Stephen Shapiro

Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula's World-System and Gothic Periodicity

Gothic productions appear in clusters during the capitalist world-markets transition from one economic cycle to another. Using a world-systems approach, I argue that Gothic narrative devices and sensations are both historically specific to the time of their production and representative of the general logic of capitalist time-space contortions. A world-systems perspective insists on an inter-state relational approach relatively unexplored within Gothic studies. Using Stokers Dracula as a case study, the article claims that Dracula encodes inter-imperialist tensions, primarily those between England and Germany and their proxy agents over South African gold mines in the Transvaal. This antagonism provides the background to the Boer War, itself a forerunner to the First World Wars battle among imperialists.

From capitalist to communist abstraction : the pale king’s cultural fix

David Foster Wallaces The Pale King achieves a new novelistic form that narrates different capitalist temporalities simultaneously – in his case, the classic logistic of capitalism and its particular contemporary form in neoliberalism. A reading of his novel suggests a solution to the goal of cultural materialist theory. By rereading the second and third volumes of Marxs Capital, we can perceive the absence of a term – fixed labour-power – that ought to be present but is not. By providing this term, we can resolve incompletely theorised techniques from Russian Formalism and its later adaptation by Fredric Jameson. The Pale King thus creates a text that suggests what a Western communist or left front novel in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 period might look like.

Sexuality: An Early American Mystery

a lost world. Does the dearth of print comments and court prosecutions mean Americans found their sexual relations unremarkable, for whatever political, denominational, and personal reasons, or have we only begun to discover ways to discern the periods complex attitudes? Most recent sexuality studies build on Michel Foucaults writing, but two key absences, one historiographic, the other methodological, problematize its usefulness for early American sexuality studies. In his account of modern subjectivitys emergence in Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes three phases of penalty: the ancien rdgimes spectacles of torture and regal terror, the revolutionary eras semiotic punishment of sentimental mimesis, and nineteenth-century modernitys disciplinary surveillance of the soul.1 When Foucault turned from penalty to The History of Sexuality, these three periods collapsed into two: the early modern regime of illicit acts, when a persons deeds, sexual or not, were obscene only if they challenged the church-states material and symbolic hierarchy, and the modern sense of intrinsic personhood, strongly defined by ones immanent sexual desires, whether enacted or not.2 The early modern period emphasized the subjects subordination to traditional chains of vertical command; the modern one uses standards of normality, often typified as the lack of erotic perversion, for its control mechanism. What Foucault left out was his operative schemas implied middle, the eighteenth-century term. The resulting truncated binary, between early modern acts and industrial modern identities, has long since bedeviled eighteenth-century studies, which has been left with a container with too few compartments. We can, however, mind the gap ourselves. Because industries and nation-states in the nineteenth century needed constantly replenishing supplies of labor power to fuel their industrial and imperial engines, the periods dominant economic, politi-

Realignment and Televisual Intellect: The Telepraxis of Class Alliances in Contemporary Subscription Television Drama

Stephen Shapiro reads serial television drama as a “laboratory” that allows increasingly volatile middle-class viewers to practice new class alignments while still holding on to their self-proclaimed class affiliation. The past fifteen years of “quality” television drama combine a process that moves away from traditional semiotic theories of subjectivity to facilitate this class realignment. The US-American middle-class viewer seeks separation from neoliberal elites and a new alliance with the working class. Subscription television’s recent stages of development chart this transformation.

The Motivation of Literary Theory: From National Culture to World Literature

With the rising backlash against the false assumption of value that neoliberalism’s fictions of the marketplace deliriously promoted, it is not surprising that the Humanities, in general, and literary theory, particularly, has been called on, once more, to demonstrate tangible worth. After the hangover created by more than a decade of make-believe policies, an overwhelmed public deservedly wants reassurance that university education, as a core component to social aspirations, is still worth bearing its debt-creating burden, even when the common sense about the safety of student loans has been thoroughly shaken up. We can take up this challenge, even in theory classes, without succumbing to functionalist cost-benefit logic, by revising them as spheres of learning how to engage and interpret the newly unknown and uncharted world in which our students will be propelled, like those early astronauts facing the astral darkness.