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In an essay entitled ‘Criticism and Interiority’, Georges Poulet presents his phenomenological view of a book's effect with a scene of reading as an empty rooms holds a book within a book. This literary criticism presented by Poulet is not too close nor too distant from its object. Another question is raised in that essay regarding how the book, as an object, is transformed into an equivalent subjectivity or into what he referred to as ‘interiority’. The book's openness is what encourages others to think about whether it exists outside itself, or if one would exist in it. This chapter highlights what is meant by the ‘scene of reading’ — a scene where in imagining an open book in an empty room allows several equivalences like ‘inside me’ or ‘inside the book’.

The conclusion explores the kinship between Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival and the #SayHerName Movement, as articulated by the African American Policy Forum. A more capacious roll call of instigators of black opposition encompasses sustained engagement with the philosophies and social achievements of intellectuals too frequently deemed incomprehensible as such. Accordingly, fully engaging with the liberal problematic entails grappling with fierce intricacies of black interiority and imagination, thereby upsetting time-honored biases regarding black resistance and power. Reading Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper’s literary endeavors differently likewise involves theorizing a counter-hegemony as concerned with vicious racial antagonism as subtle micro-aggression, with a theft of the black body as with a theft of black joy. In neglecting black knowledge production in its myriad forms, a history bereft of ambiguity and contradiction, and consequently, of humanity, emerges.

The Introduction lays out the conceptual and epistemological terrain of the problems at hand: the idea of the moral project of childhood, the definition of moral architecture, and the notion of a pre-capitalist child. The main argument is that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. It presents and justifies the methodological approach of examining women’s periodicals and summarizes the coming chapters.

This chapter examines the cultural-interpretive labor involved in defining right from wrong goods and activities and negotiating the place of possessions, money, and property in the instruction and rearing of children in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It is a labor that fell to fathers as well as to mothers, particularly when money was involved. Under such an episteme, and with so much at stake, responses to materiality clustered around a didactic imperative—i.e., the necessity to turn all aspects of child’s life into an instructional course of action. Observers and commentators found virtue and invested in faith in the self-corrective characteristics of simple goods, money (especially in the form of allowances), and the working of notions of children’s property rights. In the process of coming to terms with a growing material-commercial culture and with the inescapable presence of money in middle-class children’s lives, observers, pundits, and advice-givers framed their responses around issues of justice and fairness whereby the child’s subjectivity, its personhood, appears as an increasingly intractable focal point with which to assess the morality of materiality.

Before Alison Bechdel became widely read with the publication and subsequent Broadway adaptation of Fun Home (2006), her work reflected non-mainstream-oriented queer experience and the alternative comix legacy exemplified in Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008). In this spirit, this chapter takes Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) as its subject, but does so by thinking alternatively about how the book works as a graphic narrative pertaining to queer erotics and its associated relational contexts. What this essay will conceptualize as the text’s avant-garde aesthetics of interiority refers to qualities of the text that deploy representations of interiority that exceed and complicate the explicitly clinical or strictly psychoanalytic approaches to Are You My Mother?; an aesthetics of interiority, this chapter will show, more readily accommodates the formations and disruptions that accompany the queer “self” in—and as—the text. “Interiority” as defined here thus signifies textual-spatial instances of queer constructions of the “self.” This chapter contends that interiority is infinitely open-ended, resists closure, and ultimately provides a way out that the text uses as its own beginning and/or revision of a conclusion.

This chapter addresses the perceived turn to ‘interiority’ in Antonioni’s cinema during the course of the 1960s, often described as an ‘interior neorealism’ or a quintessentially psychological cinema. Such turn, often associated with a breakdown of narrativity and a changed temporal economy, is generally enlisted as another factor fostering increased cinematic purity. Yet I consider how it can be better understood by examining its entanglement with the diffusion of television. In the wake of its mass diffusion in the 1950s, this new medium, transmitting an externally generated ‘flow’ of images inside the home, gave rise to new temporal and viewing economies, as well as preoccupations about its effects on viewers’ interiority: their minds. Starting with a discussion of L’avventura and La notte, this chapter considers how the new temporal aesthetics of Antonioni’s cinema may be both a consequence of and a reaction to the televisual. The discussion then concludes with Il deserto rosso to address how television’s dynamics of interiority and exteriority are in turn connected with the then-emerging fields of cybernetics and early computers, with which Antonioni, like other ‘moderns’, was fascinated.

Georges Vigarello’s essay is a history of the senses in the Western subject. Vigarello’s essay traces that history from antiquity, through important milestones in the medieval and early modern periods (with particular emphasis on Diderot), and then finally to its crescendo in the nineteenth century. Vigarello argues that it is through the historiography of the senses that we can gain a better understanding of the rise of modernity.

This chapter argues that women's writing, specifically poetry in the "Poetess" genre, exposes the tensions that wrack both the ideal liberal and lyric selves. The self-made, autonomous liberal subject was built on a permeable public/private distinction; public circulation confirmed one's circumscribed, and therefore sovereign, interiority. With its expression of private feelings, Poetess poetry was thought to demonstrate the opposite—namely, women's inability to exert liberal self-possession in public and, by extension, their dependent social status and the necessity of confining them to the domestic sphere. In order to illustrate how the literary public sphere enforced these conventions over time, this chapter compares popular texts that rehearse the expectation that women poets were not professional writers but amateurs: they could not help but profess sincere feminine emotion in their poems. In so doing, authors writing Poetess poems could turn amateurism into a kind of public "profession" (both line of work and declaration), and thereby push against the boundaries of belonging that liberalism had set. The chapter explores this process with the example of Frances Sargent Osgood, whose poems specifically about the profession of the Poetess self-consciously expose a feminized interior in public.

Chapter Two discusses Elizabeth Oakes Smith, the lecturer, journalist, novelist, poet, and women’s rights activist, whose literary career began in the 1830s and stretched well into her old age. Her essays and lectures asserted that women, not just men, had the right to develop their own lives and pursue their own interests as equals. While her poetry is very different from her prose, this chapter highlights the political aspirations that underpin Oakes Smith's poetics. By representing women's genius, her poems endeavor to symbolize women's fundamental right to self-sovereignty. Oakes Smith tries in her poetry to rewrite the terms of her reception, not as a generic female writer, but as the lasting, liberal poet. She adapts the conventions marking Poetess poetry to anticipate a different reception for herself, and, in the process, a different status for women. By exploiting the expectations regulating the Poetess's accidental exposure of interiority, Oakes Smith's poetry acknowledges the intimate emotions of its figured speakers but, crucially, refuses to excavate them for readers. In so doing, Oakes Smith purports to reveal her self-sovereign genius through her full control over what she sees and says.

The chapters attest to the mutual transformation of comedy and melancholy that Shakespeare develops. considers the ways in which early Shakespearean comedies interrogate established conceptions of english melancholy such as lovesickness, mourning and interiority. Both The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost apply pressure on these melancholic expressions by developing them within explicitly comedic settings. The chapter underscores the critique that Shakespearean comedy performs in reworking such philosophical notions, which culminates in the ambiguously happy resolution put forth. In both plays, there exist parallel efforts to neutralise and rehabilitate melancholic characters. The humour is not easily purged away through medical expertise, nor is it ultimately celebrated as a sign of interiority. There remains a perceptible sense of doubt as to whether characters eventually do away with the melancholy they express. Love’s Labour’s Lost in particular, with the jarring announcement of the King’s death, suggests that the melancholy of early comedies shatters established classification. In its initial form, the chapter suggests, Shakespearean comedy already rejects traditional definitions of melancholy.

The concluding chapter charts out potential critical links between Shakespearean comic melancholy and modern conceptualizations of melancholia in the works of Freud, Butler and Ngai. It argues that the comic philosophy of melancholy and of the melancomic, through its performative and affective dimensions, dovetails with the theoretical frameworks of all three writers. The chapter positions the representation of melancholy as a productive emotional marker akin to nostalgia in its conflation of sorrow and pleasure, as well as the artistic and creative repercussions that such a connection suggests over the years.

Taurus poses questions about the nature of death and life whereby the two are indistinguishable from one another. One of the main technical features and optical tropes in the film is that of the dissolve shot which emphasises the blurring of boundaries between all states and which codes subjectivity in terms of transience and transcendence. I demonstrate how film as a form of art constructs particular forms of subjectivity and relates them to the discourse of intelligence—cinema as a metaphor for thought. Sokurov is interested in a type of ontology which is invisible and is a matter of transcendental evocation, guessing and anticipation, and one which is visible but only to the subject itself in the ultimate act of internalising knowledge and experiencing it as a knowledge-world. Sokurov never reduces one to another and instead engages in the retroactive act of re-assembling knowledge-worlds as matters of relation and intentionality. His worlds are infinite in the composition and limited by duration and change. The worlds of Sokurov are always political in that they contradict the laws of being, and particularly the ontology of spectatorship. This chapter sets the agenda for my further investigation.

Chapter 5 examines why and how the new Meiji government made a much more concerted effort to regulate the popular culture as a focal point of its program of remaking the county into a capitalist nation-state. It focuses on the early Meiji policy called “Reform of Popular Culture and Customs” implemented in the 1870s and 80s through a series of decrees and educational reforms. This policy was devised in conjunction with the government’s swift decision to dismantle the Tokugawa social order and erect a new one based on the liberal ideological principle of individual rights to equality and freedom. The new political leaders believed that a competitive ethos of self-motivated individuals was the key to Western nations’ dominance in wealth, military strength, and technology, and that Japan’s successful transformation into a modern nation-state worthy of the respect of Western counterparts depended on the creation of such an ethos at home. Accordingly, Edo-style popular culture, which seemed devoid of the ethos, was reconfigured as the markers of negative traces of the past— backwardness and ignorance— and a serious impediment to the nation’s drive for modernization. This chapter examines the implications of this reconfiguration, reflecting on Meiji power’s effects on subject-formation.

Another defining feature of the Scottish Legendary is the emphasis put on the depiction of consciousness and interiority. Thus this chapter considers the implications of representing characters’ interiority in the trajectory of edification, identification, and enjoyment of the narratives. A number of key scenes are discussed and interpreted in detail, such Judas’s anagnorisis in the legend of Matthias, Theodora’s sinning, and Eustace’s suffering. An effective strategy of narrating consciousness is to limit the point of view to the character in question, which can even be signposted by linguistic means, as in the cases of pronoun switches in the lives of the cross-dressing saints.

This chapter discusses the significance of medieval practices of prayer both for the modern rediscovery of media and for the anthropology of sensation. It demonstrates how medieval theories of reading, prayer, and contemplation thematize ways in which specific media—words, images, and music—are to be used in order to produce sensual and affective cognition. In doing so, these theories develop a sophisticated understanding of media on one side, and a specific understanding of the human soul as a sphere of evocation of possible sensation and affect on the other side. In working through this complex intersection of media and soul-formation I focus on this very notion of possibility, its significance in the context of an ‘anthropology of Catholicism’, and its presence in catholic discourses from the Middle Ages up to the twentieth century. Through discussion of the source texts an understanding of the seemingly established anthropological distinction between “inner man” and “outer man,” “interiority” and “exteriority” is challenged and what remains is a radically different way of thinking about interiority.

Anthony Trollope, too, casts suspicion on the ethical implications of the psychic economy metaphor eloquently voiced by Dickens and Eliot. His financial roman-a-clef illustrates the centrality of this idea to the speculative credit economy. This chapter considers the remarkable fact that this novel, widely celebrated as the most vitriolic satire composed in the Victorian period, actually abandons its satire for its last 200 pages. It argues that the satire implodes because a satire of finance is topologically impossible: satiric hyperbole circulates exaggerated figurative language just like fictitious capital. The modal conversion stemming from this hypocritical collusion compels Trollope to put down “the whip of the satirist,” and results in a conventionally realist focus on interiority and intimacy as putatively less hyperbolic subjects of narration. In the process, the novel performs that recursive grounding of the financial economy in the inner economy of the psychological individual which the book argues absorbs Victorian thinkers, a move problematized by the many ironies at work in the last quarter of the text.

This paper explores formal differences between Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway and Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs to argue that Woolf’s punctuation reveals how her fiction defies the “damned egotistical self” which she claimed “ruins” her contemporaries’ work. While Richardson’s ellipses distinguish her narration of Miriam’s thoughts from both the “current masculine realism” against which she wrote and male writers’ conventions of “feminine prose,” Woolf’s apparently-seamless sentences develop Clarissa Dalloway’s interiority by engaging, rather than rejecting, what Richardson calls “formal obstructions” on the page. Combining narratology with textual and feminist criticism, this paper argues that the novels’ punctuation reflects these writers’ radically different approaches to character interiority, narratorial authority, and the ethics of representation.

This chapter presents a series of exhibition and curatorial projects situated in the discipline of interior design that experimented with questions of interior and interiority, subject and object relations, spatial and temporal conditions. Deleuze’s critique of interior and interiority as isolated, pre-existing entities provokes a thinking and doing otherwise where space and subjectivity, interior and exterior are unquestioned givens. Thinking through practising with Deleuze, the technique of framing is re-posed as a technique of interiorization where interior and interiority are productions in exteriority; the frame as a fold of an outside that involves processes of selection and arrangement. Deleuze’s book Foucault and the ‘Outside-interior’ and Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth are key references. The chapter poses ‘?interior’ – with reference to Deleuze’s ?-being – as a problematic to be addressed through designing interior – each time anew.

Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters that make up ‘Part II‘ of the book. This part focuses on issues of lyric spatiality (both the spatial presence of the poem on the page, and the idea of lyric as a communication across space). As the first chapter in this part, Chapter 5 builds a conceptual and theoretical basis that will underpin the poetic case studies offered in the subsequent two chapters. It responds to two (related) central problematics in aestheticist lyric poetry: first the accusation that its strict verse forms killed the aural energy of lyric in a poetry primarily made for the eye not the ear; secondly the threat of solipsism in a lyric exchange that had been dubbed by John Stuart Mill, earlier in the century, a ‘soliloquy’. Framed between Mill’s discourse on lyric isolation and the new phenomenological modes that were entering into aesthetics from psychology in the late nineteenth century, this chapter finds a distinctive mode of lyric encounter and a new lyric somatics in aestheticist poetry.