The creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may have led a solitary life ostracized and un... more The creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may have led a solitary life ostracized and unloved, but these days he has plenty of friends in the countless imitations, adaptations, and interpretations he has provoked. The present study by Eileen Hunt Botting adds to the growing body of political readings sustained by the novel in recent years, including the work of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and disability scholars, to a name a few prominent types. Devoted exclusively to Frankenstein and written by a political theorist, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child attests to the novel's ongoing salience. Seeking to convince her colleagues in political science of literature's evidentiary value, Botting makes the sort of grand case for fiction that we literary scholars are no longer much used to making: "The novel form allows for this sort of big and open-ended philosophical question to be entertained by readers from a variety of temporal contexts, cultural backgrounds, and political perspectives" (8). With this philosophizing remit, Botting presents Frankenstein as a mental laboratory for running a series of "thought experiments" about children and the rights they are due. Literature, in this view, seems a good way to experiment on humans without having to obtain IRB approval. Botting asks that we "see the Creature for who he really was: a stateless orphan, abandoned by family, abused by society and ignored by the law" (xi). By casting the creature as "a giant baby" (13), his tale can be read as a parable on the perils that lie in the abandonment and abuse of children. Dismissing the Gothic apparatus that surrounds this archetypal "monster," Bot-Modern Philology, volume 116, number 3.
... Thank you also to my research assistant, Nese Senol, for her curiosity and commitment. ... pa... more ... Thank you also to my research assistant, Nese Senol, for her curiosity and commitment. ... panels on Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism at the annual confer-ences of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism: Joselyn Almeida, Jessica Damián, Lisa Nevarez, Charles ...
... The paradox that being conscious of "uno mismo" is the recognition of the alien qua... more ... The paradox that being conscious of "uno mismo" is the recognition of the alien quality of oneself is identified with the act of writing poetry ... calm, and the auditory: silent, Gimferrer shifts to the portrayal of a river, wherein the light that recently glimmered in the princess's eyes now ...
Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826Rewriting Conquest, 2010
This essay examines the rhetoric of sameness (as opposed to the more familiar rhetoric of otherne... more This essay examines the rhetoric of sameness (as opposed to the more familiar rhetoric of otherness) that characterized British imperial interest in Spanish American during the Romantic era. To do this, it analyzes how Robert Southey's 1805 poem Madoc, a Welsh-Mexican epic set in the twelfth century, builds on the Burkean plea for colonial benevolence in India in order to mount its own vindication of 'good' imperialism in Spanish America. Southey's struggle to exalt traditional colonialism as the great unifier of conqueror and conquered was dogged, however, by internal contradictions as well as by Britain's increasingly aggressive presence in Spanish America. This essay appears in _Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.
... Following the arguments of John Locke regarding the English constitution, Viscardo argued tha... more ... Following the arguments of John Locke regarding the English constitution, Viscardo argued that Spain's medieval constitution had been framed so as to ensure that unrepresentative government could legitimately be overthrown. ...
Critical Introduction to _The Most Foreign Country_, trans. Yvette Siegert (New York: Ugly Duckli... more Critical Introduction to _The Most Foreign Country_, trans. Yvette Siegert (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017).
For the last three decades, Ammiel Alcalay has been a signal force of cultural recovery, recupera... more For the last three decades, Ammiel Alcalay has been a signal force of cultural recovery, recuperating critical figures and events that have been buried or removed from the historical record in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe.
The creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may have led a solitary life ostracized and un... more The creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may have led a solitary life ostracized and unloved, but these days he has plenty of friends in the countless imitations, adaptations, and interpretations he has provoked. The present study by Eileen Hunt Botting adds to the growing body of political readings sustained by the novel in recent years, including the work of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and disability scholars, to a name a few prominent types. Devoted exclusively to Frankenstein and written by a political theorist, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child attests to the novel's ongoing salience. Seeking to convince her colleagues in political science of literature's evidentiary value, Botting makes the sort of grand case for fiction that we literary scholars are no longer much used to making: "The novel form allows for this sort of big and open-ended philosophical question to be entertained by readers from a variety of temporal contexts, cultural backgrounds, and political perspectives" (8). With this philosophizing remit, Botting presents Frankenstein as a mental laboratory for running a series of "thought experiments" about children and the rights they are due. Literature, in this view, seems a good way to experiment on humans without having to obtain IRB approval. Botting asks that we "see the Creature for who he really was: a stateless orphan, abandoned by family, abused by society and ignored by the law" (xi). By casting the creature as "a giant baby" (13), his tale can be read as a parable on the perils that lie in the abandonment and abuse of children. Dismissing the Gothic apparatus that surrounds this archetypal "monster," Bot-Modern Philology, volume 116, number 3.
... Thank you also to my research assistant, Nese Senol, for her curiosity and commitment. ... pa... more ... Thank you also to my research assistant, Nese Senol, for her curiosity and commitment. ... panels on Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism at the annual confer-ences of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism: Joselyn Almeida, Jessica Damián, Lisa Nevarez, Charles ...
... The paradox that being conscious of "uno mismo" is the recognition of the alien qua... more ... The paradox that being conscious of "uno mismo" is the recognition of the alien quality of oneself is identified with the act of writing poetry ... calm, and the auditory: silent, Gimferrer shifts to the portrayal of a river, wherein the light that recently glimmered in the princess's eyes now ...
Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826Rewriting Conquest, 2010
This essay examines the rhetoric of sameness (as opposed to the more familiar rhetoric of otherne... more This essay examines the rhetoric of sameness (as opposed to the more familiar rhetoric of otherness) that characterized British imperial interest in Spanish American during the Romantic era. To do this, it analyzes how Robert Southey's 1805 poem Madoc, a Welsh-Mexican epic set in the twelfth century, builds on the Burkean plea for colonial benevolence in India in order to mount its own vindication of 'good' imperialism in Spanish America. Southey's struggle to exalt traditional colonialism as the great unifier of conqueror and conquered was dogged, however, by internal contradictions as well as by Britain's increasingly aggressive presence in Spanish America. This essay appears in _Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.
... Following the arguments of John Locke regarding the English constitution, Viscardo argued tha... more ... Following the arguments of John Locke regarding the English constitution, Viscardo argued that Spain's medieval constitution had been framed so as to ensure that unrepresentative government could legitimately be overthrown. ...
Critical Introduction to _The Most Foreign Country_, trans. Yvette Siegert (New York: Ugly Duckli... more Critical Introduction to _The Most Foreign Country_, trans. Yvette Siegert (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017).
For the last three decades, Ammiel Alcalay has been a signal force of cultural recovery, recupera... more For the last three decades, Ammiel Alcalay has been a signal force of cultural recovery, recuperating critical figures and events that have been buried or removed from the historical record in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe.
The young poets who came together in mid-1970s Mexico City to found Infrarealism were keenly awar... more The young poets who came together in mid-1970s Mexico City to found Infrarealism were keenly aware that the artistic and political freedoms promised by the historical avant-garde had been betrayed. What was left was an ossified, institutionalized literary vanguard whose dominion was jealously guarded by a small circle of cultural elites. The Infras were united by their collective and individual determination to subvert the forces that imposed this regime and conspired to maintain it. And while these acts of subversion would take many forms over the next two decades, at the heart of them all was a commitment to integrating art and life by means of what Roberto Bolaño called "an ethics-aesthetics carried to the end." Featuring readings and conversation between Infrarealist Rubén Medina, and poet-translators Cole Heinowitz and John Burns, this panel will explore the radical politics and aesthetics of Infrarealism and their continued urgency for contemporary poetic practice in América.
Sweet Science makes a major contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of the relationship between ... more Sweet Science makes a major contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of the relationship between Romantic poetry and science. It is also an important work of intellectual history, exploring with intelligence and sensitivity the way in which atomist thought enters into the relation between poetry and biology. Goldstein reveals much about the ways in which Lucretianism allows for a conceptual complexity concerning the nature of things that is lost in the rise of scientific objectivity. I would only note that her argument curiously elides another trace of materialist thought, one perhaps more human. There is a shadow-project invoked in her book, an atomist engagement with Romantic notions of mortality and immortality in all of the Romantic poets but especially Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, that sees poetry returning to the great Lucretian question of philosophy as a means of learning how to die. Death-a philosophical acceptance of our dissolution into the atomies of the natural world-signifies within the theoretical framework Goldstein engages so energetically (organic life, materialist history), but also within the more recognizably Lucretian and Epicurean project of learning how to live and how to die.
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FANTASIES IN PERMEA... more POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER BOOK REVIEWS FEBRUARY /MARCH 2008
LAURA ELRICK FANTASIES IN PERMEABLE STRUCTURES FACTORY SCHOOL / 2005 REVIEW BY COLE HEINOWITZ
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BOOK REVIEWS
FEBRUARY /MARCH 2008
LAURA ELRICK
FANTASIES IN PERMEABLE STRUCTURES
FACTORY SCHOOL / 2005
REVIEW BY COLE HEINOWITZ