Search Results

This chapter examines the subjectivization of narrative in two Middle English romances. King Horn is largely narratorless; subjectivizing material includes statements of characters’ thought and feeling, explanations of motive, and emotional evaluation, but no individualization of a textual narrator. Synecdoche, equivalent to cinematic close-up, is a predominant figure. Like cinematic narrative, that of Horn is subjectivized yet impersonal. Havelok has an intermittent narratorial ‘I’ occupying space outside the story, enacting various roles, and intervening especially at transitional moments to convey partisan responses. Havelok claims historicity, yet often using free indirect style imagines its characters’ inner lives empathetically, and at one point even defines empathy.

This chapter begins from Kittredge’s exposition of the ‘dramatic principle’ in the Canterbury Tales, a work which apparently provides justification for understanding narrative as spoken in a fictional narrator’s ‘voice’. Analysis of its critical history shows that dislike of the Man of Law’s Tale has encouraged readings that displace blame for supposed deficiencies on to its teller. Recent interpretation, while subtler, continues the arbitrary separation of this major poem from its author and anachronistically attributes modern critics’ prejudices to Chaucer. It is argued that Chaucer, just beginning to explore narrative voicing, did not anticipate the dramatic monologue. Detailed stylistic analysis of the tale reveals the impossibility of distinguishing subjectivization from narrative substance, and of referring it to the consciousness of an individual teller. The chapter ends by noting in the tale a disturbed questioning that is obscured by unhistorical ‘dramatic’ interpretations.

The practices discussed in the book served not merely to diffuse spiritual practices among believers. They contributed to creating a new sense of self, a self that is constantly under its own surveillance, constantly examining itself and producing itself as a subject. As such, they document and affirm Michel Foucault's discussion, following other philosophers of modern subjecthood, of the uniqueness of modern subjectivization as a process that creates selves while submitting them to authority.

Although social science literature on sports fandom reduces its appeal to “basking in reflected glory” (BIRGing) and the euphoria of the stadium, this chapter focuses on the everyday practices of sports fans, arguing that sports fandom facilitates the cultivation and reproduction of individual and community identities. In Foucaultian terms, sports fandom is a practice of subjectivization—a means by which individuals both subordinate themselves to a discipline and achieve a sense of their own identities. Just as a religious practitioner obtains new self-knowledge by participating in confession, prayer, and the observance of Lent, the sports fan comes to understand him or herself as a particular sort of person through participation in the daily practices of sports fandom, which include knowledge acquisition, ritual performances, and participation in fan discourse. Through participation in these practices, sports fandom is instrumental in the production of masculine subjects, and of subjects who understand themselves as belonging to a specific (often racialized) community or region—as an “I” who is part of a particular “we.” Examples analyzed include Markovits and Albertson's (2012) study of women sports fans, Ole Miss fans' performance of white southernness, and the use of "we" pronouns in fan discourse.

The separate discussions of page and stage in Chapters 2 and 3 are followed in Chapters 4 and 5 by a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes—the subjectivization of space and the spatialization of the subject—manifest in both the poetry and drama of the period. As already made clear, space is presented in the works to be discussed not as objective outside but as emanation of character; by the same token, the subject does not remain fully demarcated from its surroundings, and exhibits varying degrees of spatial dispersion. Exploring various types of subjectivization and associated formal techniques such as collage, montage, and temporal telescoping, Chapter 4 focuses on Maeterlinck’s one-acts, Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ and ‘Lundi Rue Christine’, and Jarry’s Ubu roi.

Jacques Rancière’s democratic theory affirms not only an an-archic antifoundationalism, but also an everyday theory of political subjectivization and democratic appearance, through which “the power of the people” is “re-enacted ceaselessly by political subjects that challenge the police distribution of parts, places or competences, and that re-stage the anarchic foundation of the political.” This afterword focuses on Rancière’s conceptualization of the relationship between democracy as a politics without arche, and the singular acts of political subjectivization and democratic appearance that bring this contingency to light and enact it on the public stage. I turn first to Rancière’s work and then to an examination of a series of images created by the contemporary artist Glenn Ligon that critically engage with the Nation of Islam’s 1995 Million Man March. Ligon’s work provides an occasion for thinking in more historically and aesthetically detailed ways about the forms of everyday political speech and action that Rancière’s work brings into view as distinctive modes of democratic appearance.