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Publications by Alex Benson

Narrative, 2019

Even the smallest conversational turns can index macro-contexts of social inequality, racializati... more Even the smallest conversational turns can index macro-contexts of social inequality, racialization, and capital; fictional narrative, coordinating the particular and the global, seems well positioned to represent these scalar dynamics. But how exactly does the textual medium of the novel link the particularities of voice with the politics of race? Scholarship on this question has often turned either to the representation of vernacular speech (e.g., dialect) or to free indirect discourse, the latter as a "double-voiced" mode that linguistically concretizes Du Bois's influential theory of black double consciousness. This essay draws an alternative approach from Du Bois's fictional practice, highlighting the affinities between his use of dialogue in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and recent work in linguistic anthropology. In the turn-of-the-century US South represented in Quest, the functions of conversation are intricately connected with the production and exchange of cotton—otherwise known as gossypium hirsutum, giving the essay a key term, gossypoglossia, for describing these connections between a racialized global economy and particularized forms of talk. To attend to those forms is to locate theoretical resources in the very thing that critics, often dismissing Du Bois's dialogue as unrealistic or discordant, have found least compelling about his fiction. For Du Bois, the essay argues, fictional dialogue is not only (nor primarily) a site for the realist representation of conversation, but also a speculative mode in which the unspoken metapragmatic contexts of the "color-line" can be rendered explicit, unfamiliar, and subject to contestation.

Leviathan, 2019

This essay develops a new way to parse the scrivener's refusals: through Melville's representatio... more This essay develops a new way to parse the scrivener's refusals: through Melville's representation of labor as a field of variant, sometimes incommensurable, velocities.

Small Axe, 2016

Claude McKay's “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture” first saw print in his 1912 volume Songs of Jamaica... more Claude McKay's “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture” first saw print in his 1912 volume Songs of Jamaica. Its speaker, whose voice appears in a densely patterned representation of Jamaican Creole, meditates on biological variation and colonial history. Setting the poem against discourses of race and poetics in contemporaneous Kingston print culture (and other intertexts, from Paul Laurence Dunbar's “When Malindy Sings” to Erving Goffman's “The Lecture”), this essay links the thematic concerns of “Fresh from de Lecture” with its medium: McKay, it argues, uses the principle of accident to explore the intersection of evolution, history, and poetic performance. In many accounts of McKay's early work, scholars have read “Fresh from de Lecture” as evidence of McKay's youthful internalization of imperialist apologism and formal conservatism. Conversely, this essay highlights the poem's political intractability—its ironization of social evolutionism, its allusions to insurrection, its emphasis on the counterfactual—and suggests that it offers a surprising view of dialect poetry, one that foregrounds the potentially radical mutations involved in the act of reading aloud.

Criticism, 2014

This essay reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s representation of gestures and tics in relation to a moder... more This essay reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s representation of gestures and tics in relation to a modern ethnographic construction of the body as a cultural signifier. The first half of the essay constellates moments from several texts in order to trace Fitzgerald’s interest in the semiotic embeddedness, local particularity, and discursive function of gestures. The second half focuses on moments that unsettle the distinction between gesture and tic, such as when, in The Great Gatsby (1925), Jay Gatsby drums the devil’s tattoo with his foot on the floor of a room in the Plaza Hotel. This event, the essay shows, is conditioned by a historically specific set of discourses related to nervousness, jazz, and cultural particularity. At the same time, it serves as a compressed allegory of procedures of behavior and interpretation, with ramifications for questions of descriptive methodology that have shaped the ethnography/literary-studies interface for several decades and that are central to recent discussions about the roles of depth and surface in critical practice.

Narrative, 2019

Even the smallest conversational turns can index macro-contexts of social inequality, racializati... more Even the smallest conversational turns can index macro-contexts of social inequality, racialization, and capital; fictional narrative, coordinating the particular and the global, seems well positioned to represent these scalar dynamics. But how exactly does the textual medium of the novel link the particularities of voice with the politics of race? Scholarship on this question has often turned either to the representation of vernacular speech (e.g., dialect) or to free indirect discourse, the latter as a "double-voiced" mode that linguistically concretizes Du Bois's influential theory of black double consciousness. This essay draws an alternative approach from Du Bois's fictional practice, highlighting the affinities between his use of dialogue in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and recent work in linguistic anthropology. In the turn-of-the-century US South represented in Quest, the functions of conversation are intricately connected with the production and exchange of cotton—otherwise known as gossypium hirsutum, giving the essay a key term, gossypoglossia, for describing these connections between a racialized global economy and particularized forms of talk. To attend to those forms is to locate theoretical resources in the very thing that critics, often dismissing Du Bois's dialogue as unrealistic or discordant, have found least compelling about his fiction. For Du Bois, the essay argues, fictional dialogue is not only (nor primarily) a site for the realist representation of conversation, but also a speculative mode in which the unspoken metapragmatic contexts of the "color-line" can be rendered explicit, unfamiliar, and subject to contestation.

Leviathan, 2019

This essay develops a new way to parse the scrivener's refusals: through Melville's representatio... more This essay develops a new way to parse the scrivener's refusals: through Melville's representation of labor as a field of variant, sometimes incommensurable, velocities.

Small Axe, 2016

Claude McKay's “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture” first saw print in his 1912 volume Songs of Jamaica... more Claude McKay's “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture” first saw print in his 1912 volume Songs of Jamaica. Its speaker, whose voice appears in a densely patterned representation of Jamaican Creole, meditates on biological variation and colonial history. Setting the poem against discourses of race and poetics in contemporaneous Kingston print culture (and other intertexts, from Paul Laurence Dunbar's “When Malindy Sings” to Erving Goffman's “The Lecture”), this essay links the thematic concerns of “Fresh from de Lecture” with its medium: McKay, it argues, uses the principle of accident to explore the intersection of evolution, history, and poetic performance. In many accounts of McKay's early work, scholars have read “Fresh from de Lecture” as evidence of McKay's youthful internalization of imperialist apologism and formal conservatism. Conversely, this essay highlights the poem's political intractability—its ironization of social evolutionism, its allusions to insurrection, its emphasis on the counterfactual—and suggests that it offers a surprising view of dialect poetry, one that foregrounds the potentially radical mutations involved in the act of reading aloud.

Criticism, 2014

This essay reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s representation of gestures and tics in relation to a moder... more This essay reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s representation of gestures and tics in relation to a modern ethnographic construction of the body as a cultural signifier. The first half of the essay constellates moments from several texts in order to trace Fitzgerald’s interest in the semiotic embeddedness, local particularity, and discursive function of gestures. The second half focuses on moments that unsettle the distinction between gesture and tic, such as when, in The Great Gatsby (1925), Jay Gatsby drums the devil’s tattoo with his foot on the floor of a room in the Plaza Hotel. This event, the essay shows, is conditioned by a historically specific set of discourses related to nervousness, jazz, and cultural particularity. At the same time, it serves as a compressed allegory of procedures of behavior and interpretation, with ramifications for questions of descriptive methodology that have shaped the ethnography/literary-studies interface for several decades and that are central to recent discussions about the roles of depth and surface in critical practice.