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Papers by John Funchion

The Henry James Review, Aug 31, 2023

American Literature, Sep 1, 2018

These days sovereignty seems both an omnipresent critical concern and something of an anachronist... more These days sovereignty seems both an omnipresent critical concern and something of an anachronistic political concept. On the one hand, over the past couple of decades critical attention to sovereignty has multiplied, evidenced both by the insistent fascination with the work of the German political theorist and legal scholar Carl Schmitt (routed, as it so often is, through the work of Giorgio Agamben) and through the expansion of sovereignty's attachments-we find references to practical sovereignty (Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011), the sovereignty of critique (Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, 2015), corporate sovereignty (Joshua Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government Under Capitalism, 2013), and the sovereignty of data (Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud, 2016), to name but a few. For a concept long associated with final authority in the political sphere, it sometimes seems that nearly everything has been deemed sovereign. On the other hand, given its long association with the nation-state, now that we are supposedly entering the twilight of that political form, sovereignty seems, according to some, to be of increasingly less significance. This line of thinking, of course, has something of a storied lineage, most famously articulated by Michel Foucault, who in a 1977 interview put it this way: What we need … is a political philosophy that isn't erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King's head; in political theory that has still to be done.

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

American Literary History

Review by John Funchion, University of Miami Virtuous Citizens revisits debates surrounding the r... more Review by John Funchion, University of Miami Virtuous Citizens revisits debates surrounding the rise of the public sphere and its relationship to print and politics that shaped US literary and cultural studies after the publication of Michael Warner's The Letters of the Republic (1990). Kendall McClellan argues we have yet to acknowledge sufficiently how marginalized groups participated in public life to craft their own definitions of "civic selfhood" (3). Moving well beyond the well-trod public and private spheres binary, McClellan compellingly insists that Nancy Fraser's critical term counterpublic should inform how we perceive US civic participation and the changes to the public sphere in the early nineteenth century.

UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dis... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Divisible pasts: Nostalgia and narrative in American literature and culture, 1848--1900. ...

ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 2017

Journal of American Studies, 2019

Journal of the Early Republic, 2019

Choice Reviews Online, 2016

Choice Reviews Online, 2015

The Henry James Review, 2013

Among the many well-known proclamations made by Henry James about the form of the novel in his es... more Among the many well-known proclamations made by Henry James about the form of the novel in his essay "The Art of Fiction" (1884) is his insistence that "the story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle or the needle without the thread" (MS 588). James, as Theodor Adorno would argue nearly a century later in Aesthetic Theory (1970), maintained that the form and content of a work of art could not be separated from one another (see 143-49). James's insistence has not stopped readers from stressing one over the other, casting him first as the Master and later as an astute "critical social theorist" (Rowe 7). These shifts in emphasis, however, explain why his work has successfully weathered so many discursive upheavals within literary studies. We are always returning to James's writing: no matter how closely we read it, we never read it closely enough. James scholarship is enabled by a process of perpetual "oversight," a reading practice animated by the antinomy between content and form and one that Jacques Rancière describes as "the necessary inclusion of 'non-seeing' in 'seeing'" and vice versa (Flesh 135). I will return to the larger significance of Rancière's notion of oversight and his theory of revolutionary aesthetics later, but I want to stress that the critical attention paid to James means that studies of his work serve as an instructive barometer for registering the state of U.S. literary scholarship on the nineteenth century and the discipline more generally: as the field goes, so goes James. Literary critics are once again confronting the question of whether to privilege form over content or form over context, weighing the merits of a range of reading practices, including New Formalism, distant reading, and surface reading. 1 It makes sense then to turn to James's writing as a milieu within which to revisit a series of questions about the role and value of the literary work that James and his contemporaries also puzzled over at the turn of the last century.

Modernist Cultures, 2008

, The Country and the City "Among the Corn-Rows," a short story appearing in Hamlin Garland's Mai... more , The Country and the City "Among the Corn-Rows," a short story appearing in Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads (1891), opens with a telling dialogue between homesteader Rob Rodemaker and Seagraves, a local newspaper editor. At one point during their exchange, Rodemaker explains why he left his native Waupac County in Wisconsin to settle further west in the Dakota Territory: "We fellers workin' out back there got more 'n' more like hands, an' less like human beings. Y' know, Waupac is a kind of summer resort, and the people that use' t' come in summers looked down on us cusses in the fields an' shops. I couldn't stand it." 1 Rodemaker, in other words, complains that as Waupac became more of a tourist destination for urban affluent visitors to indulge their pastoral fantasies, it also transformed into a place of agricultural peonage. For the tourists, the farmers became just part of the scenery-reified synecdochally as mere "hands" for the visitors to gaze at like "the cussed European aristocracy" looked upon their peasants (92). At moments like this one in the text, Rodemaker alludes to the clashing perceptions of the rural region-the Middle West specifically-that framed the debate over the status of regions and regional writing both in the 1890s and in contemporary discussions over the form. Rodemaker's observation begs the question: is regional writing fundamentally a toursitic genre that nostalgically transforms places into imaginatively "possessible property" for the leisure class, as Richard H. Brodhead has influentially argued, or can it instead serve the economic and cultural interests of the marginalized people that inhabit these spaces? 2 The question this passage seizes upon runs through nearly all of the short stories published in Main-Travelled Roads. Such a question, however, has implications that extend well beyond the field of American regionalism. Regional writing, and Garland's writing in particular, functioned as a genre through which turn-of-the-century readers could contemplate the relationship between time and space and between history and aesthetics. Contemporary commentators often have likened regional writing to ethnography for this reason, suggesting that "the process of arriving at the region entails a backward movement" to "nostalgically charged spaces." 3 Regionalism, when read from this perspective, granted its nineteenth-and early twentieth-century urban readers with what Johannes Fabian refers to as an "allochronic" perspective whereby the observer inhabits a time distinct from the object or site of observation. 4 By imaginatively moving from the city to the American countryside, the regional reader moves in space as well as back in time. But while the leisure class may "'deny'" rural regions' "coevalness" by casting it as a pre-industrial agrarian space, Garland continually uses characters like Rodemaker to affirm the Middle West as a region coterminous with the rest of the nation. 5 For this reason, previous commentary on Garland has underscored these moments, drawing upon them to distinguish him from other late nineteenth-century regional and local color writers. 6 Responding to the local color writing that unabashedly trafficked in pastoral and idyllic portrayals of lost rural worlds to pawn them off to urban readers, Garland conversely casts the rural as a space of "toil" where "the poor and wary predominate." 7 Consistent with his late nineteenth-century Populist political education, so this account goes, Garland "rejects nostalgia" for the past. 8 But contrary to this prevailing view, I argue that Garland actually embraces nostalgia in his short fiction and enlists it in the service of his Populist project. Garland knew that Populism had a

Modern Language Quarterly, 2010

... What is significant about her false res-toration is less the realization that, to quote Thoma... more ... What is significant about her false res-toration is less the realization that, to quote Thomas Wolfe, she “can't go home again ... Jessica Berman describes how periodicals like the Cosmo-politan cultivated a privileged sensibility in their readers by catering to their “wanderlust and ...

Early American Literature, 2013