Anonymous Life : Romanticism and Dispossession

by Khalip, Jacques

• ISBN13: 9780804758406
• ISBN10: 0804758409
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-16
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy. In the last two decades, these models have been the focus of critiques of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. While such critiques have proven useful, they often draw attention to the conceptual or material tensions of romantic subjectivity while accepting a conspicuous, autonomous subject as a given, thus failing to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, one whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona. InAnonymous Life, Khalip goes against the grain of these dominant critical stances by examining anonymity as a model of being that is provocative for writers of the era because it resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency and self-disclosure. He explores how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, frequently rejects the demands of self-assertion and fails to prove its authenticity and coherence.

Author Biography

Jacques Khalip is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: "Rien Faire Comme une Bete": Of Anonymity and Obligation	p. 1
Virtual Ruin: Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keats	p. 25
Fugitive Letters: Tracking the Anonymous in Godwin's Caleb Williams	p. 67
Feeling for the Future: The Ends of Sympathy	p. 97
The Art of Knowing Nothing: Feminine Melancholy and Skeptical Dispossession	p. 133
Coda: What Remains: Romanticism and the Negative	p. 173
Notes	p. 187
Index	p. 231
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