Rochelle Rives | City University of New York Borough of Manhattan Community College (original) (raw)

Papers by Rochelle Rives

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Oct 1, 2015

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If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposit... more If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposition to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the “stranger” presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics. This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations. The stranger is . . . the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself. The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation is organized, i...

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Modernist Impersonalities, 2012

Speaking of Sappho, H.D., the modernist poet, is at once concerned with the body and its ability ... more Speaking of Sappho, H.D., the modernist poet, is at once concerned with the body and its ability to “terribly” sabotage the voice, the “coming glory,” of the master poet (Wise 59). In this description from The Wise Sappho, H.D.’s guide to the poetic vocation, the poet aligns the “impersonal” with the disembodied “song” or “spirit;” conversely, she locates “personality” within the world of the body and social relations. In this state of impersonality, the poet holds the bard-like authority to “mark” or “presage” history and the future, but this ability does not preclude her place in the world among “fellow beings,” a condition that also disables the scope of the poet’s voice, or authority. In light of this contradiction, this chapter examines H.D.’s theory of impersonality as it self-consciously explores the poetic vocation and its relation to authority. As do her contemporaries, most notably Ezra Pound, H.D. promotes poetry as the subject of authoritative, impersonal mastery. In ABC of Reading (1934), for example, published well after Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho (1919), Pound announces his intention of writing pages “impersonal enough to serve as a text-book” for how to study poetry.2 This use of the word “impersonal” suggests that poetry can be objectively learned through meticulous study, by following a set of rules or principles that lead to poetic authority. Unlike the work of Pound, however, H.D.’s own oeuvre suggests her acute awareness of the potential problems of this sort of impersonality; she self-consciously explores the problems and dynamics of an impersonal method that erases individual distinction, or personality, precisely through an intense engagement with others that presupposes a personality in the first place.

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Modernist Impersonalities, 2012

Elizabeth Bowen’s 1938 novel The Death of the Heart defines what it means to “live” as a matter o... more Elizabeth Bowen’s 1938 novel The Death of the Heart defines what it means to “live” as a matter of impersonal acceptance, not personal choice. This kind of living, where the material architecture of the house—its “door handles” and “clocks”—sabotages the desire for self-possession and containment, makes more “real” the phenomena that cannot be contained or formalized in these structures: “voices,” “smoke,” and “smells” (Death 192). Objects continually exceed their materialization, creating residues that deny humans the comfort of subordinating them to their own consciousnesses. One wants to smell of oneself, not of other people. Living thus becomes a stance, a mode of affective survival that necessitates a vigilant defense against remembering. Objects then pose a particular threat to this posture; indices of affective attachment, they “make for hallucination” that threatens emotional safety (Death 191).

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Modernist Impersonalities, 2012

As early as 1915, four years before the publication of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individua... more As early as 1915, four years before the publication of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” D. H. Lawrence would characterize himself as an impersonalist. Writing to Katherine Mansfield in regard to her husband John Middleton Murry’s scheme for “authors to be publishers,” Lawrence praises an “easy and impersonal” life that resists the reflexive impulse to psychologize it by “fingering over our own souls or our acquaintances” (CL 395). Lawrence inveighs against the prominence of “mental decisions,” aligning these reflexive acts with the “personal element” that fatigues him so desperately. For Lawrence, this “personality” is built upon the humanist presumption of expressive and unique individuality, an attitude toward selfhood that produces only stasis. Like other modernists such as Lewis, Lawrence’s protest against individualism in society actually reflects his desire to protect the individual from the deindividuating forces of bourgeois social modernity; a truly “common life” born of “some new non-personal activity … a genuine vital activity” will rescue the individual from the contemplative quagmire of “personality,” which, in individualist society, falsely parades as individuality. In much of Lawrence’s work, and as I argue here of his 1913 novel Sons and Lovers, this understanding of activity and its corresponding attack on the “personal” links the individual to a progressive communal practice that dispels “personality” and the impulse to analyze it—an impersonal aesthetic.

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Criticism, 2014

In a sense the face is equipped to lie the most and leak the most, and thus can be a very confusi... more In a sense the face is equipped to lie the most and leak the most, and thus can be a very confusing source of information during deception.-Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, "Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception" (1969)'He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keeP a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task °f waking conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish.-Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)2"What are you making that face for? You see, you can't even bear the mention of something conclusive?" "I am not making a face. "-Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)3For Freud, secrets are destined to leak, if not from mismanaged bodily conduct, then from inevitable slips of the tongue. Prior to this conception of unintentional self-disclosure, Charles Darwin, writing in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), identified the face as the primary vehicle of self-expression, both intentional and otherwise, arguing that our faces, while responsive to our control, inevitably betray our wills.4 Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, drawing from this physiognomic tradition, termed such unguarded disclosures "micro leakage[s]," clues that thwart the liar's attempt to "perpetuate deception through his face."5 Admittedly, Ekman and Friesen are writing here about telling lies, and Freud is writing about keeping secrets, two acts that carry ostensibly different moral valences, since lying is almost always unethical, and secret keeping is more ambiguous. Despite this difference, both theories of leakage posit an observer who reads these bodily and facial surfaces as a means of "making conscious" the subject's interior.This confidence in the ability to determine the meaning or intent behind presumably unintentional acts of disclosure stands in contrast to the third epigraph, taken from Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel, The Secret Agent. In a scene that foregrounds the thematic importance of legibility in the novel, along with the epistemological uncertainty of the face, Comrade Ossipon, a member of a secret anarchist cell, meets with the explosivewielding anarchist known only as the Professor. The former hopes to "know the inside of this confounded affair," a bombing in Greenwich Park, in which a man has died (ST, 52). The Professor chastises Ossipon for believing that any such knowledge could be a "matter of inquiry" to others, and this profound skepticism regarding the ability to "know" continues into the conversation when he accuses Ossipon of "making a face" (ST, 53, 58). Ossipon misunderstands the charge, contradictorily suggesting that he can intentionally control his face because his face is not something he is intentionally making. Suggesting that there is something to know about his face, he subscribes to physiognomic logic, defensively declaring that he has nothing to hide.Ironically, the very notion of concealment runs counter to the Professor's entire philosophy; the distinction on which concealment turns-between intention and action, the interior and its expression-is, according to the Professor, characteristic of "conventional morality," which "governs your thought, and your action too, and thus neither your thought or action can ever be conclusive" (ST, 59). According to this logic, a face does not offer its reader an inside to be known. It thus cannot function (as conventional morality and physiognomic logic would have it) as a potential arbiter of trust, transparency, and mutual accountability or, alternatively, as a mask or tool of concealment. Having a face does not give one an interior, a psychology, or depth capable of being explained, read, discussed, analyzed, or even hidden. Rather than corroborating the Professor's moral nihilism, this failure of the face to mean in the novel, as I suggest here, is the source of its ethical potential. …

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Journal of Modern Literature, 2011

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Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Oscar Wilde's face was simultaneously maligned and celebrated by the “sciences” of physiognom... more Oscar Wilde's face was simultaneously maligned and celebrated by the “sciences” of physiognomy in the nineteenth century and, after the trials of 1895, in depictions that link Wilde to a pathologically expressive personality type. Personality and modern vision converge in the subject of Wilde's face, and their relation is illuminated by recent debates about affects and the emotions as well as by the theories of visual modernity advanced by Charles Baudelaire, Max Beerbohm, and E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris . Whereas early caricatures of Wilde invest the image with a readable psychology or interior, later depictions maintain a fiction of readability linked to a purely physiological notion of abnormal personality.

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The Review of English Studies, 2015

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disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, 2007

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Modernist Impersonalities, 2012

As early as 1908, Georg Simmel articulated the potential value of impersonal spatial relations. T... more As early as 1908, Georg Simmel articulated the potential value of impersonal spatial relations. The particular sociological impersonality of Simmel’s stranger is not unlike the specific literary articulations of impersonality that arose just a few years later. Though he does not mention the term explicitly in this passage, Simmel theorizes something akin to what modernists would call “personality” as it develops from spatial and social interaction. As I will argue here, the aesthetic impersonality modernists would employ later was a response to this idea of personality as a socio-spatial concept. According to this logic, having or possessing a personality entails the ability to socially demarcate oneself, to occupy a distinct unit of social space. For a sociologist such as Simmel, “personality” is linked to singularity and individuation. Furthermore, social space is not meaningful outside of the value it acquires from this sort of human organization. Within this spatial organization, the stranger inhabits the best of both worlds; his “personality” is made possible through a condition of spatial fixity that offers freedom of interaction without complete “liberation from every given point in space” (Sociology 402). That is, his fixed position within social space grants him a personality, but his “distance” ensures that that space is dynamic, neither overly static nor completely in flux. Like “the really new” Eliot praises in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which “modifie[s]” and “alters” the “existing monuments” of tradition into a new order, Simmel’s stranger also “imports qualities” into the existing social group, “which do not and cannot stem from the group itself” (Sociology 402).2

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