Revolutionary Claims: Transatlantic Agency in the Fictions of Godwin, Brown, and Irving Público
Sellountos, Jessica Demetra (2012)
Published
Abstract
Abstract
"Revolutionary Claims: Transatlantic Agency in the Fictions of
Godwin, Brown, and
Irving"
While the revolutions in America and France began with different
goals and ended with
different results, the people of the eighteenth century who felt
their influence in Britain
and America shared a common experience: a loss of social tradition
and order caused or
greatly accelerated by the experience of political and social
upheaval. Anglophone
literatures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
responded to this crisis in
works reflecting on the shift from monarchy to democracy in which
subjects found
themselves without a king, lord, or sovereign. I argue that William
Godwin's Caleb
Williams offers a model for early American Gothic, captivity
narratives of Charles
Brockden Brown and Washington Irving as they stage the emergence of
an uncertain,
revolutionary subject suspended between feudal and democratic
orders. But Godwin is
not merely an influence on Brown and Irving: rather the
revolutionary subject at stake in
their work is necessarily transatlantic--not engendered by any
particular nation per se but
rather by the phenomenon of revolution experienced as a suspended
event occurring
across continents in the eighteenth century.
Godwin, Brown and Irving use the motifs of curiosity, indecision,
and paralyzing
uncertainty to allegorize the emergence of this revolutionary
subjectivity but also to show
its failure to found itself as an authoritative agency with a claim
to direct representation.
As a number of critics have shown, revolution creates a paradox by
founding the very
conditions that are necessary to give it political legitimacy. The
problem for the subject of
democracy then, as these transatlantic authors show, becomes the
need to receive
legitimacy as agents from the very sovereigns they had severed
themselves from. The
protagonists in these texts remain uncertain, as they repeatedly
encounter the aporetic
impossibility of their revolutionary claim and become caught in the
political and moral
dilemmas of saving or eradicating the monarchs who have ruled over
them.
Godwin, Brown and Irving present this uncertainty as a repeated
interruption disturbing
their protagonists' testimonies of tyranny and disrupting their
ability to control their
revolutionary impulses for violence and compulsive self-analysis.
These interruptions
appear in the literary texts as ellipses, anachronisms and scenes
of suspended
consciousness; they paralyze the construction of a coherent,
reliable narrative and
narrator. Ultimately, the protagonists of these narratives
simultaneously construct and
deconstruct their subjectivities by their unsuccessful attempts to
claim autonomy through
the act of narrative. Revolutionary subjectivity is never
completely attainable, and thus
becomes the basis for a larger, transnational allegory questioning
whether national
narratives and national identities are themselves completely
attainable.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
______________________________________________________________________________
Revolutionary Claims: Transatlantic Agency in the Fictions of
Godwin, Brown, and
Irving 1
A Transatlantic and Transnational Approach: Framing the Project
Within American
Studies and Comparative Literature 2
Why These Authors, Why These Texts and Why Now? 11
Subjectivity as Event, Revolution as Event: the Problem of the
Founding Act,
Defining the Revolutionary Event, and
Understanding its Connection to
Subjectivity 17
Godwin and the Model of Revolutionary Agency 30
Charles Brockden Brown: Deconstructing Revolutionary Subjectivity
34
Washington Irving: Re-staging Ruptures in the National
Consciousness 38
Chapter 1
______________________________________________________________________________
Textual Prefaces and Intertextual Uncertainties 45
The Origin of (Uncertain) Agency: Subjectivity and the
Revolutionary Turn 50
Curious Beginnings, Novel Turns 62
Uncertain Subjectivity: Caleb and the Feudal Contract 74
A History of Violence: Doubles and the Failure of a Plebeian
Subject 82
Broken Promises: The Claim to Rights 100
Truth on Trial: a Witness to the Claim and a Failure to Declare
106
Paranoid (Undecidable) Subjects, Nervous (Unreliable) Narratives
121
Uncertain Subjects, Uncertain Endings 133
The End is the Beginning of a Revolution(ary) Tale 138
Chapter 2
______________________________________________________________________________
A Godwinian Inheritance 143
Divided Subjects: Edgar and Clithero 148
Curiosity and Uncertainty: The Legacy of a Godwinian Crisis
165
Godwinian Dilemmas and the Search for a Cause 174
Caught in a Dream: Suspended Subjects 186
Talking Subjects, Missing Words; Violent Events, Missing Subjects
201
Traumatic Returns 224
Chapter 3
______________________________________________________________________________
National Truths and Legitimate Fictions 231
Colliding Narrative Forces: Truth Against Fiction and a Narrator's
Collapse 241
Sleeping through the Revolution: Inhuman Revolutionary Agency and
Textual
Evidence 252
Between Colonial and Postcolonial Identities: Suspended Certainty
in Rip 260
State of Infantia: The Absence of an Other and the Exclusion
of Subjectivity 272
Traumatic Subjectivity: Bearing Witness to Revolution as a
Traumatic Event 280
Works Cited 295
Notes 307
_______________________________________________________________________________
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