An aesthetics in all things

Representations

Volumn 104, Issue , 2008, Pages 116-125

  Otter, Samuel ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63849083777     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2008.104.1.116     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. Jonathan Loesberg, "Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Formalism," Victorian Literature and Culture 27, no. 2 (Sept. 1999): 537
2. Susan J. Wolfson, "Reading for Form," introduction to Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle, 2006), 3
3. Mark David Rasmussen, "New Formalisms?" introduction to Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York, 2002), 3, 7
4. Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, "A 'Hive of Subtlety': Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies," introduction to Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies, special issue of American Literature 76, no. 3 (Sept. 2004): 428-29
5. W. J. T. Mitchell, "The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy After All These Years," PMLA 118, no. 2 (March 2003): 321
6. Marjorie Levinson, "What Is New Formalism?" PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 558-69, and in an expanded version online at http://sitemaker. umich.edu/pmla-article. Mary Poovey doubts the efficacy and theoretical coherence of a "reinvigorated formalism" and has called for new and more persuasive defenses of aesthetic value
7. see "Beyond the Current Impasse in Literary Studies," American Literary History 11, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 354-77
8. and also her recent Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2008)
9. Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and intro. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE, 1965), 22
10. Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca, 1990), 264-70
11. George Levine, "Reclaiming the Aesthetic," introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), 1-28
12. Steven Knapp, Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism (Cambridge, 1993)
13. Patricia Meyer Spacks, introduction to "Does Literary Value Supersede Other Kinds of Value? Selected Papers from a Colloquium at the University of Virginia, April 2, 1993," Special Section in Callaloo 17, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 542-44
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Merlin" (1847), in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations, ed. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (New York, 1994), 94
15. Catherine Gallagher, "The History of Literary Criticism," in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton, 1998), 151-72
16. Levinson, "What Is New Formalism?" 561, 563
17. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1985), 138
18. The phrase "odd inches" is taken from the end of the chapter entitled "A Bower in the Arsacides," when Ishmael describes how he rounded off the measurements of the whale skeleton, which he had tattooed on his right arm; see Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851), vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, 1988), 451. Subsequent references will be given in parentheses in the body of the essay
19. See Myra Jehlen, "Beyond Transcendence," introduction to Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (New York, 1986), 1-18
20. Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno" (1856)
21. in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston, 1987), 76
22. As Howard P. Vincent notes, Melville elaborated on the details about hemp he found in Frederick Debell Bennett's Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe (1840)
23. see The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston, 1949), 227-31. The comparison between hemp and Manilla rope appears to be Melville's own invention
24. Edward Said, "Introduction to Moby-Dick," in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, 2000), 356
25. In "Shiloh: a requiem (April 1862)," a poem describing the aftermath of the catastrophic battle in southwestern Tennessee during the Civil War, Melville uses a volatile parenthesis to convey the reciprocal pressures of form and history and the obstacles to redemptive interpretation: "(What like a bullet can undeceive!)." See Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), in The Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Douglas Robillard (Kent, OH, 2000), 81-82
26. Michael Warner considers the poem's reflections on violence in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, in "What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive," Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 41-54