Sunday, October 11, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
New York
I will be in New York from October 17 - 27, so if any academic researchers would like to meet up, please email petamayer@gmail.com
Sunday, September 27, 2009
My Project - Recent Articulations
Anita Brookner is a French Romantic art historian and a contemporary British novelist. In popular and critical worlds, Brookner has been stereotyped as boring, old-fashioned and unsexy. These criticisms allude to what i call the "nineteenth-century effect" of her fiction. My contention is that the interpretation of the cultural text of “Anita Brookner” hangs on the reading of the nineteenth-century effect.
In mainstream criticism, the reading of the nineteenth-century effect is indicative of the heterochronic regulation of Symbolic. Organised around the biographical author-subject, generic Brookner criticism reflects the way in which the historical status of the subject is produced through the heterosexual matrix of gender. I argue that in the biographical construction of "Anita Brookner" as an unmarried, childless, women's writer, the nineteenth-century effect is produced in the Symbolic position of mother - by way of the author's Jewishness. The heterochronic organisation of the oedipal narrative constructing the author-subject means that readings of the nineteenth-century effect as a signifier of Brookner’s personal and sexual failure have dominated criticism of Brookner’s novels. The production of the nineteenth-century effect reflects the simultaneous regulation of representational status (discursivity, intelligibility, aesthetic production) and historical status with the figuration of desire.
I advance a new intertextual reading strategy for the nineteenth-century effect which i call "performative Romanticism". The epistemological context for my reading is located in Brookner’s connections to nineteenth-century French Romanticism, Aestheticism and Decadence and in her readings of Stendhal, Baudelaire, the Goncourt Brothers, J-K Huysmans and Henry James. I take my methodological impetus from the queering of the nineteenth century and queer theories of performativity and “crossing”.
In her critical art history texts, Brookner explains how Romantic narratives of loss and longing manifest in a provocative historical representational strategy designed to challenge hegemonic ideologies and expose the presuppositions organising self-evident modes of thought and behaviour. Brookner’s studies of nineteenth-century representational practices implicitly document the discursive proliferation famously analysed by Foucault as characterising a period of time during which formerly disparate sexual acts, practices and desires became increasingly regulated through the modern categories of sexual identification. Tracing a similar phenomenon in her interpretation of nineteenth-century literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick substitutes a plot/character analysis of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” with a biographical, historical, lexical, rhetorical and narrative reading strategy. Effectively Sedgwick produces the nineteenth-century textual figure of the Queer as an effect of the rhetorical figure of preterition and the narrative of the secret. While formulated as a transgressive response to loss and longing, Romantic narrative strategies and rhetorical devices produce textual figures which became read in an historical context where behaviours were becoming formalised into identity categories of the homosexual and the heterosexual.
I recruit a cast of intertextual figures or “Romantic personae”, including the Military Man, the Analysand, the Queer, the Aesthete, the Dandy, the Flaneur and the Degenerate, to propel my reading of the nineteenth-century effect in five of Brookner's twenty-four novels. My contention is that the narrative forms which produce these Romantic persone in nineteenth century texts are reconstituted and performed in Brookner’s contemporary fiction. I examine ways in which Stendhalian hendiadys, Freudian repetition, Jamesian preterition, Baudelairean peripetia, Decadent syllepsis – in conjunction with nineteenth-century narrative devices - are refigured in Brookner’s A Misalliance (1986), A Friend from England (1987), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1999) and Falling Slowly (1998). My reading of Brookner sponsors narrative crossings from nineteenth-century to contemporary contexts which intervene in the heterochronic organisation of normative gender and oedipal narratives. Through an intertextual, transhistorical Symbolising practice, I demonstrate alternative possibilities for a discursive project which rebuts heterochronic fantasies of Symbolic mastery.
In mainstream criticism, the reading of the nineteenth-century effect is indicative of the heterochronic regulation of Symbolic. Organised around the biographical author-subject, generic Brookner criticism reflects the way in which the historical status of the subject is produced through the heterosexual matrix of gender. I argue that in the biographical construction of "Anita Brookner" as an unmarried, childless, women's writer, the nineteenth-century effect is produced in the Symbolic position of mother - by way of the author's Jewishness. The heterochronic organisation of the oedipal narrative constructing the author-subject means that readings of the nineteenth-century effect as a signifier of Brookner’s personal and sexual failure have dominated criticism of Brookner’s novels. The production of the nineteenth-century effect reflects the simultaneous regulation of representational status (discursivity, intelligibility, aesthetic production) and historical status with the figuration of desire.
I advance a new intertextual reading strategy for the nineteenth-century effect which i call "performative Romanticism". The epistemological context for my reading is located in Brookner’s connections to nineteenth-century French Romanticism, Aestheticism and Decadence and in her readings of Stendhal, Baudelaire, the Goncourt Brothers, J-K Huysmans and Henry James. I take my methodological impetus from the queering of the nineteenth century and queer theories of performativity and “crossing”.
In her critical art history texts, Brookner explains how Romantic narratives of loss and longing manifest in a provocative historical representational strategy designed to challenge hegemonic ideologies and expose the presuppositions organising self-evident modes of thought and behaviour. Brookner’s studies of nineteenth-century representational practices implicitly document the discursive proliferation famously analysed by Foucault as characterising a period of time during which formerly disparate sexual acts, practices and desires became increasingly regulated through the modern categories of sexual identification. Tracing a similar phenomenon in her interpretation of nineteenth-century literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick substitutes a plot/character analysis of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” with a biographical, historical, lexical, rhetorical and narrative reading strategy. Effectively Sedgwick produces the nineteenth-century textual figure of the Queer as an effect of the rhetorical figure of preterition and the narrative of the secret. While formulated as a transgressive response to loss and longing, Romantic narrative strategies and rhetorical devices produce textual figures which became read in an historical context where behaviours were becoming formalised into identity categories of the homosexual and the heterosexual.
I recruit a cast of intertextual figures or “Romantic personae”, including the Military Man, the Analysand, the Queer, the Aesthete, the Dandy, the Flaneur and the Degenerate, to propel my reading of the nineteenth-century effect in five of Brookner's twenty-four novels. My contention is that the narrative forms which produce these Romantic persone in nineteenth century texts are reconstituted and performed in Brookner’s contemporary fiction. I examine ways in which Stendhalian hendiadys, Freudian repetition, Jamesian preterition, Baudelairean peripetia, Decadent syllepsis – in conjunction with nineteenth-century narrative devices - are refigured in Brookner’s A Misalliance (1986), A Friend from England (1987), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1999) and Falling Slowly (1998). My reading of Brookner sponsors narrative crossings from nineteenth-century to contemporary contexts which intervene in the heterochronic organisation of normative gender and oedipal narratives. Through an intertextual, transhistorical Symbolising practice, I demonstrate alternative possibilities for a discursive project which rebuts heterochronic fantasies of Symbolic mastery.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Hotel du Lac by the BBC
LipstickThespians has uploaded a few snippets of the BBC adaptation of Hotel du Lac to youtube.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
From the Courtauld
Two snippets of text concerning Brookner from the Courtauld site.
In the first piece, Brookner reflects on the significance of the Courtauld.
If you scroll down the page, Andrew Graham-Dixon "vividly remembers" Brookner as a teacher, and in particular "her wise advice to pay attention to every last detail in a work of art - "because nothing is a mere coincidence"".
In the first piece, Brookner reflects on the significance of the Courtauld.
If you scroll down the page, Andrew Graham-Dixon "vividly remembers" Brookner as a teacher, and in particular "her wise advice to pay attention to every last detail in a work of art - "because nothing is a mere coincidence"".
Cancer Sun, Cancer Moon
Brookner was born in London on July 16, 1928. This means she has Cancer Sun, Cancer Moon. I'll be back with my interpretation soon.
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