About

Elisha Cohn is a professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, located in 250 Goldwin Smith Hall. Her research focuses on Victorian literature, theory of the novel, animal studies, literature and science with an emphasis on medicine, affect theory, and ecology. She has authored two books: 'Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel' (Oxford University Press, 2016), which considers how states of reverie and trance shaped aesthetic forms in Victorian literature, and 'Milieu: a Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel' (Stanford University Press, 2025), which rethinks the status of animals in global fiction by exploring how contemporary narratives evoke the creatureliness of both animal and human lives. Additionally, she is a co-editor of the 'Oxford Handbook of George Eliot' (2025). Her scholarly contributions include essays published in journals such as Contemporary Literature, Victorian Studies, and the Journal of Victorian Culture. Her current academic interests extend to the history of medicine, affect theory, and ecology.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Geodesy
• Geography
• Geometry
• Psychoanalysis
• Philosophy
• History
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Communication
• Media studies
• Theology
• Mathematics
• Art history

Selected publications

• <i>Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture</i> by Lindsay Wilhelm

  Victorians Institute Journal · 2025-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  “Progress,” Oscar Wilde noted as a college undergraduate, “is simply the instinct of self-preservation in humanity, the desire to affirm one’s own essence. . . . Mankind has been continually . . . turning the key on its own spirit: but after a time there is an enormous desire for higher freedom—for self-preservation” (qtd. 102). Reading the work of theorist Herbert Spencer, the young and surprisingly industrious Wilde found in evolutionary optimism the grounds for the pleasures of self-making. Lindsay Wilhelm’s Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture offers an assured, deeply researched, and often revelatory intellectual history of the connections between evolutionary theory and aestheticism. The degree of entanglement between these two movements that emerged in the nineteenth century has been vastly underestimated. George Levine’s influential account of the “one-culture” model of the collaboration of literature and science focused primarily on the work of writers grappling with the realist paradigm. By addressing the work of novelists, poets, and aesthetes like George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Mathilde Blind, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee alongside the writing of public intellectuals like Spencer and W. K. Clifford, Wilhelm creates an extremely convincing account of how evolutionary thought’s endorsement of useless beauty “sanctioned the founding principles of aestheticism” (23). In a wide-ranging yet cohesive manner, Wilhelm offers a convincing genealogy of aesthetic visions of aesthetic fulfillment, queer belonging, and collective futurity.If for many Victorians, evolutionary models transformed a meaningful world into “a universe governed by vast and pitiless natural forces” and hostile to individual flourishing in the interest of mass survival, the aesthetes made their mark through a commitment to an optimistic view of evolution as at once physical and cultural—as well as sensual (3). Throughout Evolutionary Aestheticism, Wilhelm shows that these fin-de-siècle writers and thinkers were “united in the belief that individual aesthetic choices, propagated via evolutionary mechanisms, carried the potential for far-reaching social and cultural change” (11). While the book acknowledges eugenics as one sinister post-Darwinian aftermath, the socially progressive reading of evolutionary thinking has been comparatively underrecognized.This work of intellectual history, sparing but elegant in its use of literary close readings, finds evidence not only in poetry but also in personal journals, public-facing writing, professional writing, and the buzzy activity of social networks. Wilhelm begins with “Darwin’s turn to the beautiful” in The Descent of Man (1871), in which he builds on his earliest thinking about beauty in his pre–Origin of Species notebooks (23). In Descent, his second book on the mechanisms of evolution and his first to attend to the origin of his own species, Darwin emphasizes individual human preferences and control over their outcomes. Darwin’s interest in beauty permitted a reading of his work as offering “an intriguingly hedonic aesthetics, in which certain qualities are called beautiful simply because they ‘give pleasure’ to a prospective mate” (29–30). Though this hedonistic angle appalled some of his contemporaries, it attracted many others.Wilhelm supplements this reading of Darwin through a discussion of Herbert Spencer’s related endorsement of the value of play to individual and social development; taste is not merely an instinct unamenable to judgment, but becomes linked to personal and social meliorism. This optimism was also the hallmark of mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford, for whom “a sensorial receptivity to the beauties of the cosmic order” cultivated through aesthetic training, finds consolation and beauty in a newly material conception of the universe (57). Clifford’s work—a wonderful, underread, and historically pivotal set of essays—resonates with the “secular reverence” of Walter Pater’s late interest in ethical aestheticism in Marius the Epicurean and discernible in his earlier writing (67). Even if a “receptive, reverential temperament” is ultimately linked by these writers to rather vague socially progressive goals—in some cases, like Oscar Wilde’s, more libertarian-socialist, and in others, like Grant Allen’s, more openly eugenicist—it is notable that both imagine the individual exercise of perceptual freedom as pleasurable and good, nonreproductive and (ultimately) nonsubversive. As Vernon Lee and her circle would clarify, “art, not for art’s sake, but of art for the sake of life” exemplified aestheticism’s ethical turn and discernible in the physiological responses to visual art Lee understood as “empathy” (qtd. 122).Aestheticism’s posture of reverence for pleasure even continues to inform debates about the project of literary criticism today. Moving into the twentieth century, Evolutionary Aestheticism documents the aftermath of Victorian faith in the ethical force of aesthetic experience in Bloomsbury art theory. When writers like Roger Fry and Clive Bell sought to refute linear evolutionary narratives that presented European art as beauty’s telos, they nonetheless preserved a late Victorian investment in the social autonomy of art from other regimes of social value, a move that had begun in collaboration with the sciences. Thus, the surprising applications of evolutionary thinking provide a window into the origins of the increasingly vast institutional distance between the practice of literary criticism and the sciences in the twentieth century. Moreover, if recent work on what Rita Felski calls “the limits of critique” suggests a restorative confidence in determinations of literary value, this is, Wilhelm suggests, an idea that retraces a discernably Victorian faith in the immanent power of an aesthetic education, if not “good taste” per se.Late Victorian writing’s engagement with evolutionary thought, for Wilhelm, is dissident, queer, and utopian; drawing briefly on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, whom Wilhelm quotes midway through the monograph, evolutionary thought offered “‘the anticipatory illumination of the utopian,’ with its sense of unlimited potentiality” (87). The theoretical stakes of this argument appear in a few illuminating moments like this one, while overall the book’s nuanced and fascinating focus on the history of evolutionary thought is precisely rendered and, in its own right, beautifully conceived.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-03-20

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract The introduction lays the foundations for the Handbook’s commitment to exploring George Eliot’s interest in, and handling of, literary form. The volume opens with a brief discussion of Eliot’s reviews of the fiction and poetry written by her contemporaries, which show her repeated use of organic imagery and ongoing preoccupation with what different literary genres and forms were best suited to do. It then discusses the short, hybrid piece ‘Story of a blue-bottle’, part translation and part adaptation, as a stepping-stone between her career as an essayist and a novelist. The clarifying effect, for Eliot, of engaging with contemporary literature is in turn mirrored by the Handbook’s aim to offer over fifty perspectives on Eliot. The introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s five sections: Life and Networks, Influences, Works, Form, and Reception.

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• <i>Silas Marner</i> and Affect

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-03-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Silas Marner is fascinated by feeling in all its manifestations: with the experience and manifestation of emotion, with the absence of feeling in catalepsy, and with the nature of touch as an ambivalent conductor of knowledge, including a knowledge of the self. This chapter reads the novella alongside the nineteenth-century physiology of touch as grounds for understanding Silas Marner as presaging criticism’s recent affective turn. The chapter argues that the text makes the role of the senses in the production of both emotion and knowledge key to its disruptions of realism and raises questions about the degree to which realism depends upon or assumes a hierarchy of the senses.

  PublisherDOI

• Kathy Alexis Psomiades. Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 256. $85.00 (cloth).

  Journal of British Studies · 2024-04-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Review: <i>The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel</i>, by Brian Gingrich

  Nineteenth-Century Literature · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Media studies
  • History

  Book Review| March 01 2024 Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich Brian Gingrich, The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 202. $84. Elisha Cohn Elisha Cohn Cornell University Elisha Cohn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2016) and has published in a variety of other venues including Contemporary Literature, Victorian Studies, and the Journal of Victorian Culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 78 (4): 316–319. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.78.4.316 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Elisha Cohn; Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2024; 78 (4): 316–319. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.78.4.316 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search In The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, Brian Gingrich reframes classic problems of narrative structure, arguing for pace—and not reference as such—as a master concept in the emergence of British realism. The book ranges from a comparativist discussion of the late eighteenth-century novel through the heightened moments that structure "epiphanic modernism" (p. 159). Offering a structural analysis of the way realist narrative manages temporal flow, Gingrich makes the case that realism as it emerges in the late eighteenth century is foundationally based on a tension between "scene" and "summary." Gingrich highlights these terms from Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse, pointing out that they were demoted from a place of prominence in Mieke Bal's Narratology in 2017. Gingrich recovers these terms in order to explain pace, which he identifies as a fundamental rhythm of narrative: enacted scenes are interspersed, to varying degrees, with summaries that transmit compressed... You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Materializing Feeling and the Limits of Metaphor

  Victorian Studies · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Sociology

  The affective turn has prompted literary scholars to take interest in neuroscientific and philosophical approaches to the materiality of bodyminds, even while often insisting on the immaterial qualitativeness of feeling. This paper examines the prehistory of this divided investment, which reinscribes affect into the atom, the cell, the fiber, and the molecule. The Victorian fascination with newly imaginable physical worlds creates unsettling scales of existence that were understood as formative of human identity, emotion, and moral capacities, but were seemingly fungible, nonindividual, and depthless. Examining George Eliot’s treatment of the material basis of feeling in Middlemarch (1871–72), I argue that Victorian science insisted on the metaphorical bearing of materialist concepts, presenting materiality itself as affectively charged to avoid grappling with the threat of a noninteriorized reality.

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• The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2023 · 34 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  • Literature

  One of Olive Schreiner’s favorite verbs, it turns out, was internet. S. Pearl Brilmyer’s fascinating new book, The Science of Character, embeds Victorian realist fiction in a range of then-active philosophical and scientific debates that led away from a concept of character as an interiorized subjectivity. Realist character, for Brilmyer, was an emergent phenomenon, the product of networks of geometrical, electrochemical, evolutionary, and cultural forces. Linked to Marxist traditions in novel criticism as well as to the priorities of new materialism, this book aims to find “the object within the subject” by highlighting a set of materialist concepts that function at both subjective and objective levels: “plasticity, impressibility, spontaneity, impulsivity, relationality, and vitality” (6). Doing rare justice to the vast range of reference available to Victorian writers, as well as to the more recent theoretical turns that inherit their obsessions, Brilmyer showcases the accelerating reconceptualizations of character during the nineteenth century that disrupted the idea that representation of the real could occur through engagement with a single scale or qualitative dimension. Representations themselves in this period, the book demonstrates, became objects that are constituted by networks of relation. While this approach is marked as “weak theory,” in which striking claims about the novel form surface only through immersion in novels’ “situational particularities” (43), it remains both historically rich and theoretically satisfying because the range of contexts is treated so rigorously. New materialisms like thing theory sometimes suffer from vagueness when their discourses of materiality are too transhistorical, while history-of-science perspectives on the Victorian period (however rich) tend to center on a single discourse. Brilmyer, in contrast, unites a thickly historicized account of multiple sciences to pinpoint their convergence around a relational object world of which humans are just one not-so-distinctive part.The contributions of the book’s chapters fall into two (not completely homologous) categories: an innovative account of George Eliot’s scientific interests that presents her as a more deeply materialist, specifically Spinozist, thinker than we have recognized, and an intellectual history that tracks several authors’ creative reuse of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy in post-Darwinian England. First and foremost, however, this book matters as an intervention in theories of character, which whether formal (Alex Woloch) or historical (Deidre Shauna Lynch) have not yet grappled with how Victorian writers’ fascination with the history of science affected their understanding of character as a form. If scientific reading led authors like Eliot and Thomas Hardy to the “presumption of a shared materiality between human beings and the world they describe, encouraging us to recognize the material-semiotic processes that knit worlds together” (12), then this recognition profoundly decentered subjectivity in fictional representation. Opening with a discussion of J. S. Mill’s unfulfilled call for a science of ethology—the study of how character arises from environment—Brilmyer’s book documents how Victorian realists attempted to constitute this science. Following James Sully’s suggestion that fiction had the unique capacity to turn “the sensuous medium of words” into a “perception of physical objects” (quoted on 22–23), Brilmyer shows that it was important to Victorian writers to attest to “human objecthood” so as to fully register a material “real.” Like recent monographs by Megan Ward (2018) and David Sweeney Coombs (2019), The Science of Character investigates the Victorians’ curiosity about how the materiality of the page generates sensations that feel real, making sense of fiction’s open unreality by showing that “consciousness” is less contained, less subjective, than assumed. This approach depends on a certain literalism, in which characters do not just represent but literally are “inorganic relational forms” (59). Against a picture of metaphor and reality at odds with one another, Brilmyer presents the figurative imaginary of Victorian science as generating a knowledge of the real through a process of emergence theorized by G. H. Lewes and later James Clerk Maxwell, in which materials that appear dynamic at one scale appear individuated at another.Memorably attentive to Eliot’s descriptions of characters as impressible organic textures or inorganic shapes with geometrical properties and aesthetic qualities, Brilmyer highlights the consistency with which Eliot’s later writing investigated “not only sympathetic and real-seeming minds but also lively and reactive characterological bodies” (42). Brilmyer’s emphasis is strongly weighted toward the latter. The first of two Eliot chapters showcases the physicalism of Eliot’s figurative language in Middlemarch, in which comparisons of characters to substances start to sound literal and complicate the dematerializing tendency of metaphor. Brilmyer turns to Eliot’s provocative short essay “Notes on Form in Art,” along with her engagement with the work of Spinoza, to show that Eliot attributed “the affective capacity of people as well as things to the fact that they are composed of a formative matter from which the very possibility of interconnection (and thus also sensation) arises” (56), while Lewes and Maxwell’s concept of emergentism explains the range of figures used to capture that materiality. The second chapter turns to Eliot’s almost Nietzschean gestures to the futility of consciousness in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, where late style coincides with something approaching a Victorian posthumanism. The book’s coda, too, circles back to Eliot, connecting her approach to flat character in Middlemarch to, on the one hand, debates in the 1870s about spontaneous generation of life out of dead matter and, on the other hand, Gertrude Stein’s play with variation.Hardy’s late turn away from an already antisubjective realism serves The Science of Character as a hinge, whereby Brilmyer juxtaposes debates about purity in early genetics between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton; microbiology’s tacit investment in whiteness and surface as aesthetic ideals serving the theorization of undifferentiated matter; and geology’s account of England’s oolitic rock formations (multisurfaced, without a unified consistency). Brilmyer focuses on Hardy’s odd late novel The Well-Beloved, portraying a sculptor’s obsession with capturing in marble a feminine, transgenerational essence. On this reading, the novel showcases the dangers of presuming the whiteness of human objecthood; the chapter—contra recent readings of Hardy as complicit with the logic of whiteness—extends a robust understanding of the dynamics of racialization to his picture of a provincialized England.The final third of the book, treating somewhat less-known work, including Schreiner’s From Man to Man and Sarah Grand’s Ideala: A Study from Life, properly introduces Schopenhauer’s work to Victorianists, which is crucial, given the interest in his philosophy that began in intellectual circles like Eliot’s in the 1850s. This section of the book demonstrates that Schopenhauer’s account of the will as a superseding force was more a provocation than an impediment to writers eager to disturb conventions. Thus the “physical and determined aspects of existence that humans share with nonhuman animals and things” at once reveal how character is “a sedimented accumulation colored by one’s surroundings” but might also show “uncontrollable spontaneity . . . in the face of eugenic attempts to mold the species by force of will” (35). As against increasingly normative accounts of human materiality, object-oriented vocabularies allowed later Victorian “new realists” especially to develop accounts of the interaction between personal circumstance and impersonal structures, which in turn permitted both instinct and impulse to refuse a deterministic picture of human life. While the book might do more to show how the earlier texts present objecthood as a challenge to think with alongside the scale of moral dilemma and existential self-formation, these dual dimensions of objecthood fully cohere in these chapters, which bring together novels and philosophers to theorize as a feminist issue “the degree to which humans experience their actions as volitional” despite their status as also objects, determined by forces beyond their control (179).The two trajectories in The Science of Character operate at different scales, with differing degrees of distance from the concerns that still animate a great deal of subject-oriented criticism on character. Still, each of these trajectories affirms Victorian efforts to materialize the real, rather than highlight its accretive, polyvocal qualities (not to say incoherences). Indeed, Brilmyer endorses Victorians’ efforts to come to terms with their rapidly materialized world, which could look forbiddingly “unfelt” (75) because it sometimes seemed so inhuman. Brilmyer calls attention to the unpredictable afterlives of their omnivorous curiosities about the sources of that fiction called the self.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style</i>. Simon Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. vii+238.

  Modern Philology · 2022-07-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewNotework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style. Simon Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. vii+238.Elisha CohnElisha CohnCornell University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNote taking is a semilearned skill, essential in academic labor, yet often inconsequential; sometimes it culminates in a project or exam, but much of the time it goes nowhere. Unlike diary writing, note taking—typically partial in its observations, sometimes wrong about what is being recorded, often digressive and far more extensive than necessary—is rarely recognized as either an epistemology or a genre except as preparation for something more; George Eliot’s Casaubon allegorizes for us all the dangers of infinite scholarly notation. Yet Simon Reader’s fascinating Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style presents a theory of the notebook as a genre in its own right—an ethically significant style of information even as it often remains constitutively minor. Notework offers a major contribution to the genre theory and the history of reading because it makes valuable, really for the first time, an absolutely ubiquitous practice; although it builds upon accounts by Leah Price, Deirdre Lynch, Nicholas Dames, and others of how Victorian writers manipulated the book form, Notework is not book history. Rather, it offers “a lateral literary criticism that turns a formalist eye upon texts that have been hiding in plain sight” (11). For Victorian studies especially, where knowledge making still typically depends upon the close analysis and contextualization of complete, major works usually published within an author’s lifetime, Reader’s approach can return us to the archive and attune us beyond the canon because it so profoundly values formal multiplicity.“Part of my goal,” he writes, “is to ask ‘why always the tangled bank’”—but he does more than reframe criticism’s ordinary “practices of excerption” that endlessly reiterate certain charismatic passages (33). More deeply, Reader disturbs a latent commitment to instrumental reading. Notework recovers the “vibrant aimlessness” and “fragmentary splendor” of note taking and frames its “desire for pluralist and nonsystematic thinking” as an ethical expression of curiosity that defers recuperation (143). With a lightly materialist touch, Reader offers familiar examples mostly from the second half of the scribblemaniacal nineteenth century, from Charles Darwin’s notebooks of the 1830s and 1840s to the work of George Gissing, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee. Without claiming Darwin as a direct influence, Reader observes that the Darwin’s “preoccupation with uselessness and inconsequential variation is uncannily reiterated” in the work of these later writers (13). Indeed, it seems not only that an interest in the useless produces the nonlinear form of notework, but also that a nonlinear form makes the idea of the useless thinkable. After all, Darwin had to theorize uselessness in developing his heterodox account of evolution. But as Reader shows, Darwin’s theory included an epistemology very far from the practices of objectivity we have long associated with nineteenth-century science. His notebooks featured a curious mixture of emotional and sensory impressions, measurements, food and weather logs, and more. Reader offers up Darwin’s messy, paratactic, half-banal and half-rapturous notations as significant in their own right, noting that Darwin himself “took care to preserve even those documents that served no purpose in the construction his argument, pushing them forward into unfinished time” (54). This ethos may reflect his nonteleological thinking about evolutionary time without needing to predict or exemplify it.In the work of Gissing and Hopkins, Reader examines two authors whose work over a lifetime changed significantly to accommodate the value or solace they understood as accruing to the minimal percept. Both chapters make resonant use of twentieth-century interlocutors in order to bring home the theoretical significance of these styles of inconsequence. In the chapter on Gissing, Reader reflects on the relation between the fragmentary notebook and the realist novel as a social whole in the formalist sense that tends to shut down the circulation of open-ended, fragmentary knowledge. Reader refracts Roland Barthes’s lectures published as The Preparation of the Novel (2010), where Barthes lingers in the neutrality of the not-yet-written, to argue for Gissing’s gradual and successful experimentation with an increasingly notebook-like novel form in his Ryecroft (1903) (which appears as a kind of anti-Middlemarch). For Gissing, “notation can keep one from refusing the world altogether, allowing for a sustained relation to the present even if it drives at nothing” (82). The chapter on Hopkins pairs the poet with Harold Garfinkel, a twentieth-century predecessor to actor-network theory, observing their shared fascination with the interactive, infinite, and collective haecceity of the things of the world encountering consciousness—which the poet famously termed “inscape.” Demonstrating how Hopkins’s poems reflect increasing anxiety about the need to redeem inscape effects through a spiritual frame, Reader observes that the early notebooks develop forms of punctuation that resonate with his distinctive system of poetic stress, allowing him to record the intensity of fleeting impressions.Unlike the previously named writers, Wilde’s notebooks were directly related to the production of knowledge in a scholarly sense. Reader examines the notebooks Wilde kept while studying as an undergraduate at Oxford during a period of rapid curricular change; but more important than what they record is that the notebooks offer a means of dealing nonhierarchically “with a massive influx of competing and contradictory information and Victorian Oxford” (128). The strategy is style itself: the notes become a laboratory for the aphoristic style with which Wilde has long been associated, revealing the influence of Francis Bacon’s aphoristic philosophy even as they also demonstrate Wilde’s tastings of an extremely wide range of thought on physics, physiology, philology, and philosophy, among other discourses. Rather than suggest a master discourse that informs Wilde’s work from outside the literary, the notebooks suggest the primacy of form. Turning to the novel’s treatment of this mode of knowledge, however, Reader finds Wilde working in a more cautionary vein: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), for all that it dallies with antiteleological values, ultimately functions as an allegory of the dangers of taking free-floating bon mots as a theory of self-cultivation.In Lee’s seemingly less anxious case, the notebook form is directly in the service of a theory of aesthetic response, where units of impression and attention themselves constitute the social meaning of art. As in Reader’s own treatment of the other writers, where polished “literary” texts can prove bleaker in their finitude than the notations that surround them, we see in Lee a “radical desire to dispense with things like novels and poetry altogether, imagining a way that she and her readers could participate in the recirculation of diverse mental notations as the very essence of aesthetic attention, combining in one style both creation and response” (182). But the theory is nontotalizing; what at times looked to Lee’s contemporaries as self-absorption allowed her to redefine empathy as the infinite attunement between the self and its object world.Throughout, notebooks not only perform uselessness but offer a haven for writers preoccupied by a resistance to use. The teleological toxicity of being “fatally subsumed” (62) is as consequential for its anti-instrumental method as it is for our thinking about genre, continuing in a vein of criticism by (among others) Anne-Lise François and Sianne Ngai that disentangles minor or neutral aesthetic productions from melancholy aspirations to an impossible completeness or pristine mode of agency. At its most ambitious, Notework investigates “a style of eschewing the life of a sovereign human subject” (49), a claim Reader makes without suggesting any predetermined ideological consequences. For even while, throughout the monograph, nonlinearity and noncontinuity are most typically sites of pleasure, they are potentially also sites of cooptation. In the conclusion Reader observes the alignment of notetaking with machine learning, an externalization of consciousness presaging the rise of information. Today, even as we record “the existential texture of our lives” (194) in constantly shifting collectives that find value in the givenness of our perceptions, “we are data” (193): the datafication of our notations of everyday life through social media platforms makes the notes actors. “Notework” echoes network—despite the form’s ability to provoke unexpected, nonhierarchic collectivities, there is no guarantee of its staying that way. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 2November 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721473 Views: 310Total views on this site HistoryPublished online July 14, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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• Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science, by David Sweeney Coombs | Hardy, Conrad and the Senses, by Hugh Epstein

  Victorian Studies · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Virtual Minds, Victorian Novels, and the Question of Modeling

  Victorian Literature and Culture · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.” While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?

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