Crossing Boundaries: Thinking Through Literature

Crossing Boundaries Thinking through Literature This page intentionally left blank Crossing Boundaries Thinking through Literature Edited by Julie Scanlon and Amy Waste with contributions by Terry Eagleton and Sally Shuttleworth Sheffield Academic Press www.SheffieldAcademicPress.com Copyright © 2001 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield SI 19AS England www. SheffieldAcademicPress. com Typeset by Sheffield Academic Press and Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd Glasgow British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1-84127-232-9 Contents Acknowledgments List of Contributors Crossing Boundaries—Delegates 7 9 11 Introduction Julie Scanlon and Amy Waste 13 'So Childish and So Dreadfully Un-Childlike': Cultural Constructions of Idiocy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Sally Shuttleworth 17 'Aberrant Passions and Unaccountable Antipathies': Nervous Women, Nineteenth-Century Neurology and Literary Text Jane Wood 45 X-Club not X-Files: Walter Pater, Spiritualism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism Gowan Dawson 56 Scientific Prophecies and Modern-Day Seers: Prognostication in the Industrial Fiction of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell Louise Henson 72 Popular Cosmology as Mythic Narrative: A Site for Interdisciplinary Exchange Elizabeth Leane 84 Translation as Gay Deception Ulrika Orloff 98 The Mark of Desire: Rewriting the Romance and Lesbian-Feminist Textual Strategies Fleur Diamond 112 Constructing the Female Self in Migrant Postcolonial Fiction Maria-Sabina Draga-Alexandru 121 6 CROSSING BOUNDARIES Locating the 'Nigga' in 'The Wood-Pile': Robert Frost, the Academy and Pedagogy in the Context of a South African Tertiary Education Brendon Nicholls 130 Enervation in Language as Innovation in Literature: The Function of Cliche in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy Elizabeth Barry 141 Reading Between the Lines: Materiality in the Age of Hypertext Colin B. Gardner 150 Music to Desire By: Crossing the Berlin Wall with Wim Wenders Annette Davison 161 'Fictional Capital': Economics and Narrative in the Novels of Jay Mclnerney Julian Crockford 169 Bourdieu versus Deconstruction: The Social (Con)Text of Irony and Reality Johannes Angermuller 178 Performance Theory, Practice and the Intrusion of the Real Helen Freshwater 189 Writing on Air Heather Leach 200 Aesthetics and Politics Terry Eagleton 210 Index of Authors 218 Acknowledgments Julie and Amy would like to thank all the delegates who attended the conference and helped to make it a success as well as those involved in its organization and smooth running in any capacity. Special thanks go to our plenary speakers, Terry Eagleton, Elaine Showalter and Sally Shuttleworth, for taking a chance on a marginal event. Extra special thanks go to Philip Davies for essential and continued support for both the conference and the production of this volume. Thank you, also, to all at Sheffield Academic Press who have worked on the volume. For sponsorship, thanks to the Department of English Literature and the Graduate School, University of Sheffield. This page intentionally left blank List of Contributors Johannes Angermuller, Institut fur Soziologie, Otto-von-GuerickeUniversitat Magdeburg, Germany. Elizabeth Barry, Department of English Literature, University of Wales, Bang