Fantastic Metropolis

Reflecting on my year’s reading, I’ve realized that whenever I’m forced to curtail the time I allocate to reading, the first items to be sacrificed tend to be those most recently published, which then get added to my to-be-read pile. I’m not yet ready to advance a reason for this prioritization, although I expect it has something to do with my sense that what I need at any given moment may not necessarily be the work that is hottest off the presses. Still, I regret this, since the lag puts me out of step with the au courant. And yet, being out of step produces a distinct effect: by the time I get around to reading work that’s a year or three old, such hype as may have attended its first appearance has faded (since the flow of hype shifts focuses swiftly), leaving me with a less-mediated read. And also when I read older work, I often find myself considering whether it has become dated, in the sense of being past its sell-by date: something that can happen with astonishing rapidity to not only blockbuster fiction and trendy nonfiction but also to academic work. Is this a result of the publishing industry’s fostering a built-in obsolescence of its products and of a publish-or-perish oversupply of scholarly work? Or does it have to do with the constant shortening of our cultural memories and attention spans, an epiphenomenon, perhaps, of an accelerating rate of change? Whatever the case, the very idea of textual obsolescence is a sobering thought for any writer. This essay aims to celebrate the work I’ve read with appreciation this year, though, so I see no need to dwell on it

My pulse always quickens when I come upon articles that help me think about difficult, seemingly intractable problems that interest me. Two such pieces stood out this year. Rachel Hall’s “’It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management” (Hypatia 19,3; Summer 2004) delivers a knockout blow to the notion that making women fearful and timid is the best means of rape-prevention, as well as to the conceptualization of rape as inevitable (and even natural), and argues that “the performative recurrence of horror in public representations of sexual violence naturalizes rape in a manner that denies men’s ability to stop raping women.” Besides offering fresh ways of thinking about this problem, Hall’s article reminded me that something like a quarter of a century ago more than one (male) graduate student insisted to me that rape was hard-wired into men and that therefore we should accept it as inevitable. I didn’t understand the argument then; but Hall’s article makes me wonder, now, if such an naturalization of violence isn’t the reason that after thirty years of concerted feminist effort most people still seem to think that teaching women to be fearful is the only possible strategy for preventing rape.

In a special issue of differences (14, 3; Fall 2003) honoring the late Naomi Schor, Monique Roelofs examines gendered valuations in Hume’s aesthetic theory and Barthes’ degendering of the detail by way of two details in a Vermeer painting. I find aesthetics difficult to think about, though as a writer and a feminist I’ve long been concerned with the problem of why women’s creative productions are all but ignored by critics and historians. “A Pearl’s Pleasure and Perils: The Detail at the Foundation of Taste” opens new space for feminist thinking on the subject.

I’ve long been fascinated by the process known as reading and so continually gorge myself on work that explores that process. This year I especially enjoyed three articles that focus on the changing history of how Jane Austen’s novels have been read and how that history helped shape and develop particular audiences for the novels: “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies”; “Austen’s Earliest Readers and the Rise of the Janeites” by William Galperin; and Mary A. Favret’s “Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America,” all of which appear in Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton University Press, 2000). The Janeites were fans of Austen, comparable, as Johnson notes, to late twentieth-century trekkies, constituting a “reading community whose practices violate a range of protocols later instituted by professional academics when novel studies emerged—dogmas holding, for example, that you cannot talk about characters as if they were real people” (30). One particular community, “principally….an elite corps of publishers, professors, and literati,” exercised considerably more influence on the judgment and interpretation of Austen’s novels than the “middlebrow” communities of Janeism managed to do, though as fan communities tend to do, every Janeite, regardless of the nature of their fandom, seems to have adopted a fiercely proprietarial attitude toward her work. The intensity of passionate conflict described in these articles suggests that ways of reading widely beloved texts will always engender quarrels (if not outright interpretive war) among reading communities that value very different qualities in the texts they adore.