William Galperin - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by William Galperin
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, May 29, 2020
The central issue surrounding the “everyday” in relation to literature and to literary study is e... more The central issue surrounding the “everyday” in relation to literature and to literary study is etymological: a distinction between the “everyday,” a Romantic-period neologism that names both a site of interest and a representational alternative to both the probable and the fantastic; and “everydayness,” a mid-19th-century coinage, reflecting developments particular to urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of capital. This distinction has largely vanished, reflecting the influence of social science, and theory on the humanities and the flight in general from phenomenology. Nevertheless, as the first discourse actually to register the uncanniness of the everyday, literature provides an approach to everyday life that is not only in contrast to the limitations and routines linked to everydayness but also a reminder of possibilities and enchantments that are always close at hand. Although Maurice Blanchot’s axiom that “the everyday is never what we see a first time, but only see again” is as applicable to “everyday life studies” as it is to literature and to related theories of perception, there are fundamental differences. From the perspective of the human sciences and social theory, this discovery is recursive: “the everyday” proceeds from something that “escapes”—which, like ideology, is never quite seen—to something suddenly visible or seen again but with no alteration apart from being retrieved and corralled as a condition of being understood and in many cases lamented. In literature, the escape is ongoing. A parallel world of which we are unaware, or unmindful, becomes visible as if for the first time, but as a condition of remaining missable and always discoverable.
Modern Language Quarterly, Dec 1, 2021
Stanford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 1996
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sep 1, 2015
Duke University Press eBooks, Apr 27, 1998
University Microfilms International eBooks, 1979
Stanford University Press eBooks, May 23, 2017
It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound di... more It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it misses—or that often evanesce in his writing—are recoverable and acutely palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look, “things of every day” emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet’s sister), which lacks historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and nowhere.
The Wordsworth Circle, Sep 1, 1995
Modern Language Review, Jul 1, 2004
... Galperin's search after the 'new' and 'startling' leads him into som... more ... Galperin's search after the 'new' and 'startling' leads him into some quirky choices and eccentric juxtapositions which do not always work. Some of the chapter titles themselves betoken a wish to shock the naive and uninitiated into respectful atten-tion: 'Lady Susan and the ...
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jul 1, 2016
Galperin mines Romanticism as a kind of second-sight or retrospective turn that allows for possib... more Galperin mines Romanticism as a kind of second-sight or retrospective turn that allows for possibility to emerge in the interstices of past, present, and future. In this way, Romanticism uniquely serves “as text and context as opposed to a discourse readily contextualized, where the ‘world’ onto which literature opens is so embedded, so barely understood, that it is enough just to mark it.”
Keats-shelley Journal, 2017
Modern Language Quarterly, 1979
The History of Missed Opportunities, 2017
It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound di... more It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it misses—or that often evanesce in his writing—are recoverable and acutely palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look, “things of every day” emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet’s sister), which lacks historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and nowhere.
Revision and Authority in Wordsworth, 1989
The History of Missed Opportunities, 2017
An overlooked aspect of Lord Byron’s short unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke remains the “si... more An overlooked aspect of Lord Byron’s short unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke remains the “singular,” everyday world of relation that marriage represented for him, both beforehand, when marriage was an abstraction performed in correspondence with Milbanke, and afterwards, when the Byron marriage and the world it figured was literally a history of missed opportunities that the poet recaptured and reinscribed in Don Juan. The finite, epistolary conversation that constituted the Byron courtship was more than a trial run at marriage, particularly as the opposite of what Byron disparagingly called “love.” It proved a stay against a future that, on the relational front and in Byron’s contemporaneous Eastern Tales, was devoid of either hope or possibility. Here, in the sway of anticipatory nostalgia, marriage day after day would be suddenly fathomable and as valuable as the monetary fortune Byron also sought, but as a history of missed opportunities.
Revision and Authority in Wordsworth, 1989
Revision and Authority in Wordsworth, 1989
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, May 29, 2020
The central issue surrounding the “everyday” in relation to literature and to literary study is e... more The central issue surrounding the “everyday” in relation to literature and to literary study is etymological: a distinction between the “everyday,” a Romantic-period neologism that names both a site of interest and a representational alternative to both the probable and the fantastic; and “everydayness,” a mid-19th-century coinage, reflecting developments particular to urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of capital. This distinction has largely vanished, reflecting the influence of social science, and theory on the humanities and the flight in general from phenomenology. Nevertheless, as the first discourse actually to register the uncanniness of the everyday, literature provides an approach to everyday life that is not only in contrast to the limitations and routines linked to everydayness but also a reminder of possibilities and enchantments that are always close at hand. Although Maurice Blanchot’s axiom that “the everyday is never what we see a first time, but only see again” is as applicable to “everyday life studies” as it is to literature and to related theories of perception, there are fundamental differences. From the perspective of the human sciences and social theory, this discovery is recursive: “the everyday” proceeds from something that “escapes”—which, like ideology, is never quite seen—to something suddenly visible or seen again but with no alteration apart from being retrieved and corralled as a condition of being understood and in many cases lamented. In literature, the escape is ongoing. A parallel world of which we are unaware, or unmindful, becomes visible as if for the first time, but as a condition of remaining missable and always discoverable.
Modern Language Quarterly, Dec 1, 2021
Stanford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 1996
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sep 1, 2015
Duke University Press eBooks, Apr 27, 1998
University Microfilms International eBooks, 1979
Stanford University Press eBooks, May 23, 2017
It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound di... more It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it misses—or that often evanesce in his writing—are recoverable and acutely palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look, “things of every day” emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet’s sister), which lacks historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and nowhere.
The Wordsworth Circle, Sep 1, 1995
Modern Language Review, Jul 1, 2004
... Galperin's search after the 'new' and 'startling' leads him into som... more ... Galperin's search after the 'new' and 'startling' leads him into some quirky choices and eccentric juxtapositions which do not always work. Some of the chapter titles themselves betoken a wish to shock the naive and uninitiated into respectful atten-tion: 'Lady Susan and the ...
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jul 1, 2016
Galperin mines Romanticism as a kind of second-sight or retrospective turn that allows for possib... more Galperin mines Romanticism as a kind of second-sight or retrospective turn that allows for possibility to emerge in the interstices of past, present, and future. In this way, Romanticism uniquely serves “as text and context as opposed to a discourse readily contextualized, where the ‘world’ onto which literature opens is so embedded, so barely understood, that it is enough just to mark it.”
Keats-shelley Journal, 2017
Modern Language Quarterly, 1979
The History of Missed Opportunities, 2017
It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound di... more It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it misses—or that often evanesce in his writing—are recoverable and acutely palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look, “things of every day” emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet’s sister), which lacks historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and nowhere.
Revision and Authority in Wordsworth, 1989
The History of Missed Opportunities, 2017
An overlooked aspect of Lord Byron’s short unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke remains the “si... more An overlooked aspect of Lord Byron’s short unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke remains the “singular,” everyday world of relation that marriage represented for him, both beforehand, when marriage was an abstraction performed in correspondence with Milbanke, and afterwards, when the Byron marriage and the world it figured was literally a history of missed opportunities that the poet recaptured and reinscribed in Don Juan. The finite, epistolary conversation that constituted the Byron courtship was more than a trial run at marriage, particularly as the opposite of what Byron disparagingly called “love.” It proved a stay against a future that, on the relational front and in Byron’s contemporaneous Eastern Tales, was devoid of either hope or possibility. Here, in the sway of anticipatory nostalgia, marriage day after day would be suddenly fathomable and as valuable as the monetary fortune Byron also sought, but as a history of missed opportunities.
Revision and Authority in Wordsworth, 1989
Revision and Authority in Wordsworth, 1989