David Carroll Simon

Eds. Matthew C. Augustine, Giulio J. Pertile, and Steven N. Zwicker (Oxford University Press, 2022).

This essay argues that Andrew Marvell's Last Instructions to a Painter should be read as a critique and an evasion of knowingness--of the feeling of contented possession that stands in for knowledge and so renders thinking superfluous. The poem suggests that sexuality is a domain of human experience from which ideologies of self-evidence draw affective strength. Marvell holds up for comparison two ignominious experiences of knowing incuriosity: the conventionalized version of sexual pleasure in which desire is simply and conclusively gratified and the form of pseudo-understanding in which you seem to discover what in fact you presuppose. On the basis of Marvell's diagnosis and rejection of a culture of incuriosity, he casts a suspicious gaze on his own practice of political satire, which depends on thoughtless sexualization. Finally, Marvell seeks an escape from the realm of self-evidence in an experience of hyperbolic naïveté in which everything everyone assumes--about, in the first place, sexuality, but also about everything else--melts into air.

 

Editors: Julia Lupton and Donovan Sherman.

Cambridge University Press, forthcoming fall 2022.

This essay identifies and anatomizes a cruel rite of friendship. In 1 Henry IV, Hal bullies Falstaff by inducing him to fail. Yet the play frames Hal’s comic brutality as an expression of fondness. Because Hal understands Falstaff’s failures as occasions for self-display, he also sees them as opportunities to savor what is distinctive about his friend’s personality. Hal also interprets Falstaff’s ineptitude as evidence of stuckness and thus of the durability of his character. For his part, Falstaff’s readiness to perform shamelessness seems to lower the stakes of his ongoing humiliation; he is habituated to helplessness. The essay concludes by considering some of the reasons for which Shakespeare might have chosen to narrate the development of trust against the contrastive background of ethical obligation. In a speculative mode, I suggest that any ethical program that does not prioritize the leveling of hierarchy over the inculcation of virtue—any ethical program that is not also (and, indeed, primarily) a politics—will inevitably remain bound up with social subordination. As long as virtue is not the object of collective negotiation but rather an imposition from on high, it will encourage confused and abusive responses such as Hal’s bid for solidarity in wildness. It is telling that Shakespeare locates the resistance to virtue even in the very person who benefits most from the values it reproduces.

Forthcoming: Fall, 2022.

This essay aims to understand the relationship between feeling and attention in gendered experiences of evaluative perception. Juxtaposing Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” with ancient and early modern descriptions of laughter, humor, and comedy, I develop a new reading of this poem in which unserious or gratuitous attention is identified with gender subordination. Marvell’s poem confuses the hierarchy of significance on which comic misogyny depends. I conclude by identifying some of the cultural-historical reasons that the scene of heteroerotic encounter makes sense as a point of departure for Marvell’s experiment in levity.

In each case, the event of injury conveys an eager insistence on the truth of some taken-for-granted assertion about the injured party. I discuss the role of comic atmosphere in encouraging such performative incuriosity, and I describe those strategies by which cruel pranksters enlist the participation of readers and spectators. Ultimately, I show that Shakespeare parts ways with Rabelais by undermining epistemological security, the desire for which helps motivate both the prank and whatever affirmation it elicits from witnesses.

Turning to Roland Barthes's 1977–78 lecture course at the Collège de France, an understudied precursor to post-critical agitation, I argue that he offers us concepts, “the neutral” and “the panorama,” that invite reflection on the affective conditions of reading. Yet here the “panorama” is no more than an intriguing sketch; Milton enriches our understanding of this concept by developing a detailed description of wayward visual attention. Exploring this dimension of Paradise Regained, I depart from the near-consensus view among scholars that the poem should be understood as a celebration of self-mastery. Ultimately, I show how Milton's account of the wandering eye both anticipates and challenges recent “post-critical” perspectives by modeling a knowingly unpredictable version of irenic reading.

While scholars have often looked to this period in order to narrate the triumph of methodical rigor as a quintessentially modern intellectual value, Simon describes the appeal of open-ended receptivity to the protagonists of the New Science. In straying from the work of self-possession and the duty to sift fact from fiction, early modern intellectuals discovered the cognitive advantages of the undisciplined mind.

This essay cuts against both accusatory and apologetic perspectives—but not by offering a competing moral evaluation.

This “peculiar affect” Simon argues, “discloses an unfamiliar history of experimentalism leading from Bacon’s late humanist conjectures to the laboratories of Marvell’s contemporaries.” Specifically, it examines this voice through the context of the “trauma of civil war” and “Marvell’s interest in Optics” (558). Simon concludes that “Marvell’s visionary carelessness” leads us to “consider freedom from discipline another pathway to understanding” (580).