Department of English

• Thursday, September 10, 2015 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

FBH, room 401

Please join us for the next lecture in the Departmental Lecture Series. Professor Helen Deutsch (UCLA) will be presenting her talk, titled “Disability, Irony, Untimeliness: The Lateness of Jonathan Swift.” The event will take place at 4:30pm in 401 Fisher-Bennett Hall.

Helen Deutsch teaches and researches at the crossroads of eighteenth-century studies and disability studies, with particular emphases on questions of authorship, originality, and embodiment across a variety of genres. Her ongoing research questions include the relation of eighteenth-century authors to classical models (in shaping literary style, authorial careers and gendered identities), the multifaceted connection between physical embodiment and literary form, the interplay between visual and printed cults of authorship and the phenomenon of author-love more broadly considered, and the formative relationship between bodily difference and modern individuality. In addition to the volumes listed above, some of her recent articles have considered the anecdote as literary “thing,” the exemplary queer intimacy of Jonathan Swift’s Stella poems, the formative role of disability in the construction of the eighteenth-century English canon, and the paradoxes of bodily individuality and moral exemplarity inherent in the history of the essay form from Montaigne to Randolph Bourne. Her recent graduate seminars have explored topics including the literary and cultural history of deformity, the eighteenth-century origins of the current academic preoccupation with “thing theory,” the philosophy and literature of friendship, and eighteenth-century lyric form.  In addition she regularly teaches a senior seminar on illness narrative and disability theory, as well as an introduction to disability studies. An NEH fellow in residence at the Huntington Library in the academic year 1998-9, she has served on the MLA Executive Committee of the Division of Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature, as a Member at Large on the board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, as an advisory editor for PMLA and as a member of the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. A proud Johnsonian, she is working on a two new book projects, one on gendered subjectivity, embodiment, and intimate literary forms such as the essay and the verse epistle, the other on the literary afterlife of Jonathan Swift, best exemplified by one of his most passionate readers, Edward Said.

Abstract: Jonathan Swift’s irony displaces us not only metaphorically and ethically but also temporally, an untimeliness I will characterize, drawing upon the work of one of Swift’s most passionate interlocutors, Edward Said, as “late.” Such irony leaves no firm ground upon which to build either a monument to oneself or a barrier to divide oneself from the inhuman, or the inhumane.  The reader’s encounter with Swift thus proves the unsurpassable example of what Ato Quayson has described as “aesthetic nervousness” in the history of English literature. Quayson defines “aesthetic nervousness” as a kind of sublime dismantling “of the dominant protocols of representation” in confrontation with disability.  The experience of reading Swift forces the abjectly disabled being he defined, through his ironic mouthpiece Gulliver as “a lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride,” and the human reader, into identity.  Swift’s irony thus short-circuits not just dominant protocols of representation but also dominant ethical categories. To read Swift is be at once humbled by and freed from the limits of the human.  

Much of the history of Swift criticism can be characterized as a collective recoil from such aesthetic nervousness: for many readers, from Swift’s first biographer the Earl of Orerry (1751) and continuing through many twentieth-century diagnostic efforts and literary portrayals, the ethical challenge of Swift’s irony proved so unbearable that it was easier to dismiss as a symptom of Swift’s personal aberrations (most significantly a fear of madness linked to a singularly queer sexuality in the popular imagination) than to confront its demand for self-reflection.  It was easier in other words to judge (or diagnose) Swift the man than to be judged by his satire.  This talk will begin to explore this history with an eye toward considering the utopian possibilities Swift’s untimely irony affords.