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In a recent assessment of Victorian studies, Amanda Anderson queries literary criticism’s somewhat reflexive cross-disciplinary filiation with history. What, she ponders, would be the impact of a more concerted privileging of political theory as a “disciplinary partner” for criticism? This panel takes up Anderson’s question by exploring the relation between Anglo-American literature and political theory in three distinctive cases: the mid-Victorian realist novel as crafted by George Eliot, the early modernist experimentation of E. M. Forster, and the post-welfare state fiction of Angus Wilson and Paul Goodman. Each of the panelists will undertake to show how the works in question engage with contemporaneous politics and, in turn, how today’s political theories both illuminate such literature and are illuminated by it. Anderson will follow with a response. Gordon Bigelow will lead the session.
In “Consenting to what we love: Daniel Deronda and the Victorian History of the Sexual Contract,” Kathy Alexis Psomiades argues that liberalism’s sexual contract—famously elucidated by the political theorist Carole Pateman—has a Victorian past. In her classic 1988 work, Pateman argues that the same social contract under which men agree to give up certain rights for the benefit of equality before law underwrites a secret sexual contract that gives all men compensatory sexual access to women. Liberal society is thus divided between a private sphere in which men oppress women in the family, and a public sphere in which gender neutral universal subjects engage in contractual relations. Women’s access to such universal subjectivity is, however, compromised since their unequal role in the home precludes the autonomy on which the liberal subject is predicated. Psomiades argues that the emergence of the sexual contract can be traced (in Victorian anthropology and in literature) to the 1860s in Britain, where it served a political function in the project of imagining new models of collectivity for a democratized British state. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) can be read as one instance of this Victorian story. When Pateman’s feminist critique is read back against Eliot’s novel and when Eliot’s novel in turn is read as a species of political theorizing what emerges is a new take on the old project of making sense of the novel’s sexual and political plots. Indeed, the sexual in much post-Reform Act fiction does not so much translate, disguise or displace the political as it facilitates the production of political theories.
In Lauren M. E. Goodlad’s paper, “E. M. Forster’s Queer Internationalism and the Ethics of Care,” liberalism’s vexed relation to feminism takes yet another turn in relation to Forster’s first-published novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Since Lionel Trilling, Forster has often been seen as liberalism’s literary standard bearer and, more recently, as a novelist who portrayed foreignness as a metaphor for tabooed sexual difference. According to Goodlad, Forster is a “queer internationalist” not because he was a closeted homosexual but because his early novel flummoxes the ethical categories of liberalism—an argument that involves complicating the feminist ethics of recent political theorists such as Seyla Benhabib, Joan Tronto, and Iris Marion Young. Though critics have likened Forster’s fiction to the pragmatism of Richard Rorty and the communicative ethics of Jürgen Habermas, Goodlad argues that the novelist’s commitment to embodied particularity, as expressed in the erotic charge of national difference, is so radical that it is difficult to reconcile his works to liberalism of any cast. Forster’s dramatic encounters with “Southern” Italy and India undermine liberal ideals of synthesis and mutual recognition, yet simultaneously aspire toward a reconfigured ethic of care (both like and unlike the recent feminist theories). As a queer internationalist—a particularist and contextualist who embraces difference for its world-enlarging frisson—Forster is, as Trilling writes, “at war with the liberal imagination,” albeit not in the humanist mode Trilling proposed.
Robert Caserio focuses on the anti-liberal political theories of Deleuze, Foucault and the Italian autonomia group (e.g., Georgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno)—thinkers whom the philosopher Todd May has identified as “poststructuralist anarchists.” In “Welfare State Ideology and Anarchism in Angus Wilson and Paul Goodman,” Caserio argues that Anglo-American fiction both anticipates and illuminates the debate between left-liberal theorists of the welfare state and their anarchist critics. Poststructuralist anarchists oppose the post-war welfare state in both its New Deal and Keynesian formations by arguing that the rights which the liberal state guarantees are compromised by capitalism and imperialism. Two postwar novels, Hemlock and After (1952) by English novelist Angus Wilson and The Empire City (1946-1959) by U. S. novelist and anarchist Paul Goodman, challenge that view. In Wilson and Goodman welfare state ideology and proto-poststructuralist anarchism are not antithetical but mutually supporting. Accordingly, recovery of their novels’ perspectives elucidates an ill-conceived antithesis in the political assumptions that undergird today’s cultural criticism. Moreover, Wilson and Goodman’s fictions dramatize patience and passivity as political virtues, as surprisingly in line with welfare state and anarchist aims; and their novels re-define fiction’s effects on its audience in terms of a humbling or embarrassing of audience agency. Thus, Wilson and Goodman, in addition to subverting opposition between welfare state thought and current radical political theory, newly picture the role of literature and of audience response in regard to social rights and anarchist impulses.