IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB587948355

Passing Forms: Decay and the Making of Victorian Culture (2016)

Mershon, Ella Tobin (Author)
Duncan, Ian (Advisor)

University of California, Berkeley
Duncan, Ian

URI: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1864669675?accountid=12964

Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 139 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Science and literature Literary analysis Regeneration Biodegradation; decomposition (biology); decay Degeneration 19th century Great Britain

From sociological studies of urban squalor and sanitary reform, to critiques of the politics of prostitution, pathology, poverty, and criminology, criticism has tended to read nineteenth-century “decay” as an ideological apparatus keyed to the discursive policing of wayward, diseased, and abnormal body. Read through the Victorian theories of degeneration and decadence, on the one hand, and the contemporary discourses of defilement and abjection, on the other, criticism has tended to cast decay has a symbolic register for the period’s ideological investment in normative progressive development, such that backwardness, depravity, and devolution are reified and read as symptomatic fears of taxonomic transgression. As my project demonstrates, however, in their minute and sustained attentions to the periodic pattern of dissolution and re-formation, the Victorians came to view decay as the conditional possibility for form’s continual emergence. Decay was not “matter out of place.” It was matter ceaselessly reforming itself on the stream of time. This conception of decay, in turn, reconfigures our critical interpretation of the Victorian ideologies of life, growth, progress, and reform. Decay does not pathologically mark the failure of progressive ideology; instead, it expresses the plasticity necessary for ceaseless growth. Recuperating the temporal dynamics of formation-in-decay, this project rethinks the categorical coordinates of abjection and defilement. In a world where everything—the pulsations of electromagnetic waves, the geomorphic crust of the earth, the mineralogical components of crystals, and, of course, the cellular tissues of biological bodies—was constantly dissolving and recombining, it does not make sense to speak of the singular, delimited subject’s confrontation with the contaminating, liminal object. Rather, we must speak of the multiple, heterogeneous, and simultaneous “interabsorption” of subjects and objects. In their investigations of this horizontal relationality, the Victorian theorists of decay emphasized the rhythms of doing and undoing and, thus, folded the abject processes of expulsion and rejection into the experience of growth and development. Accordingly, this project focuses on the self-formation of the porous individual in relationship to the ever-dissolving and ever-renewing world. I argue that these manifold entities mutually emerged through the shared rhythms of decay – eddies and rests, drifts and advances – revealing the possibilities that linger in formlessness. Decay’s negations, thus, allowed for radical conceptions of receptivity, as the individual pocketed and secreted temporal absences that allowed for potent possibilities – ethical rebirth, transhistorical connectivity, exquisite moments of ecstasy. Turning to the tremulous self-formations of Esther Summerson and Richard Carstone in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-53), the nubile girls of Winnington Hall in John Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust (1865), the budding aesthete in Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and the doomed Lucian Taylor in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), this project reframes critical debates about abject materiality to address the environmental affordances of formlessness.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB587948355/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Tita Chico; (2017)
Putrefaction as Optical Technology (/isis/citation/CBB459042924/)

Thesis Matthew Robert Sherrill; (2016)
Forms of Life: Evolution and Poetic Form in the British Long Nineteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB649997265/)

Thesis Rose O'Malley; (2018)
Darwin's Failures: Childless Women in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (/isis/citation/CBB766029324/)

Thesis Andrew G. Christensen; (2018)
"Nemesis Without Her Mask": Heredity and the English Novel in the Nineteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB908914725/)

Article Ortíz, Carmen; (2010)
Naturalismo, novela y sociedad en España entre los siglos XIX y XX (/isis/citation/CBB001021990/)

Thesis Mo Li; (2017)
Science and Edgar Allan Poe's Pathway to Cosmic Truth (/isis/citation/CBB849763322/)

Book Brycchan Carey; Sayre Greenfield; Anne Milne; (2020)
Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 (/isis/citation/CBB640839629/)

Chapter Ebbatson, Roger; (2013)
Tennyson's “Locksley Hall”: Progress and Destitution (/isis/citation/CBB001422071/)

Article Rubén Domínguez Quintana; (2021)
Degeneracionismo y ficción: discurso científico en Benito Pérez Galdós (/isis/citation/CBB201664149/)

Article Lawrence, Christopher; (2009)
Degeneration under the Microscope at the fin se siècle (/isis/citation/CBB001021545/)

Article Andrea Charise; Devoney Looser; David McAllister; Ruth M. McAdams; Jacob Jewusiak; Travis Chi Wing Lau; (2021)
Bending the Clock: New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Ageing: A Roundtable Conversation (/isis/citation/CBB956259833/)

Book Ian Duncan; (2019)
Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (/isis/citation/CBB663333559/)

Thesis Rae X. Yan; (2018)
"This Seemingly So Solid Body": Philosophical Anatomy and Victorian Fiction (/isis/citation/CBB686565075/)

Thesis Wietske Smeele; (2018)
The Victorian Posthuman: Monstrous Bodies in Literature and Science (/isis/citation/CBB118579237/)

Thesis Charles Robinson; (2017)
From Jeu D'Esprit to Exact Science: Speculation, Science, and Literary Expression in the US, 1870-1895 (/isis/citation/CBB195151551/)

Thesis Meredith Farmer; (2016)
Melville's Ontology (/isis/citation/CBB071009731/)

Article Heggie, Vanessa; (2008)
Lies, Damn Lies, and Manchester's Recruiting Statistics: Degeneration as an “Urban Legend” in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (/isis/citation/CBB000774476/)

Book Michael J. Crowe; (2018)
The Gestalt Shift in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes Stories (/isis/citation/CBB650011309/)

Thesis Brian Allen Gazaille; (2016)
Wasteful Words: Visions and Failures of Literary Efficiency in American Fiction, 1885-1910 (/isis/citation/CBB161127975/)

Article Régis Olry; Duane E. Haines; (2018)
Tabes Dorsalis: Not, at All, “Elementary my dear Watson!” (/isis/citation/CBB588205955/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}