Search results
also political theorists, sociologists, and philosophers turned to friendship to reimagine citizenship and political community. In Subtle Bodies , Ned and his college gang hope to ‘somehow generaliz[e]’ their friendship into a broader politics. In the next section of this Introduction, I show that, over the past four decades, there has been a far-reaching revival of critical interest in this very possibility. Friendship, community, and liberalism’s ‘crisis of citizenship’ Joris – the cynical lawyer whom Ned has the most trouble convincing to sign his anti
in previous chapters – but of the connection between the themes of political community, citizenship, and male friendship that the novel will explore (33). Because Marny’s academic specialism is ‘American colonial history’, Robert is keen to have his old friend on board to ‘take the long view’ and to interpret their project in Detroit within a broader historical context (53). In Chapter 1 , I explored how Roth’s American Trilogy also took the ‘long view’ of American democracy, connecting the politics of the 1990s to a series of earlier periods in US history
Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 46 (2006): 523–42 Andreadis, Harriette, ‘The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632–1664’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15 (1989): 34–60 Applegate, Joan, ‘Katherine Philips’s “Orinda upon Little Hector”: An Unrecorded Musical Setting by Henry Lawes’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 4 (1993): 272–80 Barash, Carol, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 22 Further
‘negates’ community’ ( 1993 : 112). In his 2016 text The Disavowed Community , Nancy admits his deployment of the political nature of community in his original text The Inoperative Community was ‘not always coherent or clear’, but locates this problem as a fundamental component of political community itself: ‘A crucial paradox lies at the heart of this matter of community (and
indicates how the novel looks beyond filial bonds to consider what other kinds of ‘allegiances and affiliations’ might structure a life and a political community. Through their friendship, the novel ultimately calls into question Nathan’s notion of masculine independence, and his decision to live apart from the world. As well as noting the novel’s similarities to The Ghost Writer , critics have also pointed to the resemblance between Ira and the Swede in American Pastoral. Structurally, both characters appear to play comparable roles within their narratives and
different register of political potentiality. Post-utopian utopianism In elucidating this different register, I turn back to Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship (1997) and his suggestion that Aristotelian civic republicanism renders citizenship a militaristic form of fraternity, resulting in an exclusionary and repressive kind of political community. 15 In this regard, Derrida’s analysis shares an affinity with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who also sought to defamiliarise the idea of an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ community constituted by a
vindicating the self by turning ‘self-love’ into a prompt to Christian charity and general benevolence; the playful exhibition or painful exploration of self-fragmentation through Augustan satire and diaries; the search through fiction for a symbolic solution to the problematic experience of inner division and discontinuity; the twin gestures, as the American and French revolutions confronted British selves with the spectacle of collective action, of Romantic retreat into nature and self, and radical effort at conjuring up a nationwide political community through public
of its individualised citizens’.37 In these views, the citizen is a political entity and the smallest unit that makes up the state. As such, the citizen does not only enjoy the rights that come with membership in the political community, but also assumes the duties that come with citizenship. In this framework, citizenship defines identity.38 Yasemin Soysal notes: ‘Citizenship defines bounded populations, with a specific set of rights and duties, excluding “others” on the grounds of nationality.’39 Marshall’s specific definition, with operative words such as
it to express a wholly different articulation of the ‘self’ – a spiritual wit. Notes 1 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 156–7. 2 Killigrew’s father, Dr Henry Killigrew, edited her Poems and had them published the year after she died. 3 Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), p. 30. 4 See Anne Killigrew, ‘My Rare Wit Killing Sin’: Poems of a Restoration Courtier, ed. Margaret J. M
, 1686, pp. av–b2v. All subsequent references to Killigrew’s verse will be taken from this volume. 2 See H. Weinbrot, ‘Dryden’s “Anne Killigrew”: towards a new pindaric political ode’, in R. DeMaria (ed.), British Literature 1640–1789: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 2008, pp. 114–25, at n. 4. 159 EMWP.indb 159 10/15/2013 12:52:55 PM margaret j. m. ezell 3 See C. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996; and M. J. M. Ezell, ‘The post humous publication of women