It’s conference season! and other thoughts upon returning

I know it’s been awhile, Long Nineteenth Century Blog. It’s not that I didn’t want to come visit and tell you everything I was doing in the world of Romantic/Victorian geekery, it’s just, well, you know. Things got busy. Did you know I’ve written *two* dissertation chapters since we last talked? And I don’t really have internet access at my house, and then I was on the market and it was just…well, you know. Life got so complicated. I mean, you know how it is, right? It’s not you, Long 19th Century Blog, it’s me.

So, it’s been about ten months since my last post. And, yes, I have written two chapters, gone on the market (unsuccessfully in the traditional sense, but I’m glad I did it, I still like MLA, and it didn’t crush me in the way it’s “supposed to”), rethought a lot of the project, started thinking a lot about religion, gave a long format talk on Browning at the CUNY Victorian seminar, strategized, theorized, historicized (well, not *too* much), and made some new friends. In a certain sense, I think I’ve started to get a better sense not just of the field but of myself in the field, feeling part of a community on a level I didn’t before. (Or you just hang around for seven years and eventually people start talking to you.) I guess I’d say that I’ve also started enjoying myself again.

So, for now at least, here I am. The future of the Poem of the Week remains uncertain, but I do plan to start posting here every now and then. (Yes, I know we’ve heard this before, etc.) And spring conferences are a good place to start, right?

Over the weekend, I was in Columbus at the very wonderful British Women Writers Conference, where I was talking about Christina Rossetti’s The Prince’s Progress — that is, the long narrative poem she wrote that isn’t Goblin Market. It was a truly lovely conference, and you can relive much of the magic via Twitter,* thoughts that include reflections on my first time as a legitimate member of the “backchannel” in any meaningful way. (Funny to think that a couple of years ago, we were all excited about liveblogging — who knew at the time that would end up seeming so 2009?) There are also several conferences I’m looking forward to in the coming weeks — NVSA is coming up on the 15th, there’s the Politics of Form grad conference at Columbia on the 22nd, and of course, the CUNY Victorian conference on May 6. Good times, and I’m hoping to tweet my way through at least some of these, depending on where I and my iPod can wrangle some free wi-fi access. (I tweet as @annecmccarthy, though not exclusively or even predominantly about matters of the Long 19th Century.)

It was my first time at the BWWC, and I applied mostly because of a special session on poetic form. In the end, I didn’t make it on that panel, but I did give the paper as part of a session on Christina Rossetti (where, oddly enough, I was the only women — my copanelists and the moderator were male, which is something of a feat given the overall demographics of the conference). What I didn’t realize until I got to Columbus was that the single-author panel was a relatively rare beast at this conference (or, in keeping with the theme of the weekend, a curiosity). Most of the other sessions had individual papers from all over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a surprising number of genres being represented as well. In some ways, that made it hard for me to choose which panels to attend (I’m sometimes a bit of a poetry snob), but I ended up appreciating the chance to leave my own period and genre comfort zones and actually, well, learn things. (Not that I don’t learn things in my normal conferencegoing experience, of course, but still…)

Along those same lines, I was really impressed by the generic range of the keynotes. The plenary panel on the first night with Caroline Levine, Sandra Macpherson, and Robyn Warhol was heavily pitched towards the novel (which, admittedly, I groused about at the time), but the second night had Sharon Marcus talking to us about Sarah Bernhard, and Helen Deutsch’s keynote on Saturday dealt rather dazzlingly with eighteenth-century poetry. All of which was quite wonderful. And I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with people both in and adjacent to “my” field, especially since I’m starting to reconceptualize my place in all of this, and to really try to worry this Romantic/Victorian divide as both an intellectual necessity and a professional strategy.** In fact, it was actually quite wonderful to be at a conference where it didn’t seem crazy to explain what I was doing, to talk about my plans for a fifth (!) chapter of the dissertation, and so on. I also had more than one conversation about religion, though that’s been one of the strangely predominant themes of the semester, and of the later work I’ve done for the diss. It’s a topic that, most likely, will deserve its own post or series thereof — there’s a lot I want to work out, and I haven’t yet decided what forum is going to work best for it.

Nevertheless, yay. Yay for the BWWC and for the upcoming conferences (where I don’t have to present anything).

And yay, of course, for at least a temporary return to blogging — still, apparently, in 1,000-word chunks.

*Yep, I was the person who met Tim Gunn at the airport.

**I don’t mean the second one in a cynical sense, by the way. Professional strategy is important and not necessarily soulless — this is one of the lessons I’ve had to internalize in these long unblogged months.

 

A Doubtful Manifesto

During the Q & A of Alina Gharabegian’s talk  on Matthew Arnold at the last Victorian Seminar, the conversation inevitably turned to the quality of Arnold’s doubt and its relationship to the Victorian Age. I perhaps imprudently spoke of my own doubts a few months ago, mainly doubts concerning academia. In the mean time–whether by intention or accident, right before MLA–somebody posted an anonymous manifesto listing their reasons for leaving academia. It went viral, and you’ve probably read it. If you haven’t, be warned before clicking–despite my compulsive reading of the Chronicle, I still wasn’t inured enough to brush it off lightly.

It hasn’t just been academic doubts I’ve been thinking about–it’s more about doubt itself–and my doubts about doubt. I first came across those lines, “The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” out of context in Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version–I read it when it first came out, while I was in high school. Now, of course, it’s been  made into a movie with Americans in it, so you might know what I’m talking about. Anyway, when I read those lines the first time, I thought of them prescriptively, not descriptively, taking it as gnomic wisdom and not a bitter lament. The subsequent Bush years were not exactly effective at dispelling my misreading. For it to be best to lack all conviction, though–it seemed reasonable enough. After all, it was Socrates’ real method: to put into question what you think you know. I wonder whether this is why so many academics–pretty much all I can think of–describe themselves as slow writers, subjecting their thoughts and words to relentless doubt before putting pen to paper. It was why I was a particularly bad writer of high school and undergraduate essays–the whole idea of having a thesis which you had to think you knew seemed to me antithetical to true mental life.

But this isn’t a manifesto for doubt. What’s really been getting to me lately is my doubt of doubt. Maybe lacking all conviction isn’t such a good thing. It’s certainly not a recipe for happiness. It’s not exactly conducive to political change, as Yeats could tell you. It doesn’t make you a better teacher, or a better interviewee.

What I’ve been calling doubt or lacking conviction might more optimistically be called critical thinking. Here is where my doubts align more closely with Arnold’s–it’s our credo, isn’t it, to teach critical thinking, the way we justify our existence. These espousers of critical thinking, though–for me, lately they’re of both worlds between which famously wanders the “Chartreuse“‘s speaker. There’s a certain sheen to critical thinking not unlike the shiny white Truth of Arnold’s “rigorous teachers,” but there’s also a certain not-necessarily-unattractive morbidity to its professional practitioners:

For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
Show’d me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gae, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?

Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unleant, so much resign’d–
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth;

Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone–
For both were faiths, and both are gone.

I began this post intending to talk about our own age’s allergy to doubt. Is it even possible to have religious doubt any more? It’s not like Dawkins et al speak for all the atheists and agnostics of the world, but they’re the only ones, it seems, who would devote as much thought about religious belief as Arnold did. It seems telling that our most prominent skeptics–anthropogenic global warming “skeptics”–should be so passionate and intense in their disbelief of science. Sure, we’ve got our ugly feelings, but paranoia and anxiety seem to have taken the place of melancholy and doubt.

This isn’t a call to revive Victorian doubt. If it’s anything, this manifesto suggests that Victorian doubt for us is as alien, quaint, and unsettling as the Chartreuse’s monks were for Arnold–but then again, Arnold too probably felt his own age to be less friendly to doubt than we’re led to believe.

 

N-Grams

It’s been a few months since the folks at Google Labs unveiled their fancy n-grams toy. It’s fun to play with, but, as I’m sure all my hermeneutically suspicious readers know, there are plenty of objections to taking the findings seriously. The team of non-digital-humanist scientists behind it have since published an FAQ. Since the topic’s been handled much more ably by others, I won’t go through the list of problems here. However, I do think that it could be useful for me. In a previous post, I described my efforts to get a sense of when “Celestial Empire” became associated with China, and when it stopped. And now, I can give you a sexy graph:

As I predicted, there’s nothing in the eighteenth century, and it dwindles in the twentieth, with peaks around the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. A better use of n-grams, though, is to make comparisons. Here’s “Celestial Empire,” grouped with “Middle Kingdom” and “Chinaman”:

I think that despite the “noise” in the data, this is a fairly effective demonstration that, as a name for China, “Celestial Empire” was more popular than “Middle Kingdom” in the nineteenth century, and vice versa in the twentieth. Why did Victorians like the “Celestial Empire”? I’m hoping to answer that in my dissertation. What the above search suggests to me, though, is that there’s some historical shift going on around 1850, when all of the sudden “Chinaman” becomes way more popular than “Celestial Empire when it had been so closely correlated before that.

Despite all the shortcomings of the Google Books data and metadata, though, I’m really curious to see how these searches would look for a corpus with more reliable metadata–namely, the ProQuest and Gale databases of British periodicals.

 

The dreaded fear-of-giving-oneself-away disease

… I was rarely sure what the men whom I met while staying with Mr Thims really meant; for there was no getting anything out of them if they scented even a suspicion that they might be what they call ‘giving themselves away.’ As there is hardly any subject on which this suspicion cannot arise, I found it difficult to get definite opinions from any of them, except on such subjects as the weather, eating and drinking, holiday excursions, or games of skill.

If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort, they will commonly retail those of some one who has already written upon the subject, and conclude by saying that though they quite admit that there is an element of truth in what the writer has said, there are many point on which they are unable to agree with him. Which these points were, I invariably found myself unable to determine; indeed, it seemed to be counted the perfection of scholarship and good breeding among them not to have–much less to express–an opinion on any subject on which it might prove later that they had been mistaken. The art of sitting gracefully on a fence has never, I should think, been brought to greater perfection than at the Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason.

…

However this may be, the fear-of-giving-oneself-away disease was fatal to the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost every one at the Colleges of Unreason hadh caught it to a greater or less degree. After a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease has yet been discovered.

I’ve got a soft spot for Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. I first read it early in my graduate career, and it’s one of the books that convinced me that the Victorian period was full of kick-ass-ness. This particular passage I’ve kept close to me, and one of the reasons I’ve done this blog using my full, googlable name has been to take preventive measures against this disease.

Lately, though, I believe I’ve become infected, to a greater degree. Partly this is due to the doom-and-gloom that’s come to settle on humanities departments world wide (although maybe not Singapore, from what I heard there at the AVSA conference this June), which has had me walking around with a constant feeling of the possibility I won’t have enough funding to finish my degree. It reached a head last night and today when I was serving on a faculty membership committee making decisions for appointments to the Graduate Center from the CUNY colleges. The degree of scrutiny to which candidates were subjected to was terrifying. Of course, the scrutiny’s entirely justified, but throughout the meeting I couldn’t help thinking about all the shortcomings a team of academics would be able to find in my scholarship, my teaching evaluations, my responses to Q & A, my team spiritedness, this blog (and hey, maybe even my fucking tweets [before I go on the market, I’d better scrub my online personae of all f-bombs, but for now, hey, I’m in NYC, it’s how we talk]). It’s one thing to think, in theory, how I don’t want to be an academic paralyzed from fear of making the tiniest of mistakes, but it’s another thing entirely to hear the tiniest of mistakes dissected and debated at length. With the knowledge that these decisions and dissections are being made in reference to tenured faculty, whereas here I am, a mere adjunct with little job security, now ineligible for tuition remission. It could be worse–I know I’ll be teaching next semester, whereas there are people in my program who may have to not take classes in the spring since all of CUNY’s slashing adjunct classes. And, even though I’m not making a living wage (and I mean living wage, not middle-class-lifestyle wage), I am making a wage.

Should i be voicing my anxieties? Am I breaking taboo by talking about how deeply my financial precariousness has impacted my intellectual confidence?

I believe I had a point when I started writing this post. Oh yeah, that disease thing, it’s one of the reasons why it’s been so long since posting here. And why it might be a while before I post again. And why I’m considering disappearing the site.

 

Posted without comment…

Adolphe was, by profession, an artist in hair — ingeniously forming weeping willows out of auburn tresses, and baskets of flowers out of chesnut, or, indeed, any other kind of locks. His hairy nosegays, he boasted, were the admiration of all who had seen them; and his flaxen roses and raven lilies he prided himself upon being the perfection of imitative art. Still, the hairy art was merely an imitative one, and the talented Sheek had a soul for nobler things. He had occasionally soared as high as a fancy composition in hair, and had executed an elaborate hairy marine piece, displaying a hairy sea and a hairy ship in the distance, with a hairy cottage, thatched with hair, in the foreground, and a small hairy pond in front of it, with two hairy ducks swimming among a thicket of hairy weeds.
Henry Mayhew, 1851, or the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys

 

The “Celestial Empire”

My latest candidate for dissertation title is “The Twilight of the Celestial Empire.” I wanted to capture the sense that the nineteenth century marks a decided decline in Western opinions of China and the Chinese, in contrast to early modern fantasies of Chinese wealth (think Columbus) and the eighteenth-century chinoiserie craze. I also wanted to give some Victorian flavoring with their favourite nickname for China. This got me thinking, though, just when was “Celestial Empire” used to describe China?

In the good old days, you’d be able to go to the OED, and stop, with a proviso that the OED proves nothing. The earliest quotation given by the OED is 1824-1829, by Walter Savage Landor. The latest is Henry James, 1878. What this means, I guess, is that my diss could equally be described as “The Rise of the Celestial Empire,” given that when it was used corresponds quite neatly with the period I’m covering. Or I could compromise and call it “The Age of the Celestial Empire.”

But we being where we are (the blogosphere, the internets, you know) and me being who I am (a nerd, a procrastinator, an addict) I had to do some further research. *sigh* I used three text repositories: Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Google Books. (I’m actually kind of glad I don’t have access at the moment to British Periodicals or 19th Century UK Periodicals.) EEBO was the easiest, since there weren’t any hits. ECCO was slightly harder, since there were about thirty hits, but the keyword in context only displays as a popup which takes a while to load, and all of the hits seemed to refer to heaven (you know, the Christian one) or something of the sort.

And so, Google Books. I’d trade net neutrality for decent metadata any day. Well, maybe not any day, but definitely today. It’s easy to do a date filter, but so many of the publication dates are meaningless. Periodicals are frequently dated from the time the series first appeared. I got a whole bunch of hits from 1799, since the “Religious Tract Society” didn’t bother dating their publications, but only stated that it was “instituted in 1799.”

Finally, after far too much checking when things were *actually* published, it seemed like the earliest I could find was 1819 reports of an embassy to China. This is of course (“of course” meaning of course wikipedia knows what I’m talking about rather than of course you know what I’m talking about) Lord Amherst’s 1816 voyage, in which he refused to kowtow to the Emperor, which resulted in quite a hullaballoo, apparently. So, a little further digging, and I’m pretty sure that the phrase enters the British lexicon based on this event. (“Celestial Empire” is Robert Morrison’s translation of “Teën Chaou.”)

It’s far more difficult to ascertain when “Celestial Empire” stopped being used frequently, since it’s difficult to distinguish between frequent and infrequent usage, and of course because GB metadata sucks. But I could point at Bertrand Russell’s (!) The Problem of China (1922), where he uses CE to describe old China in distinction to modern China:

China has an ancient civilization which is now undergoing a very rapid process of change. The traditional civilization of China had developed in almost complete independence of Europe, and had merits and demerits quite different from those of the West. It would be futile to attempt to strike a balance; whether our present culture is better or worse, on the whole, than that which seventeenth-century missionaries found in the Celestial Empire is a question as to which no prudent person would venture to pronounce. But it is easy to point to certain respects in which we are better than old China, and to other respects in which we are worse.

;

I’m not sure when this contrast starts being made, but I’m guessing that the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 has something to do with it.

So there you have it: the “Celestial Empire” (1816-1911).

 

The Loveliest of Universes

I’m starting this post at the San Jose airport, having woken up before 6:30 to catch the bus to the bus to the cab. It’s quite a trek to get to UCSC College VIII from the right coast, but it seems appropriate to have these 12+ hours in transit to mark the passage to our much unlovelier of universes. This year’s book was Oliver Twist, which I’m glad to have discovered that I’m not alone in violently disliking. I’m not going to attempt any description of the presentations, nor the campus’s pristine panoramas, nor yet the punctual post-priandial potations. For the uninitiates, the Universe is unique in joining academics and members of the general public, mixing Victorianist professionals and Dickens amateurs, certainly not mutually exclusive categories. It was somewhat odd for me, though, as a member of the former, the latter, not so much. I haven’t read all of Dickens once, let alone several times, I don’t have hundreds of Dickens anecdotes at my fingertips, and I don’t exactly aspire to have those anecdotes, or to reread all that I’ve read so far.

I can't believe this is a campus.

I had a wonderful time, nevertheless, and if I’ve not come out of the week infatuated with Dickens more than ever, it has gotten me thinking more about the Dickens’ literary context, particularly the neglected decade of the 1830s. I wondered, for example, how OT compares with the period’s Newgate novels, especially with referencce to Fagin’s prison cell passion. Many readers, amateur and professional alike, commented on Dickens’ unique insight into Fagin’s psychological state–I wonder, though, whether the scene isn’t already generic. Likewise, I’m curious about the “Novels with Purpose” of the early Victorian period. The main reason I hated reading OT is that for much of it, I had an urge to throttle the little bastard (haha). What’s made it more interesting to me is its generic incoherence. Is it a novel, a picaresque, a children’s book, a fairy tale, a psychomachia, an allegory, a melodrama, or something else? During an impromptu Friday afternoon seminar put on by “Question Guy” (who shall remain nameless and storyless for now), we focused on Monks, after noting that in all of the week’s numerous discussions, whether in plenary session or in breakout groups, Monks was more or less ignored. The reading I came up with thanks to the seminar goes something like this: Monks is more or less a throwaway character, a stock character who, instead of fulfilling a vital role to the plot, can be expended with, as numerous adaptations show. I read Monks as the embodiment of the Gothic melodrama, incongruously grafted onto a novel with a putative purpose. So Monks isn’t just unsuccessfully fighting for Oliver’s soul, he’s successfully fighting for the depoliticization of the novel.

 

Reading Reade so you don’t have to

There’s nothing like reading dreary novels to see if you just might write on them. I’m thinking I need a chapter on sensation novels and China, but problem is, I haven’t read any of the sensation novels that have China in them. So I’m starting with Charles Reade’s Hard Cash, serialized as Very Hard Cash (1863ish), which Google Books informs me is partly set in China. The first 150 pages were pretty tough going. I think Reade wins some kind of asshat award. Here’s a random helpful footnote:

Perhaps even this faint attempt at self-analysis was due to the influence of Dr. Whately [author of a Logic book the character’s reading to help her Oxonian brother]. For, by nature, young ladies of this age seldom turn the eye inward.

And, while all the manly men are sailing their ships and fighting pirates, there’s of course an annoying lady on deck, and some amazing (ahem) prose:

[B]eneath a purple heaven shone, sparkled, and laughed a blue sea, in whose waves the tropical sun seemed to have fused his beams; and beneath that fair, sinless, peaceful sky, wafted by a balmy breeze over those smiling, transparent, golden waves, a bloodthirsty Pirate bore down on them with a crew of human tigers; and a lady babble babble babble babble babble babble babbled in their quivering ears.

Oh, the joys of being a Victorianist!

 

More odds and ends

I think I need to feel my way through the intro chapter of the actual diss before doing the prospectus. Here are some more odds and ends:

• The longue durée: How does the Victorian relationship between China and England fit into the history of Anglo-Chinese relations starting from, say 1500 to now? One of the large motivations of my project has been the work of the so-called California School of Andre Gunder Frank, Pomeranz, and Roy Bin Wong. These economic historians argue that modernity is not the story of a European center spreading modernity to the periphery (nor the center’s exploitation of the periphery) but that before 1800 China and Europe were on par in terms of economic development. Frank argues that if anything, pre-1800, China ought to be considered the center and Europe the periphery.
  This is reflected in European representations of China from largely positive pre-1800 to largely negative post-1800. So, the Victorian period is particularly interesting as the time when the image of the inferior Chinese is being constructed, replacing earlier more positive constructions.
  So is China then demonized in Victorian literature? Not really, I’ve found. In fact, it doesn’t show up all that often, especially during the mid-Victorian period. Consider:
  • None of the major Victorian writers paid much attention to China. Contrast this with the eighteenth century, when you’ve got Leibnitz writing Novissima Sinica (1697), Defoe setting the sequel to Crusoe partly in China (1719), Voltaire’s play l’Orphelin de la Chinebased on a translated Chinese drama (1755), and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1760), a series of fictional letters of a Chinese traveller in England. In the twentieth century, you’ve got Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and the Tel Quel crew (Eric Hayot’s Chinese Dreams is about these). In the nineteenth century, you’ve got Charles Lamb’s “Old China,” but that’s earlier in the century, and that’s about it, at least as far as my research has gone so far.
  • From around 1810-1830, there was a spat of Chinese literature translated into English (when they were first able to translate Chinese). Then, not so much until the end of the century.
  • There’s lots going on in China in the middle of the nineteenth century: two Opium Wars, and the Taiping Rebellion, by far the largest war of the nineteenth century. And there’s the “Opening of China” after the first Opium War.
• “From China to Peru,” from Dr. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), it shows up quite a bit in Victorian lit. Interestingly, according to a quick Google Book Search digging, it only becomes a popular expression after 1820 or so, perhaps because the poem had been heavily anthologized. I assume that the good doctor chose China and Peru more or less arbitrarily, but in terms of global commerce, the Spanish galleon trade to China from Peru’s silver mine was immensely important. See what I mean about random bits of information that will work well in an intro chapter but not a prospectus? **sigh**
• “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”: from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall.” See, there’s totes poetry in my dissertation!

I wrote the previous about a week or two ago. I’m not thinking of any other odds and ends at the moment–perhaps it’s time to start the prospectus?

 

An Odd and an End

Do you count as ABD if you haven’t turned in your prospectus? Do you count as mentally ABD if you’re terrified of starting your prospectus? I’ve been wallowing, really wallowing, in the latter condition–I think I’ve begun to pull myself out of it, but alas, the prospectus is as yet unbegun in terms of words on page, or screen, or cloud, or what have you. Things are beginning to coalesce, but I still don’t feel ready to begin. Part of my problem is I’ve had a bunch of random ideas that I think will fit in well in the intro and/or epilogue, i.e., they’re non-Victorian and kind of anecdotey. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Susan Sontag’s short story “Project for a Trip to China”: It’s not really much of a story, so I hope you’ll forgive me for giving away the last line: “Perhaps I will write the book about my trip to China before I go.” The story consists of disconnected working notes towards her personal connection to China, its place in her imagination. Some dude in the NYRB called it “an embarrassing bit of Chinoiserie, however dismantled and self-consciously post-modern.” I actually don’t find it all that post-modern. Yes, there’s no narrative to speak of, except for writing about writing, but Sontag’s point doesn’t seem to be ironize the narrator’s orientalist tendencies–rather, it seems a sincere attempt understand those tendencies and their roots. The story’s apparently autobiographical: the narrator, like Sontag, was conceived, although not born in China. “Conception, pre-conception,” she writes (or maybe it’s the other way around.” I’m attracted to this story because in the Western tradition, China is perhaps the place most defined by preconceptions, self-consciously so, the most removed from Western “realities,” due to its distance, but also its self-isolation. There’s a parallel, I think, between the “opening of China” post Opium War #1 and the visits to China in the 70s by Nixon, Sontag, the Tel Quel crew.
• Brian Massumi on affect: “The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late-capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory” (“The Autonomy of Affect” [link opens PDF]) What was the affective infrastructure of Victorian globalization? Is this affective infrastructure different from that of imperialism/colonialism? I think my close readings will go for the affective infrastructures of texts–what Sianne Ngai calls “tone” in her reading of The Confidence Man. Plus “structures of feeling” a la Raymond Williams.

More odds and ends to follow!