Justine Murison - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences [Filozofski fakultet]
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Papers by Justine Murison
This essay advances a theory of the " counterprivate " elucidated through Herman Mel-ville's fict... more This essay advances a theory of the " counterprivate " elucidated through Herman Mel-ville's fiction. Echoing the term counterpublic, which has done much to critique the notion of the unified public sphere, a new theory of the " counterprivate " can open out to alternative visions of privacy, a proliferation of competing and resistant modes that cannot be reducible to the domestic or the political. I situate Melville's Typee and Pierre within an emergent nineteenth-century discourse of privacy, still prevalent today, in which one's private life operates to develop and display one's adherence to conventional public morality. Melville's fiction shows us how privacy became a language of morality across the nineteenth century while at the same time imagining various counterprivate forms that resist entanglement with domesticity, property, and liberal individualism.
Chapter 4, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
This article argues that the eighteenth-century cultural interrelation of obeah practices and Eur... more This article argues that the eighteenth-century cultural interrelation of obeah practices and European tropical medicine demonstrates a profound limit to Charles Taylor's theory of the "buffered self." According to Taylor, Western secularity depended upon the rise of a theory of a disenchanted subjectivity. This article suggests instead that the hallmark of Western secularity is not so much a disenchanted subject, but a conflicted relation between a psychology defined by disenchantment and a theory of the body open to a world of invisible and untraceable forces.
This essay advances a theory of the " counterprivate " elucidated through Herman Mel-ville's fict... more This essay advances a theory of the " counterprivate " elucidated through Herman Mel-ville's fiction. Echoing the term counterpublic, which has done much to critique the notion of the unified public sphere, a new theory of the " counterprivate " can open out to alternative visions of privacy, a proliferation of competing and resistant modes that cannot be reducible to the domestic or the political. I situate Melville's Typee and Pierre within an emergent nineteenth-century discourse of privacy, still prevalent today, in which one's private life operates to develop and display one's adherence to conventional public morality. Melville's fiction shows us how privacy became a language of morality across the nineteenth century while at the same time imagining various counterprivate forms that resist entanglement with domesticity, property, and liberal individualism.
Chapter 4, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
This article argues that the eighteenth-century cultural interrelation of obeah practices and Eur... more This article argues that the eighteenth-century cultural interrelation of obeah practices and European tropical medicine demonstrates a profound limit to Charles Taylor's theory of the "buffered self." According to Taylor, Western secularity depended upon the rise of a theory of a disenchanted subjectivity. This article suggests instead that the hallmark of Western secularity is not so much a disenchanted subject, but a conflicted relation between a psychology defined by disenchantment and a theory of the body open to a world of invisible and untraceable forces.