Christina Lupton

Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-Century Novel

This article connects the physical form of the codex book, as one that both impedes and enables chance, to the narrative form of the novel, as one that can make closure into a condition of openness. It describes novels by Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Friedrich Nicolai, and Henry Fielding as exploring through this juncture the logic of contingency, by which given events or facts become points of contact with the patternlessness of the world. In particular, it offers a reading of Fielding’s Amelia as a novel that performs this investment in contingency through its own treatment of marriage.

Theory and practice in the eighteenth century : writing between philosophy and literature

This collection of essays by leading eighteenth-century specialists considers the Enlightenment in its historical and rhetorical contexts. Using literary interpretation and discourse analysis, the collection presents eighteenth-century philosophy as a material practice of writing, publication, conversation, and dissemination. The essays analyse how Enlightenment philosophers viewed their own writing; how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness; and how their insights into the nature of philosophical writing constitutes our own academic legacy. Eighteenth-century empiricists and common-sense philosophers, who were concerned fundamentally with problems of communication, information management, education, and publicity, offer a crucial illustration of the way linguistic action underlies philosophical ideas.Alexander Dick and Christina Lupton have brought us a most welcome collection of astute essays on the intersections of philosophy and literature in the eighteenth century. As they tell us in their introduction – and this is a point that bears much repeating – it ‘is not simply that philosophy and literature were on friendly terms during the eighteenth century but rather that the questions posed by each were the condition of possibility for the other.’ With the aim of presenting us with a concrete reminder of how crucial those ‘conditions of possibility’ are, not simply for both (ill-defined) disciplines in the eighteenth century, but also to the current state of the field, Lupton and Dick collect a series of thirteen important essays, twelve new and one reprinted. The essays are organized under three heads: ‘Writing Philosophy,’ ‘Reading Hume,’ and ‘Thinking Literature.’ Though occasionally the articles seem a bit oddly assorted – ‘Thinking Literature’ moves from Maureen Harkin’s ‘The Primitive in Adam Smith’s History’ to Adam Potkay on music and conscience in Wordsworth – the essays themselves meet a very high standard. All deserve attentive reading, and I was happy to be reminded of one deserving attentive rereading as well. The editors’ brief introduction very ably introduces both the major issues in this area of study and the individual papers at hand. More care might have been taken to ensure clarity here, and careful proofreading might have prevented a couple of awkward errors, but these are minor quibbles. Many of the contributors to this volume need no introduction. Essays by John Richetti, Adam Potkay, Nicholas Hudson, Maureen Harkin, Mark Blackwell, Nancy Yousef, Eva Dadlez, and Jonathan Kramnick are very fine. These scholars are joined by a group of newer scholars to whose work I want to draw more particular attention. Joseph Chaves, in an essay on Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711), argues intelligently for the dependency of Shaftesbury’s notion of the self on the formal, rhetorical structures associated alternately with philosophical and belletristic writing. While Shaftesbury’s philosophical mode maintains the necessity of an impenetrable, bounded self built on innate ideas, his irrepressible sociability, marked by the checks and balances of witty literary society, theorizes a permeable, socially constructed self. Jonathan Sadow’s essay, ‘The Epistemology of Genre,’ links Locke’s ‘mixed modes’ with a new generic indeterminacy that characterized both the novel and philosophy. Brian Michael Norton has contributed an exceptionally clever and convincing essay on philosophies of happiness in the humanities 345

Giving Power to the Medium: Recovering the 1750s

The fiction of the 1750s has two characteristics: a high degree of reflexivity about the practices of reading and writing, and a foregrounding of material objects, including paper and print. This article argues that both forms of self-reference are used to underscore the inability of a reader to intervene in an openly fictional world. This connects the themes of the novels and shorter narratives from this time, as well as connecting them to a vein of entertainment that carries on today.

Literature and contingency

The collection of essays in this volume spring from a two-day workshop we ran through the University of Warwick in the summer of 2016, a gathering that was itself the result of unlikely and unplanned convergences. We assembled in Venice as an assortment of North American and European literary scholars with a wide range of specialisations and period interests: contingency seemed, in fact, both our topic and inherent to our practice. But as the world rumbled in great leaps that summer towards political changes most of us could only fear, the sense that literary critics might be well-placed to discuss what could not be planned or anticipated felt strangely real. Our common ground was an interest in literary form, in how that might engage things being or being thought otherwise than they are, and in the history of this thinking as both a critical and a creative imperative. For some of us, this involved tracking the history of that thinking – at least back to the 1700s – for others, it involved a more theoretical, philosophical, or topological investigation into the properties of events in language and language as an event. There is a fair body of work about a topic adjacent to ours: that of literature and chance. That pairing is a paradoxical one. Events that appear by chance in literature are always planted there; accidents represented in fiction are by definition premeditated. Critics like Jesse Molesworth have shown this to be true for the eighteenth century, and Julia Jordan and Mark Currie have explored it for the twenty-first. Contingency, however, differs from chance in the way it brings temporality into focus, in the ways it can be modelled in language, and in the role it has played as a key term in debates about the reception of meaning. For most of the authors in this collection, its defining feature lies in the suggestion that things that have already happened might have been otherwise. This is what makes it so central to Niklas Luhmann’s systems theoretical view of the modern world. In his terms, our worlds are characterised by the sense that even the things we take as given can be explored as systems that are made. The Anthropocene, marriage, the law: we populate

Paper ontologies: reading Sterne with Bruno Latour

ABSTRACT This article takes a critical approach to the possibility of applying Bruno Lator’s work to Tristram Shandy. Sterne is both reflexive about the impossibility of representing the material work and determined to do just that in relation to his book. But these are competing tendencies in Latour’s terms, difficult to judge in the context of a single work. Latour’s recent language for Fiction as a “mode” ultimately leaves us without a way to distinguish between texts that are self-conscious and those that aren’t.

The Novel as the Future Anterior of the Book: Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Ali Smith's The Accidental

This article asks what it means to consider a twenty-first-century novel as a machine able to talk about its own materiality. Is it a series of keystrokes or digital files or marks on a page? If, as Friedrich Kittler presumes, digital technology has boosted the autopoietic qualities of the media system, in what sense do paper books remain active components of this system and in what sense do they appear within it as old media, spoken for by the electronically mediated texts that represent them? Or have novels become comments on this in-between state of being no longer quite materially decipherable as paper sequences, portable objects, material containers of letters arranged on a page and yet not being fully free of this image of the book? Focusing on Tom McCarthys Remainder (2005) and Ali Smiths The Accidental (2005) as novels that speak from what Jacques Derrida calls the “future anterior” of the page, it argues for the view of the book that opens up once a technology is no longer in use as a primary medium. By this logic, if novels like Remainder and The Accidental perform the space of new media, it is not because they describe or actively cede a role to electronic text but because they deploy a nonnative capacity to look at narrative in its incarnation as paper and print. This also means that they engage with medial form without being strictly self-referential.

Two Texts Told Twice: Poor Richard, Pastor Yorick, and the Case of the Word's Return

Laurence Sterne’s first published sermon, The Abuses of Conscience, appeared in 1751 as a six-penny pamphlet just three weeks after Sterne had preached it at the summer assizes in York. Apart from a few pointedly political pieces published in the York Courant and his election pamphlet, ‘‘Query Upon Query, Being an Answer to J.S.’s Letter Printed in the York Courant ’’ (1741), this sermon was also Sterne’s first publication. Eight years later, in 1759, as the success of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy augmented Sterne’s rise to fame as an author, the sermon appeared again with only a few minor changes as a text within the novel. Here, as it is read aloud by Trim in the secular forum of the Shandy drawing room, the sermon is continuously interrupted by the central cohort of the novel’s male characters: Toby, Walter, and Dr. Slop. The Anglican sermon, which connects religion and morality, and rebukes the idea that either can rely on reason alone, can seem difficult to take seriously in the witty, highly intellectual context of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. For Carol Kay, ‘‘the sermon appears as play in the novel, but assures us that there are times and places for law as well as play’’ (225). Sterne’s contemporary readers saw its inclusion, alternately, as evidence of Sterne’s contestable standing as a preacher, and as a harbor of generic familiarity and piety in an otherwise bawdy novel. HoraceWalpole praised the sermon discreetly, without associating it with the novel’s humor: ‘‘The characters are tolerably kept up,’’ writes Walpole of Tristram Shandy, ‘‘but the humor is forever attempted and missed. The best thing in it is a sermon’’ (qtd. in Howes, 56). In 1766, well into the period in which Sterne’s career as writer of fiction had overtaken his career as country pastor, The Abuses of Conscience was published a third time under Sterne’s editorship in the fourth volume of Yorick’s Sermons. Capitalizing onTristram Shandy’s success, Sterne took his