Special Issue in Memory of Robert K. Martin
Now available online…
Canadian Review of American Studies - Volume 45, Number 1, Spring 2015
Special Issue in Memory of Robert K. Martin / numéro spécial à la mémoire de Robert K. Martin
Editor/Rédacteur : Leland S. Person
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Introduction—Robert K. Martin: Celebrating a Self /Robert K. Martin : célébration d’un soi
Leland S. Person
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The five essays in this special issue honour Robert’s legacy. Christopher Looby’s “Of Billy’s Time” is certainly written with an awareness of historical contingencies that recalls many of Robert’s critical readings of texts. A very smart reading of Billy Budd, it proceeds, in fact, from what Looby calls the “general claim” that “Billy Budd is itself an exploration of and a meditation on the profound historicity of sexuality.” In “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Archive,” Eric Savoy pays tribute to Robert’s “Hester Prynne, C’est Moi,” in the process of offering a brilliant reading of “The Custom-House” preface to The Scarlet Letter. Using Derrida’s concept of the archive—“that is, the quotidian, ritualistic, and performative ways in which subjects are constituted precisely as subjects in conformity with the regulatory ideals of nation, religious tradition, and gender”—he analyzes the complex “psychodrama” through which Hawthorne constitutes himself as an author. Priscilla Walton’s “Down the Rabbit Hole” uses Robert’s “Picturesque Misperception in The Bostonians” to launch her study of connections between Alice James’s long-term relationship with Katherine Loring and James’s representation of the “Boston marriage” between Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor. I am very grateful to Professors Looby, Savoy, and Walton for their willingness to contribute to this special issue. All were good friends and colleagues of Robert’s over many years. I am also excited to have two additional essays that should appeal even more palpably to readers wishing for more examples of the Robert K. Martin tradition of American literary scholarship. Robert and Justin Edwards, a former student of his at the University of Montreal, had been working on an essay about Margaret Fuller when Robert became too ill to continue with the project. Justin has kindly provided that essay for this volume. And as I noted above, Robert and I collaborated on an epistolary dialogue about Melville’s The Confidence-Man beginning in 1996. We had every intention of developing the essay for publication, but that project too got sidetracked by Robert’s illness. I am thrilled to be able to include it here. Two posthumous essays at least partly in Robert’s own critical voice—a special issue indeed! (excerpts from Introduction by Leland S. Person)
Robert K. Martin : célébration d’un soi
Leland S. Person
http://bit.ly/cras451b
Publications of Robert K. Martin
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Of Billy’s Time: Temporality in Melville’s Billy Budd
Christopher Looby
Billy Budd is replete with invocations of various temporalities. This article brings the tale’s “juggling temporalities” to bear upon the questions of sexuality that the story also addresses and shows that Billy Budd is a searching exploration of (and meditation on) the profound historicity of sexuality. Unfinished and unpublished at the time of Melville’s death, the extant manuscript of Billy Budd is a complicated palimpsest of additions and revisions. Reconstructing the genealogy of the manuscript’s development reveals that Melville moved the action back in time; made Billy younger; added, at different stages of composition, the characters of Claggart (the “homosexual in the text,” according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known reading) and Captain Vere. But there are several homosexuals in the text, who, although they ostensibly co-exist in one time and place, nevertheless belong to different historical regimes of sexuality. http://bit.ly/cras451d
Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Archive
Eric Savoy
Twenty-five years ago, Robert K. Martin published an important essay that explored the gendered anxiety of authorship that left its traces throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s career. Given that novel-writing was understood in mid-nineteenth-century America as an essentially feminine occupation, did Hawthorne perceive himself as emasculated? Savoy supplements Martin’s argument by taking up the “fiction” of authorship, specifically the personage of “Nathaniel Hawthorne” that is constructed in “The Custom-House.” Previously, Savoy focused on Hawthorne’s gothic poetics as the figurative matrix within which the “author” accepts the exhortation of Surveyor Pue to fulfill his “filial duty” by delivering to the public the historical romance of Hester Prynne. This new article explores the “psychic economy” of what Jacques Derrida conceptualizes as the event of the archive—that is, the performative ways in which subjects are constituted precisely as subjects, in conformity with the regulatory ideals of nation, religious tradition, and gender. If there is no subject without a subtending and largely mythical archive of cultural practice, then “The Custom-House” is a spectacular mise-en-scène—rhetorically rich and charged with affect—of the ritualistic protocols of assujettissement. http://bit.ly/cras451e
Down the Rabbit Hole: The Bostonians and Alice James
Priscilla L. Walton
This article uses the life of Alice James to reread her brother Henry’s novel, The Bostonians. Alice, who was a partner in a Boston marriage, and her illnesses, of which she wrote in her letters and diary, provides a means of reassessing the gender dynamics of James’s only novel about suffrage and the women’s movement. Her life sheds light on and offers an alternative reading of the novel’s problematic heteronormative movement. http://bit.ly/cras451f
Concord Companions: Margaret Fuller, Friendship, and Desire
Robert K. Martin and Justin D. Edwards
In this paper, we examine the rhetoric of friendship and desire in mid-nineteenth-century American writing. We begin by looking at Emerson’s essay on friendship and Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy” (1840) to provide a context for reading Margaret Fuller’s fascinating texts on same-sex bonds between women. Of particular interest to us is Fuller’s translation of Elizabeth von Arnim’s Die Günderode (1840), a collection of letters between Arnim and the German Romantic poet Karoline von Günderode which provides compelling insights into the early to mid-nineteenth-century continuum between female friendship and same-sex desire. We situate this translation alongside Fuller’s own female friendships and expressions of love for women, more specifically her declarations of love to Anna Barker and, later, to George Sand. This latter relationship, we suggest, was a source of admiration and anxiety, for Sand’s cross-dressing and fluid sense of gender identity was simultaneously celebrated and condemned in Fuller’s Women in the Nineteenth Century (1843). http://bit.ly/cras451g
“But Suppose I Did Want a Boy?” Homosexual Economies in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man
Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person
This article is centred on chapter twenty-two of The Confidence-Man, the chapter in which the con man, in the guise of Philosophical Intelligence Officer, tries to sell a boy to Pitch, the misanthropic Missouri bachelor who has used up some thirty boys on his backwoods farm and now wants to replace boys with machines. Structured as an epistolary dialogue between the two authors, the article explores the complex ways Melville’s novel positions its readers and the desires they bring to the text. Can the long debate in chapter twenty-two about buying boys be read as a transaction between a pimp and a pederast? Do other homosocial encounters in the novel encode homosexuality and thus reinforce our perception of it in chapter twenty-two? The authors argue for a queer reading of The Confidence-Man and in the process foreground their own sexual identities and reading practices. http://bit.ly/cras451h
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