Elaine Freedgood | New York University (original) (raw)
Papers by Elaine Freedgood
Hetero-Ontologicality
Princeton University Press eBooks, Oct 15, 2019
This chapter explains how realist fiction of the nineteenth century has been treated by critics, ... more This chapter explains how realist fiction of the nineteenth century has been treated by critics, and experienced by readers, as an oasis from the zany ruptures of fiction that is not yet or nor longer realistic precisely because of its referentiality. If the madcap metaleptic adventures between history and fiction remain unnoticed, it would create a vertiginous hetero-ontologicality. Every sentence in which a fictional character traverses an actual city or an actual poet, has dinner with a fictional character, or an actual war is observed or fought in by a fictional character is a rupture of enormous existential proportions. That such ruptures do not feel like ruptures may be the most significant thing about them. The chapter also talks about the possibilities of hetero-ontologicality, in which various kinds of being and beings mingle and mix, allowing readers to imagine future worlds and ways of living with themselves and all of the others they have evicted from having and inhabiting “their own world.”
"Fine Fingers": Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption
Victorian Studies, 2003
alike and equal, is indistinguishable from the commodity” (171). 9In the description of Davidoff ... more alike and equal, is indistinguishable from the commodity” (171). 9In the description of Davidoff and Hall, the work of trimming and decorating performs important symbolic work, creating a home that is clearly separate from— because so different from—the public sphere (see 321–96). 10I owe this idea to Jack Amariglio. In a related argument, Armstrong contends that “conduct books differentiated the woman’s ideal role from both labor and amusement; they created a new category of labor” (79). 11It is worth noting that we do not routinely think of a work of “fine” art as handmade; rather we assume implicitly that a whole body (including a mind) was needed for
Ghostly Reference
Representations, 2014
Ghostly reference is a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the fre... more Ghostly reference is a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the free play of belief and the production of worlds—two necessary conditions for the formation and sustenance of the liberal subject. In various fictions and one historical circumstance, this essay tries to take ghosts literally, to ask what they are as well as what they mean.
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
“The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a twenty pound force, but do you feel ... more “The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a twenty pound force, but do you feel it?” Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper ,” 1856 Invented in France in 1783, balloon aerostation became immensely popular in England within months. “The chief feature of the afternoon fetes” in the pleasure gardens from the 1830s on, a balloon ascent also marked the opening of the Crystal Palace in 1851. Although only a small number of Britons actually went up in balloons, ascents drew large audiences, and aeronautical entrepreneurs were able to charge admission to spectators and passengers alike. The balloon became a popular decorative emblem on fabrics, jewelry and china, and a diverse literature of ballooning attracted a wide readership. The balloon, however, was not solely or even originally an instrument for amusement. It evolved, or devolved, very quickly through three overlapping stages: from its original status as a major technical discovery, the precursor of navigable flight, it became an instrument for meteorological and atmospheric research, and then the Victorian equivalent of an amusement park ride. In Wonderful Balloon Ascents (1870), Fulgence Marion ranks the discovery of balloons with the discovery of America, “equally” in that “of all other discoveries, these two have attracted the greatest amount of attention, and given, in their respective eras, the greatest impulse to popular feeling.”
Some Thoughts on Trauma, Autobiography, and the Work of Collective Memory
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Oct 1, 2006
Trauma is antibiographical. Trauma separates its victims from them selves, and it separates them ... more Trauma is antibiographical. Trauma separates its victims from them selves, and it separates them from the time in which subjectivity finds its story: its days, dates, and durations. When trauma survivors say, as they often do, that they have lost track of time at particular moments, we ...
Fringe: A Brief Genealogy of Edginess
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Jul 1, 2008
In the Victorian period, “edginess” referred to “hardness of outline”: fringe softened, I argue h... more In the Victorian period, “edginess” referred to “hardness of outline”: fringe softened, I argue here, the literal and figurative hard edges of that historical moment. In the 20th century, edginess moves inside the subject: it connotes irritability. This etymological journey from the literal to the figurative, and from the outside to the inside, traces a larger cultural trend I wish to resist. The prescribed reliance on metaphor and irony in modernist and postmodernist interpretive schemes means that we have lost the ability to understand other modes of representation, including the literal—a mode that was still available in the 19th century. By performing the forbidden maneuver of taking fringe literally and interpreting it, I argue for the importance of reconsidering representational strategies we have stopped valuing, as if their obviousness makes them too clear to harbor significant meaning or to do critical psychic and cultural work.
The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
Response: Strategic Presentism or Partisan Knowledges?
Victorian Studies, 2016
Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.12 Elaine... more Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.12 Elaine Freedgood (ef38@nyu.edu) is Professor of English at New york University. She is the author of Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge UP, 2000) and The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago UP, 2006), and editor of Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2003). Her current project is “Worlds Enough, or Against Realism.” Michael Sanders (Michael.Sanders@manchester.co.uk) is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Writing at the University of Manchester. He has an abiding fascination for all things Chartist and is the author of The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge UP, 2009) as well as a number of articles on Chartist poetry and culture. He is currently at work on a project on the role of religion in Chartism. Response: Strategic Presentism or Partisan Knowledges?
Islands of Whiteness
Victorian Studies, 2012
Cambridge History of the Nineteenth-Century Novel and World Literature, 2026
This chapter is dedicated to Julia Joon-Sun Lee, without whose scholarship it could not have been... more This chapter is dedicated to Julia Joon-Sun Lee, without whose scholarship it could not have been imagined. And many thanks to my amazing editor, James Cui.
An account of the relationship between the nineteenth-century novel and the absentees of world literature, this chapter attempts to decenter the nineteenth century novel and narrative from Britain and Europe and to take into account not only the creators of the material conditions of modernity--enslaved people in the Americas, but also their literary contributions to the novel.
BOOK REVIEW: Sophie Gilmartin.ANCESTRY AND NARRATIVE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE: BLOOD RELATIONS FROM EDGEWORTH TO HARDY. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998
Victorian Studies, 2001
Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2009
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, May 1, 1999
Victorian Writing about Risk
The Pitt Building, Trumpington S... more The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK ...
Introduction: the practice of paradise
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
“The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.” Niklas Luhmann, Risk “ … theirs is the hu... more “The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.” Niklas Luhmann, Risk “ … theirs is the hunger for paradise.” H. D., “The Flowering of the Rod” This book is about a massive, disorganized and highly successful Victorian cultural enterprise: the textual construction of a safe England in a dangerous world between 1832 and 1897. Beginning in the 1830s, a diverse group of writers labored to help the first victims and beneficiaries of industrialization imagine that danger could be banished from the domestic scene and relocated in the world outside British borders. Careful representations of the precise locations of safety and danger – in such diverse texts as statistical analyses of the British empire, handbooks of hospital reform, memoirs of balloon aeronauts, travelogues of Alpine mountaineers, and ethnographic studies of Africa – suggested that risk could be either avoided altogether (in England) or engaged voluntarily in the dangerous world beyond it. The attempt to resolve risk geographically ignores the most salient feature of risk: that it is by definition a temporal problem; it exists only and always as a possibility, a future contingency. A geographical solution obscures the impossibility of banishing risk. This form of risk management thus involves the colonization of time: danger would seem to be plucked out of its hiding place in the invisible reaches of the future and brought into the present, to be experienced, survived and thus eradicated.
Banishing panic: J. R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
The Malthusian Unconscious
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Sep 1, 2005
In The Body Economic, Catherine Gallagher argues that, from the beginning of the nineteenth centu... more In The Body Economic, Catherine Gallagher argues that, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the "odd organicism" of political economy connected intimately and indeed ines-capably to the work of the literary writers who, in various ways, tried to distance them-selves from ...
Hetero-Ontologicality
Princeton University Press eBooks, Oct 15, 2019
This chapter explains how realist fiction of the nineteenth century has been treated by critics, ... more This chapter explains how realist fiction of the nineteenth century has been treated by critics, and experienced by readers, as an oasis from the zany ruptures of fiction that is not yet or nor longer realistic precisely because of its referentiality. If the madcap metaleptic adventures between history and fiction remain unnoticed, it would create a vertiginous hetero-ontologicality. Every sentence in which a fictional character traverses an actual city or an actual poet, has dinner with a fictional character, or an actual war is observed or fought in by a fictional character is a rupture of enormous existential proportions. That such ruptures do not feel like ruptures may be the most significant thing about them. The chapter also talks about the possibilities of hetero-ontologicality, in which various kinds of being and beings mingle and mix, allowing readers to imagine future worlds and ways of living with themselves and all of the others they have evicted from having and inhabiting “their own world.”
"Fine Fingers": Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption
Victorian Studies, 2003
alike and equal, is indistinguishable from the commodity” (171). 9In the description of Davidoff ... more alike and equal, is indistinguishable from the commodity” (171). 9In the description of Davidoff and Hall, the work of trimming and decorating performs important symbolic work, creating a home that is clearly separate from— because so different from—the public sphere (see 321–96). 10I owe this idea to Jack Amariglio. In a related argument, Armstrong contends that “conduct books differentiated the woman’s ideal role from both labor and amusement; they created a new category of labor” (79). 11It is worth noting that we do not routinely think of a work of “fine” art as handmade; rather we assume implicitly that a whole body (including a mind) was needed for
Ghostly Reference
Representations, 2014
Ghostly reference is a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the fre... more Ghostly reference is a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the free play of belief and the production of worlds—two necessary conditions for the formation and sustenance of the liberal subject. In various fictions and one historical circumstance, this essay tries to take ghosts literally, to ask what they are as well as what they mean.
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
“The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a twenty pound force, but do you feel ... more “The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a twenty pound force, but do you feel it?” Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper ,” 1856 Invented in France in 1783, balloon aerostation became immensely popular in England within months. “The chief feature of the afternoon fetes” in the pleasure gardens from the 1830s on, a balloon ascent also marked the opening of the Crystal Palace in 1851. Although only a small number of Britons actually went up in balloons, ascents drew large audiences, and aeronautical entrepreneurs were able to charge admission to spectators and passengers alike. The balloon became a popular decorative emblem on fabrics, jewelry and china, and a diverse literature of ballooning attracted a wide readership. The balloon, however, was not solely or even originally an instrument for amusement. It evolved, or devolved, very quickly through three overlapping stages: from its original status as a major technical discovery, the precursor of navigable flight, it became an instrument for meteorological and atmospheric research, and then the Victorian equivalent of an amusement park ride. In Wonderful Balloon Ascents (1870), Fulgence Marion ranks the discovery of balloons with the discovery of America, “equally” in that “of all other discoveries, these two have attracted the greatest amount of attention, and given, in their respective eras, the greatest impulse to popular feeling.”
Some Thoughts on Trauma, Autobiography, and the Work of Collective Memory
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Oct 1, 2006
Trauma is antibiographical. Trauma separates its victims from them selves, and it separates them ... more Trauma is antibiographical. Trauma separates its victims from them selves, and it separates them from the time in which subjectivity finds its story: its days, dates, and durations. When trauma survivors say, as they often do, that they have lost track of time at particular moments, we ...
Fringe: A Brief Genealogy of Edginess
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Jul 1, 2008
In the Victorian period, “edginess” referred to “hardness of outline”: fringe softened, I argue h... more In the Victorian period, “edginess” referred to “hardness of outline”: fringe softened, I argue here, the literal and figurative hard edges of that historical moment. In the 20th century, edginess moves inside the subject: it connotes irritability. This etymological journey from the literal to the figurative, and from the outside to the inside, traces a larger cultural trend I wish to resist. The prescribed reliance on metaphor and irony in modernist and postmodernist interpretive schemes means that we have lost the ability to understand other modes of representation, including the literal—a mode that was still available in the 19th century. By performing the forbidden maneuver of taking fringe literally and interpreting it, I argue for the importance of reconsidering representational strategies we have stopped valuing, as if their obviousness makes them too clear to harbor significant meaning or to do critical psychic and cultural work.
The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
Response: Strategic Presentism or Partisan Knowledges?
Victorian Studies, 2016
Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.12 Elaine... more Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.12 Elaine Freedgood (ef38@nyu.edu) is Professor of English at New york University. She is the author of Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge UP, 2000) and The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago UP, 2006), and editor of Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2003). Her current project is “Worlds Enough, or Against Realism.” Michael Sanders (Michael.Sanders@manchester.co.uk) is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Writing at the University of Manchester. He has an abiding fascination for all things Chartist and is the author of The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge UP, 2009) as well as a number of articles on Chartist poetry and culture. He is currently at work on a project on the role of religion in Chartism. Response: Strategic Presentism or Partisan Knowledges?
Islands of Whiteness
Victorian Studies, 2012
Cambridge History of the Nineteenth-Century Novel and World Literature, 2026
This chapter is dedicated to Julia Joon-Sun Lee, without whose scholarship it could not have been... more This chapter is dedicated to Julia Joon-Sun Lee, without whose scholarship it could not have been imagined. And many thanks to my amazing editor, James Cui.
An account of the relationship between the nineteenth-century novel and the absentees of world literature, this chapter attempts to decenter the nineteenth century novel and narrative from Britain and Europe and to take into account not only the creators of the material conditions of modernity--enslaved people in the Americas, but also their literary contributions to the novel.
BOOK REVIEW: Sophie Gilmartin.ANCESTRY AND NARRATIVE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE: BLOOD RELATIONS FROM EDGEWORTH TO HARDY. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998
Victorian Studies, 2001
Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2009
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, May 1, 1999
Victorian Writing about Risk
The Pitt Building, Trumpington S... more The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK ...
Introduction: the practice of paradise
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
“The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.” Niklas Luhmann, Risk “ … theirs is the hu... more “The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.” Niklas Luhmann, Risk “ … theirs is the hunger for paradise.” H. D., “The Flowering of the Rod” This book is about a massive, disorganized and highly successful Victorian cultural enterprise: the textual construction of a safe England in a dangerous world between 1832 and 1897. Beginning in the 1830s, a diverse group of writers labored to help the first victims and beneficiaries of industrialization imagine that danger could be banished from the domestic scene and relocated in the world outside British borders. Careful representations of the precise locations of safety and danger – in such diverse texts as statistical analyses of the British empire, handbooks of hospital reform, memoirs of balloon aeronauts, travelogues of Alpine mountaineers, and ethnographic studies of Africa – suggested that risk could be either avoided altogether (in England) or engaged voluntarily in the dangerous world beyond it. The attempt to resolve risk geographically ignores the most salient feature of risk: that it is by definition a temporal problem; it exists only and always as a possibility, a future contingency. A geographical solution obscures the impossibility of banishing risk. This form of risk management thus involves the colonization of time: danger would seem to be plucked out of its hiding place in the invisible reaches of the future and brought into the present, to be experienced, survived and thus eradicated.
Banishing panic: J. R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
The Malthusian Unconscious
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Sep 1, 2005
In The Body Economic, Catherine Gallagher argues that, from the beginning of the nineteenth centu... more In The Body Economic, Catherine Gallagher argues that, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the "odd organicism" of political economy connected intimately and indeed ines-capably to the work of the literary writers who, in various ways, tried to distance them-selves from ...