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Books by Jeffrey Hole

Research paper thumbnail of Cunning Inventions and the Force of Law: Literature in the Wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (In Progress)

Examining works by Herman Melville, Ellen & William Craft, Martin Delany, William Grimes, among o... more Examining works by Herman Melville, Ellen & William Craft, Martin Delany, William Grimes, among others, this project gives particular attention to the concomitances between fugitive tactics and literary intelligence that emerged out of and coincided with the strategies of containment, the violent protection of property, and the regime of domination made possible and enforced under the auspices of U.S. power, especially as this form of power evinced an unprecedented reach and intensification with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Addressing the cartographies of transnational spaces and fluid jurisdictions of the mid nineteenth century, this project traces out the development and influence of international jurisprudence in the debates, conflicts, and literary works that responded to the enforcement of fugitive slave law.

Essays by Jeffrey Hole

Research paper thumbnail of “Enforcement on a Grand Scale: Fugitive Intelligence and the Literary Tactics of Douglass and Melville,” American Literature 85:2 (June 2013)

As works which had similarly evoked slave-ship revolt as topics for their prose fictions in the m... more As works which had similarly evoked slave-ship revolt as topics for their prose fictions in the mid-1850s, Douglass’s The Heroic Slave and Melville’s Benito Cereno offer noticeably distinct aesthetic, rhetorical, and stylistic presentations of slave rebellion and of conflict itself—that is, conflict as an aesthetic device within narrative as well as the thing being narrated, the manifestation of force between actors aboard the slave ship. Because the enforcement of US law and security by 1850 tended toward something supra-territorial if not transnational in scope and range—in fact, superseding the interests of the national body politic—Douglass and Melville also had to conceptualize how conflict was attendant with this enforcement, how conflict manifested both on a grander scale and in specific instances and intensities. The figure of the fugitive allowed each to theorize, dramatically and imaginatively, a set of relations that reflected their conceptualizations of conflict and strife within their nineteenth-century moment—conceptualizations, too, of US power if we understand this power as an arrangement that makes possible certain orders or types of conflict.

Research paper thumbnail of “Correlatives of Liberalism: Melville’s Managers and the Microphysics of Security”

Research paper thumbnail of "Edward W. Said, the Sphere of Humanism, and the Neoliberal University" in _The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said: Spatiality, Critical Humanism, and Comparative Literature_, ed. Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Palgrave Macmillan, Jan 2015)

Research paper thumbnail of “From Sentiment to Security: Cugoano, Liberal Principles, and the Bonds of Empire”

Contextualizing Cuguano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (1787) in the transformative decade of the 1780... more Contextualizing Cuguano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (1787) in the transformative decade of the 1780s, this essay examines the specific ways in which Cugoano’s argument against the modern slave trade negotiates the discourses of sentiment and security, raising important theoretical questions regarding the development of “liberal principles” and late eighteenth-century British Empire.

Thoughts and Sentiments brings into focus the problematics coincident with the historical development of liberalism in so far as it evinces a mind thinking the possibilities of human emancipation while simultaneously acknowledging the ineluctable bonds between human liberty and state instrumentalities—bonds which, moreover, have undergone various morphologies and intensifications but which manifest immanently in political-commercial relations among humans of the past two hundred years and in our present moment.

Research paper thumbnail of “Lines, Knots, and Cyphers: Concepts of History in the American Literature Survey.”

This essay reflects on successful methods, techniques, and assignment sequences that I have used ... more This essay reflects on successful methods, techniques, and assignment sequences that I have used in the first two weeks of the early American literature survey, questioning the ostensible linear development of an American literary and cultural history. I do so in order to open up a set of questions related to what Debra Madsen has called “exceptional destiny” and to introduce students to the stakes of theorizing the varied and often contested concepts of history. Although a number of scholars have effectively addressed issues related to anthology construction, canonicity, as well as chronology and coverage in teaching the American literature survey, they have not always linked these issues directly to the problem of American exceptionalism nor to questions regarding concepts of history. William Cullen Bryant's "The Prairies" and Herman Melville's Benito Cereno serve as the principal literary texts, and I assign these works within the first week of class in order to introduce and model what it means to theorize history through literature.

Research paper thumbnail of “Towards a Genealogy of Transnational Perspective” RIAS: Review of International American Studies 2:3 (September 2007)

Research paper thumbnail of “Select Bibliography of Works by and on James Baldwin” with an Introductory Essay, James Baldwin Now, Dwight A. McBride, editor. (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 393-410.

Awards & Honors by Jeffrey Hole

Research paper thumbnail of The Graves Award in the Humanities, 2013-2015

Research paper thumbnail of Stephen E. Corson Award for the Distinguished Teaching of First Year Students, 2012.

Book Reviews by Jeffrey Hole

Research paper thumbnail of John R. Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (2005) in ARIAL 39:3 (July 2008), 138-140.

Interviews by Jeffrey Hole

Research paper thumbnail of Interview: "Herman Melville, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and U.S. Empire"

Journal of Empire Studies (August 2013)

Papers by Jeffrey Hole

Research paper thumbnail of Moby-Dick and Melville's Anti-Slavery Allegory by Brian R. Pellar

Research paper thumbnail of Cunning Inventions and the Force of Law: Literature in the Wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (In Progress)

Examining works by Herman Melville, Ellen & William Craft, Martin Delany, William Grimes, among o... more Examining works by Herman Melville, Ellen & William Craft, Martin Delany, William Grimes, among others, this project gives particular attention to the concomitances between fugitive tactics and literary intelligence that emerged out of and coincided with the strategies of containment, the violent protection of property, and the regime of domination made possible and enforced under the auspices of U.S. power, especially as this form of power evinced an unprecedented reach and intensification with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Addressing the cartographies of transnational spaces and fluid jurisdictions of the mid nineteenth century, this project traces out the development and influence of international jurisprudence in the debates, conflicts, and literary works that responded to the enforcement of fugitive slave law.

Research paper thumbnail of “Enforcement on a Grand Scale: Fugitive Intelligence and the Literary Tactics of Douglass and Melville,” American Literature 85:2 (June 2013)

As works which had similarly evoked slave-ship revolt as topics for their prose fictions in the m... more As works which had similarly evoked slave-ship revolt as topics for their prose fictions in the mid-1850s, Douglass’s The Heroic Slave and Melville’s Benito Cereno offer noticeably distinct aesthetic, rhetorical, and stylistic presentations of slave rebellion and of conflict itself—that is, conflict as an aesthetic device within narrative as well as the thing being narrated, the manifestation of force between actors aboard the slave ship. Because the enforcement of US law and security by 1850 tended toward something supra-territorial if not transnational in scope and range—in fact, superseding the interests of the national body politic—Douglass and Melville also had to conceptualize how conflict was attendant with this enforcement, how conflict manifested both on a grander scale and in specific instances and intensities. The figure of the fugitive allowed each to theorize, dramatically and imaginatively, a set of relations that reflected their conceptualizations of conflict and strife within their nineteenth-century moment—conceptualizations, too, of US power if we understand this power as an arrangement that makes possible certain orders or types of conflict.

Research paper thumbnail of “Correlatives of Liberalism: Melville’s Managers and the Microphysics of Security”

Research paper thumbnail of "Edward W. Said, the Sphere of Humanism, and the Neoliberal University" in _The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said: Spatiality, Critical Humanism, and Comparative Literature_, ed. Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Palgrave Macmillan, Jan 2015)

Research paper thumbnail of “From Sentiment to Security: Cugoano, Liberal Principles, and the Bonds of Empire”

Contextualizing Cuguano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (1787) in the transformative decade of the 1780... more Contextualizing Cuguano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (1787) in the transformative decade of the 1780s, this essay examines the specific ways in which Cugoano’s argument against the modern slave trade negotiates the discourses of sentiment and security, raising important theoretical questions regarding the development of “liberal principles” and late eighteenth-century British Empire.

Thoughts and Sentiments brings into focus the problematics coincident with the historical development of liberalism in so far as it evinces a mind thinking the possibilities of human emancipation while simultaneously acknowledging the ineluctable bonds between human liberty and state instrumentalities—bonds which, moreover, have undergone various morphologies and intensifications but which manifest immanently in political-commercial relations among humans of the past two hundred years and in our present moment.

Research paper thumbnail of “Lines, Knots, and Cyphers: Concepts of History in the American Literature Survey.”

This essay reflects on successful methods, techniques, and assignment sequences that I have used ... more This essay reflects on successful methods, techniques, and assignment sequences that I have used in the first two weeks of the early American literature survey, questioning the ostensible linear development of an American literary and cultural history. I do so in order to open up a set of questions related to what Debra Madsen has called “exceptional destiny” and to introduce students to the stakes of theorizing the varied and often contested concepts of history. Although a number of scholars have effectively addressed issues related to anthology construction, canonicity, as well as chronology and coverage in teaching the American literature survey, they have not always linked these issues directly to the problem of American exceptionalism nor to questions regarding concepts of history. William Cullen Bryant's "The Prairies" and Herman Melville's Benito Cereno serve as the principal literary texts, and I assign these works within the first week of class in order to introduce and model what it means to theorize history through literature.

Research paper thumbnail of “Towards a Genealogy of Transnational Perspective” RIAS: Review of International American Studies 2:3 (September 2007)

Research paper thumbnail of “Select Bibliography of Works by and on James Baldwin” with an Introductory Essay, James Baldwin Now, Dwight A. McBride, editor. (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 393-410.

Research paper thumbnail of Interview: "Herman Melville, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and U.S. Empire"

Journal of Empire Studies (August 2013)