Many critics see Billy Budd's concluding ballad, "Billy in the Darbies," as a rebuttal of the nov... more Many critics see Billy Budd's concluding ballad, "Billy in the Darbies," as a rebuttal of the novel's penultimate chapter, a naval chronicle that depicts Billy as a criminal. Such readings reinforce the view that Melville's works valorize democratic collectives over top-down tyranny. This essay argues that the poem mirrors the chronicle's counterrevolutionary function, implying a more nuanced understanding, on Melville's part, of the risks of popular sovereignty. First, the essay takes up Sharon Cameron's claim that the poem is a "radical" dramatization of Billy's "impersonality" to demonstrate instead that this putative radicalism echoes the conservatism of "testament of acceptance" readings of the story, which justify Captain Vere's authority by obscuring the all-too-personal details of Billy's hanging. Next, the essay turns to a discussion of Thomas Hobbes and his notion that a condemned man has a right to resist his executioners. Even in the Hobbesian world of the Navy's benevolent autocracy, Billy's execution would raise the specter of legitimate revolt—a threat dispelled in the ballad by Billy's acquiescence to his fate. By obscuring the role of death in politics, the ballad effects the death of politics, neutralizing the crew's revolutionary potential and preventing critics from facing up to Melville's account of democracy's inescapable contingency.
This essay considers Mark Twain’s discarded preface for Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), which proposed a “system of weather-signs” to replace scenic description. Twain’s plan to downplay weather is surprising given that the novel’s meteorological details evoke slavery’s material conditions, and its imagery of storms and natural disasters metaphorize slavery’s psychological impact. By examining Charles W. Chesnutt’s parallel treatment of weather in The Conjure Woman (1899), and by engaging work on the climates and geographies of slavery by Katherine McKittrick and Christina Sharpe, I argue that this oscillation between superfluity and significance is crucial to both authors’ explorations of the peril and promise of weather imagery: peril because the presumed banality of weather, the quintessential topic of “phatic” chitchat, can trivialize slavery’s material conditions; promise because weather’s status as a preferred image for historical transformation holds open the possibility of new figurations of black life in slavery’s aftermaths. The essay thus brings together work in black feminist theory and the environmental humanities to insist—against “new materialist” approaches that tout a leveling of the human/object distinction—that attention to nonhuman “actants,” such as weather, must be coupled with a focus on the political and discursive factors that determine their all-too-human impact.
As a response to critics who lament Helen Hunt Jackson’s failure to attribute sufficient agency t... more As a response to critics who lament Helen Hunt Jackson’s failure to attribute sufficient agency to her Indian protagonists, this essay puts Jackson’s 1884 historical romance, Ramona, in dialogue with Charles Dudley Warner’s “Story of the Doe” and the habeas corpus case of Standing Bear v. Crook. I suggest that Jackson, outraged by the imprisonment and relocation of the Ponca tribe, reworked Warner’s tale of human-animal violence as a means of showing that the legal subject produced by late-nineteenth-century U.S. Indian policy was not an autonomous, rational “person” but rather a creature closer to Giorgio Agamben’s later notion of “bare life”: a quasi-animal life stripped of political ties. While Jackson anticipates critiques of her seemingly sentimental story by diagnosing excesses of feeling as a threat to political conscience and agency, she embraces an affective strategy by the novel’s close, narrating hopelessness, depression, and exhaustion as effects of the structural position of the disenfranchised and the systematic violation of native sovereignty. I ultimately argue that Jackson’s text reveals the biopolitics of the Indian Agency bureaucracy, in which optimism, self-maintenance, and community building were deemed incompatible with the minimal right to the barest life, as protected by habeas corpus.
Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the G... more Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age argues that late-nineteenth-century US fiction grapples with and helps to conceptualize the disagreeable feelings that are both a threat to citizens’ agency and an inescapable part of the emotional life of democracy, then as now.
In detailing the corruption and venality for which the period remains known, authors including Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, and Helen Hunt Jackson evoked the depressing inefficacy of reform, the lunatic passions of the mob, and the revolting appetites of lobbyists and office seekers. Readers and critics of these Washington novels, historical romances, and satirical romans à clef have denounced their fiercely negative tone, seeing it as a sign of cynicism and elitism. This book argues, in contrast, that their distrust of politics is coupled with an intense investment in it—not quite apathy, but not quite hope.
Chapters examine both common and idiosyncratic forms of political emotion, including “crazy love,” disgust, “election fatigue,” and the myriad feelings of hatred and suspicion provoked by the figure of the hypocrite. In so doing, the book corrects critics’ too-narrow focus on “sympathy” as the American novel’s model political emotion. We think of reform novels as fostering feeling for fellow citizens or for specific causes. Not Quite Hope argues that Gilded Age fiction refocuses attention on the unstable emotions that shape our relation to politics as such.
Many critics see Billy Budd's concluding ballad, "Billy in the Darbies," as a rebuttal of the nov... more Many critics see Billy Budd's concluding ballad, "Billy in the Darbies," as a rebuttal of the novel's penultimate chapter, a naval chronicle that depicts Billy as a criminal. Such readings reinforce the view that Melville's works valorize democratic collectives over top-down tyranny. This essay argues that the poem mirrors the chronicle's counterrevolutionary function, implying a more nuanced understanding, on Melville's part, of the risks of popular sovereignty. First, the essay takes up Sharon Cameron's claim that the poem is a "radical" dramatization of Billy's "impersonality" to demonstrate instead that this putative radicalism echoes the conservatism of "testament of acceptance" readings of the story, which justify Captain Vere's authority by obscuring the all-too-personal details of Billy's hanging. Next, the essay turns to a discussion of Thomas Hobbes and his notion that a condemned man has a right to resist his executioners. Even in the Hobbesian world of the Navy's benevolent autocracy, Billy's execution would raise the specter of legitimate revolt—a threat dispelled in the ballad by Billy's acquiescence to his fate. By obscuring the role of death in politics, the ballad effects the death of politics, neutralizing the crew's revolutionary potential and preventing critics from facing up to Melville's account of democracy's inescapable contingency.
This essay considers Mark Twain’s discarded preface for Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), which proposed a “system of weather-signs” to replace scenic description. Twain’s plan to downplay weather is surprising given that the novel’s meteorological details evoke slavery’s material conditions, and its imagery of storms and natural disasters metaphorize slavery’s psychological impact. By examining Charles W. Chesnutt’s parallel treatment of weather in The Conjure Woman (1899), and by engaging work on the climates and geographies of slavery by Katherine McKittrick and Christina Sharpe, I argue that this oscillation between superfluity and significance is crucial to both authors’ explorations of the peril and promise of weather imagery: peril because the presumed banality of weather, the quintessential topic of “phatic” chitchat, can trivialize slavery’s material conditions; promise because weather’s status as a preferred image for historical transformation holds open the possibility of new figurations of black life in slavery’s aftermaths. The essay thus brings together work in black feminist theory and the environmental humanities to insist—against “new materialist” approaches that tout a leveling of the human/object distinction—that attention to nonhuman “actants,” such as weather, must be coupled with a focus on the political and discursive factors that determine their all-too-human impact.
As a response to critics who lament Helen Hunt Jackson’s failure to attribute sufficient agency t... more As a response to critics who lament Helen Hunt Jackson’s failure to attribute sufficient agency to her Indian protagonists, this essay puts Jackson’s 1884 historical romance, Ramona, in dialogue with Charles Dudley Warner’s “Story of the Doe” and the habeas corpus case of Standing Bear v. Crook. I suggest that Jackson, outraged by the imprisonment and relocation of the Ponca tribe, reworked Warner’s tale of human-animal violence as a means of showing that the legal subject produced by late-nineteenth-century U.S. Indian policy was not an autonomous, rational “person” but rather a creature closer to Giorgio Agamben’s later notion of “bare life”: a quasi-animal life stripped of political ties. While Jackson anticipates critiques of her seemingly sentimental story by diagnosing excesses of feeling as a threat to political conscience and agency, she embraces an affective strategy by the novel’s close, narrating hopelessness, depression, and exhaustion as effects of the structural position of the disenfranchised and the systematic violation of native sovereignty. I ultimately argue that Jackson’s text reveals the biopolitics of the Indian Agency bureaucracy, in which optimism, self-maintenance, and community building were deemed incompatible with the minimal right to the barest life, as protected by habeas corpus.
Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the G... more Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age argues that late-nineteenth-century US fiction grapples with and helps to conceptualize the disagreeable feelings that are both a threat to citizens’ agency and an inescapable part of the emotional life of democracy, then as now.
In detailing the corruption and venality for which the period remains known, authors including Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, and Helen Hunt Jackson evoked the depressing inefficacy of reform, the lunatic passions of the mob, and the revolting appetites of lobbyists and office seekers. Readers and critics of these Washington novels, historical romances, and satirical romans à clef have denounced their fiercely negative tone, seeing it as a sign of cynicism and elitism. This book argues, in contrast, that their distrust of politics is coupled with an intense investment in it—not quite apathy, but not quite hope.
Chapters examine both common and idiosyncratic forms of political emotion, including “crazy love,” disgust, “election fatigue,” and the myriad feelings of hatred and suspicion provoked by the figure of the hypocrite. In so doing, the book corrects critics’ too-narrow focus on “sympathy” as the American novel’s model political emotion. We think of reform novels as fostering feeling for fellow citizens or for specific causes. Not Quite Hope argues that Gilded Age fiction refocuses attention on the unstable emotions that shape our relation to politics as such.
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This essay considers Mark Twain’s discarded preface for Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), which proposed a “system of weather-signs” to replace scenic description. Twain’s plan to downplay weather is surprising given that the novel’s meteorological details evoke slavery’s material conditions, and its imagery of storms and natural disasters metaphorize slavery’s psychological impact. By examining Charles W. Chesnutt’s parallel treatment of weather in The Conjure Woman (1899), and by engaging work on the climates and geographies of slavery by Katherine McKittrick and Christina Sharpe, I argue that this oscillation between superfluity and significance is crucial to both authors’ explorations of the peril and promise of weather imagery: peril because the presumed banality of weather, the quintessential topic of “phatic” chitchat, can trivialize slavery’s material conditions; promise because weather’s status as a preferred image for historical transformation holds open the possibility of new figurations of black life in slavery’s aftermaths. The essay thus brings together work in black feminist theory and the environmental humanities to insist—against “new materialist” approaches that tout a leveling of the human/object distinction—that attention to nonhuman “actants,” such as weather, must be coupled with a focus on the political and discursive factors that determine their all-too-human impact.
Books by Nathan Wolff
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age argues that late-nineteenth-century US fiction grapples with and helps to conceptualize the disagreeable feelings that are both a threat to citizens’ agency and an inescapable part of the emotional life of democracy, then as now.
In detailing the corruption and venality for which the period remains known, authors including Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, and Helen Hunt Jackson evoked the depressing inefficacy of reform, the lunatic passions of the mob, and the revolting appetites of lobbyists and office seekers. Readers and critics of these Washington novels, historical romances, and satirical romans à clef have denounced their fiercely negative tone, seeing it as a sign of cynicism and elitism. This book argues, in contrast, that their distrust of politics is coupled with an intense investment in it—not quite apathy, but not quite hope.
Chapters examine both common and idiosyncratic forms of political emotion, including “crazy love,” disgust, “election fatigue,” and the myriad feelings of hatred and suspicion provoked by the figure of the hypocrite. In so doing, the book corrects critics’ too-narrow focus on “sympathy” as the American novel’s model political emotion. We think of reform novels as fostering feeling for fellow citizens or for specific causes. Not Quite Hope argues that Gilded Age fiction refocuses attention on the unstable emotions that shape our relation to politics as such.
This essay considers Mark Twain’s discarded preface for Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), which proposed a “system of weather-signs” to replace scenic description. Twain’s plan to downplay weather is surprising given that the novel’s meteorological details evoke slavery’s material conditions, and its imagery of storms and natural disasters metaphorize slavery’s psychological impact. By examining Charles W. Chesnutt’s parallel treatment of weather in The Conjure Woman (1899), and by engaging work on the climates and geographies of slavery by Katherine McKittrick and Christina Sharpe, I argue that this oscillation between superfluity and significance is crucial to both authors’ explorations of the peril and promise of weather imagery: peril because the presumed banality of weather, the quintessential topic of “phatic” chitchat, can trivialize slavery’s material conditions; promise because weather’s status as a preferred image for historical transformation holds open the possibility of new figurations of black life in slavery’s aftermaths. The essay thus brings together work in black feminist theory and the environmental humanities to insist—against “new materialist” approaches that tout a leveling of the human/object distinction—that attention to nonhuman “actants,” such as weather, must be coupled with a focus on the political and discursive factors that determine their all-too-human impact.
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age argues that late-nineteenth-century US fiction grapples with and helps to conceptualize the disagreeable feelings that are both a threat to citizens’ agency and an inescapable part of the emotional life of democracy, then as now.
In detailing the corruption and venality for which the period remains known, authors including Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, and Helen Hunt Jackson evoked the depressing inefficacy of reform, the lunatic passions of the mob, and the revolting appetites of lobbyists and office seekers. Readers and critics of these Washington novels, historical romances, and satirical romans à clef have denounced their fiercely negative tone, seeing it as a sign of cynicism and elitism. This book argues, in contrast, that their distrust of politics is coupled with an intense investment in it—not quite apathy, but not quite hope.
Chapters examine both common and idiosyncratic forms of political emotion, including “crazy love,” disgust, “election fatigue,” and the myriad feelings of hatred and suspicion provoked by the figure of the hypocrite. In so doing, the book corrects critics’ too-narrow focus on “sympathy” as the American novel’s model political emotion. We think of reform novels as fostering feeling for fellow citizens or for specific causes. Not Quite Hope argues that Gilded Age fiction refocuses attention on the unstable emotions that shape our relation to politics as such.