Date Published:
13 June, 2011
Abstract:
The paper demonstrates that Dickens's Our Mutual Friend complicates any attempt to differentiate between aesthetic enjoyment and social awareness in reader response. It isolates three models of reading in which the interconnection between aesthetic effect and consciousness-raising effect is associated with the entanglements between person and thing, animate and inanimate, living and dead, subject and object of perception. These entanglements destabilize the grounds on which we would usually differentiate between aesthetic pleasure and social critique.
Jeffrey Wallen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is author of Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1998). In addition to writing about the current conflicts and debates in the university, he has published widely on nineteenth-century European literature. His essays have appeared in Yale Journal of Criticism, ELH, Diacritics, Word & Image, College English, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and other journals. His most recent publications include "Migrant Visions: The Scheunenviertel and Boyle Heights, Los Angeles," "Narrative Tensions: The Eyewitness and the Archive," "Falling Under an Evil Influence," "From the Archives" (co-written with Arnold Dreyblatt), and "Sociable Robots and the Posthuman." He is currently working on a study of the archive in contemporary thought and art. Updated February 19, 2011 |
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