Arts Research & Publications

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Browsing Arts Research & Publications by Department "English"

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    "Doomed to Live": Reading Shelley's Frankenstein and "The Immortal Immortal" with Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars
    (Litteraria Pragensia, 2019-02-25) Sigler, David
    Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s recently published two-volume seminar on the death penalty, this essay analyzes two parallel cases from Mary Shelley’s fictions: on the one hand, Elizabeth’s objection to the death penalty in Frankenstein, as she visits Justine Moritz in prison; and on the other hand, the eternal life bestowed upon Winzy in the short story “The Mortal Immortal.” In both cases, the calculations at work necessarily incorporate something incalculable as the punishment becomes “capital.” Shelley objects not just to the cruelty of the death penalty or to the possibility of wrongful conviction, but also to the ways that the law is permitted to draw equivalencies between persons and subject them to a calculation. By thinking of the death penalty and “life penalty” as two sides of the same coin, Shelley effectively deconstructs the logical framework for capital punishment and articulates a complex abolitionist position. Shelley offers, in her fictional interrogation of life sentences and death sentences, a contradictory and bleak set of meditations upon the injustice inherent in human equivalence.
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    Lacan's Romanticism
    (Routledge, 2020-01) Sigler, David
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    Logical Time in Austen's Persuasion: Desire and the Unproductive Anxious Interval
    (Routledge, 2021-06-16) Michalski, Isabelle; Sigler, David
    This essay reads Jane Austen’s Persuasion in light of Jacques Lacan’s essay “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty.” We weigh the glances exchanged between characters in a chain of four episodes from the novel, paying attention to the pauses produced in each scene. Such an analysis suggests that the characters, confronted with an effectively carceral system of social rules, must deduce their own gender identities, and their desirability within that sexual regime, by letting go of their very subjectivity. A complex temporality is produced in the field of desire that undercuts any distinction between objective and subjective self-knowledge.
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    Loonie Calls
    (2020-06) Chua, Christian Philip; van Herk, Aritha
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    Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar
    (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 2019-01) Sigler, David; Lypka, Celiese
    This essay assesses Jacques Lacan’s comments on the mirror stage in his Seminar X: Anxiety, given between 1962–63. These comments stress the importance of time, framing, and the uncanny as factors in the mirror stage, thus giving Lacan’s signature concept several unexpected points of emphasis. As we compare the frame around the edges of a mirror to other framed stages discussed in Lacan’s seminar, we consider the implications of this new way of conceptualizing the mirror stage for literary studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
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    The Virtual Child, or Six Provocations on Children’s Literature and (Pre-) Digital Culture
    (John's Hopkins University Press, 2021-01) Mason, Derritt
    Anxieties about children and the virtual might feel unique to the digital age, but as this essay clarifies, a longer, pre-digital history of “the virtual child” demonstrates that the child itself has long been “virtual,” not merely—and only recently—confronted by the perils of virtual space. Such a history illuminates the peculiarity of our current cultural moment, wherein worries about the digital virtual collide with the child’s enduring construction (by adults) as a virtual being that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, both promising and threatening. Children’s literature often aims to instill virtue, or moral quality, in the child, while mapping and regulating their Virtù, or power, creativity, and possible lack of morality. The child’s virtuality has been the subject of adult concern for centuries, such that worried attempts to manage the child’s virtuality end up producing virtual spaces for this management to take place. Frequently, these virtual spaces take shape inside imperialist narratives of colonial exploitation that assign distinctly gendered tasks to its participants, grooming them for heterosexual adulthood. Such narratives survive today, yielding not only apprehensions about and hopes for the virtual child in a digital era, but also new forms of resistance to these enduring conventions.