Roth, by Mary EstevePerfect Is Dead: Karen Carpenter, Theodor Adorno, and the Radio or, If Hooks Could Kill, by Eric LottNetwork Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr's The Transformation and Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social, by Sianne Ngai AfterwordContributorsIndex
Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, 2000
Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, 2000
Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect
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Papers by Cindy Weinstein