Bruno and Edith: Abstract and Bibliography

Hi,

I only had a copy of the following abstract for Dr. Strickland last night, though I did distribute my colorful if tiny CMAP, which I have attempted to include above. Also, Dr. S., I may have clipped the version 1.2 bibliography to my abstract and what follows is version 1.3 (a few more sources added).

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Agency within the “Silent Organization”:
Reassembling a Rhetoric of the Social in Wharton’s Age of Innocence.

Although it is commonplace to associate Edith Wharton with a literature of the social, critics have disagreed sharply as to how resolution in Wharton’s narratives either reinforces a deterministic naturalism or provides a rich critique of the “complex web of social forces” commonly ascribed to late naturalism. As early, defining critics of Wharton’s work, R.W.B. Lewis, Blake Nevius and Margaret B. McDowell each explicated The Age of Innocence (1920) to suggest that Newland Archer, as a surrogate for Wharton, can only glimpse “hieroglyphics” of the social and is too much a product of its “old decencies” to articulate an escape from—or destination outside—the hidebound New York of Wharton’s youth. Likewise, Donald Pizer, in his famous case for The Age of Innocence as a work of “perfected naturalism,” argues that Wharton’s novel “demonstrates the constraining power [of the social] over individual desire and destiny” (162).(1) Feminist critics (Showalter, 1985; Goodman, 1990; Erlich, 1992) have attempted to account for Wharton’s reification of the social as a result of Wharton’s attempts to engage and transcend—more Ellen Olenska than Newland Archer—the dominant male literary traditions, most notably the influence of her friend Henry James, in her effort to articulate “the social” as a construct and not an inescapable determinant of identity or gender.

I would argue that Wharton employs a rhetoric of the social to resolve in her fiction the struggle over agency and “fixity” we may observe in her letters, autobiography, and later criticism, especially French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) and The Writing of Fiction (1925), which bookend the writing of Age of Innocence. The recent work of Bruno Latour, particularly his view of actor-network-theory and how we assemble, disassemble and reconstruct the social, can illuminate ways in which Wharton offers agency to characters and objects that embody “the social” beyond symbolic projection. Without recasting Wharton as a proleptic ANT theorist, I will explore her attempts to move past an acceptance of the social as a unified force accountable for material consequences in terms of how Latour accounts for this history of an error in his sociology of the social. Wharton, as her letters and criticism reveal, was more interested in "tracing associations" that merely reproducing the social hieroglyphics, or the "silent organization" sans translation or analysis. Although Latour, ANT theorists, and some social-epistemic rhetoricians use literary language to describe networks outside the literary (primarily networks of science and technology), I am also proposing that actor-network-theory is well-suited for troubling the begged premise of the social in American literary naturalism and that Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, as one inheritor of the naturalist gaze, is well-suited for testing key assumptions of actor-network theory.


To provide context and exigency, I will draw on what I’ve termed “the establishment of the social” in the Wharton scholarship above. I will also focus on articles by Hoestaker (2005) and Luckhurst (2006) who have linked Latour to semiotic analysis and “scientifiction.” Additionally, I will respond to Singley’s appropriation of Bourdieu’s habitus (2003) as one means of articulating how “Wharton embraces fluid rather than fixed notions of culture in her fiction and life” (495). Finally, I will develop this “Latourian analysis” in dialogue with related poststructural influences (Jameson, 1981, 1992; Baudrillard, 1977), social-epistemic rhetoric (LeFevre, 1987; Berlin 1996), and social constructionist scholarship in American literary history (Budd, 1995; Grenier, 1993; Kaplan, 1988). To convey some of this dialogue, I have mapped a network of associations on the diagram I distributed (see above).


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(1) Pizer’s rhetoric, though foundational to the study of American literary naturalism, seems guilty of treating the social, as Latour suggests, “to be always already there” at Wharton’s disposal (Latour 8). This is clearest when Pizer asserts that “though it seldom expresses itself either in open prohibition or direct punishment in The Age of Innocence—the world that Archer describes as a “silent organization” of habit, custom, and assumption—exerts a web of compulsion that powerfully shapes and controls individual belief and behavior in the most vital areas of human experience” (Pizer 164).



Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations (The Body, In Theory; Histories of Cultural Materialism). Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1995.

Bell, Millicent. Edith Wharton and Henry James. New York, George Braziller, Inc., 1965.

Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Reconfiguring College English Studies. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor P., 2003.

Budd, Louis J. “The American Background.” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Ed. Donald Pizer. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969 1950).

Erlich, Gloria C. The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton: Friends & Rivals. Hanover, NH: Hanover UP of New England, 1990.

Grenier, Richard. “Society and Edith Wharton.” Commentary. 96.6 (1993): 48-53. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol Singley. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Hostaker, Roar. “Latour—Semiotics and Science Studies.” Science Studies. 18.2 (2005): 5-25.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

---. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago P., 1988.

Kellogg, Grace. The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work. New York: Appleton-Century P, 1965.

Knights, Pamela. “Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. 20-46.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network- Theory. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

---. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Boston: Harvard UP, 2006.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Ill. UP, 1987.

Lewis, R.W.B. Introduction. The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton. Critical Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1968: pp. xii-xiii.

---. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Long, Lisa A. “Genre Matters: Embodying American Literary Naturalism.” American Literary History 19.1 (2007): 160-173.

Luckhurst, Roger. “Bruno Latour’s Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects." Science Fiction Studies. 33.1 (2006): 4-17.

Martin, Robert K. “Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathanial Hawthorne.” Henry James Review 21.1 (2000): 56-62.

McDowell, Margaret B. “Newland Archer’s Limited Views.” Edith Wharton. Boston: Twayne Pub., 1976.

Nevius, Blake. “The Low Rich Murmur of the Past.” Edith Wharton: Studies of Her Fiction. U of California P., 1953.

Nowlin, Michael. “Edith Wharton’s Higher Provincialism: French Ways for Americans and the Ends of The Age of Innocence.” Journal of American Studies. 38.1 (2004): 89-108.

Pizer, Donald. The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

Sand, Andrea J. “Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.” Explicator. 62.1 (2003): 23-25.

Singley, Carol. “Bourdieu, Wharton and Changing Culture in The Age Of Innocence.” Cultural Studies. 17 (2003): 495-520.

Showalter, “The Death of a Lady (Novelist)” 1985 (still locating*).

Thomas, J.D. “Tribal Culture, Pantomime, and the Communicative Face in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.” Edith Wharton Review 22.1 (2006): 1-5.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Candace Waid. New York: Norton, 2002.

---. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribner’s, 1934.

---. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Eds. R.W.B. Lewis, Nancy Lewis, and William R. Tyler. New York: Scribner’s, 1988.

---. Collected Stories: 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.

---. French Ways and Their Meanings. New York: Appleton, 1919.

---. The Reef. New York: Appleton, 1912.

---. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner’s, 1925.


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