MCM Faculty & Staff : Nancy Armstrong
Website
http://research.brown.edu/myresearch/Nancy_Armstrong
Office Hours
70 Brown Street, Room 340
Tuesday 1:30-3:00
or by appt.
Phone Number
401-863-3728
Email Address
Courses
2006-2007 Course Listing on BOCA
Biography
Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) inaugurated a way of thinking about the relation between gender issues and political issues as represented by British fiction. To quote one review, this book "made a whole different series of readings possible; it changed the ways in which feminist critics of these novels saw the work these texts did; it changed the way we thought about public and private, agency and oppression, writing and action, giving us a far broader sense of the cultural work that novels do, as they translate political information into narratives about sex, gender and desire." That 15 years later scholars still feel compelled to argue against Desire and Domestic Fiction is a sign of its continuing influence in the field of novel studies.
Desire and Domestic Fiction was followed in 1992 by The Imaginary Puritan, a book coauthored with Len Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan focuses on the 17th and 18th centuries and the relationship between the emergence of the author and the transformation of England into a modern nation state. This book is considered a pioneer study in the field of Transatlantic Literary Relations. By reading the British novel Pamela as a continental version of the American captivity narrative, this study calls attention to the power the novel attributes to the printed word, the power to create both authors and readers so that they appear to exist outside of and before writing.
In Fiction in the Age of Photography (1999), Armstrong returns to the 19th century to rethink literary realism in relationship to the new art of photography. This book is really about the onset of mass visuality and how visual images came to have the power they have today. Fiction doesn't merely react to the development of photography but anticipates that development by promising to get its reader in touch with the world through visual information. This alternative theory of realism combats the claim of one strand of cultural theory that reality, history and humanity as we know it have receded into spaces as yet untouched by mass-reproducible images: the past, art, and the third world. Rather than locate the real outside the image, Fiction in the Age of Photography argues for a theory and a politics that takes into account and accepts responsibility for the reality of the image.
This past fall (2005) saw the publication of How Novels Think. This book argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same. Certain works of fiction formulated a subject in excess of itself, one displaying wit, will, or simply energy capable of shifting the social order, if ever so slightly, to grant the exceptional person a place commensurate to his or her individual worth. Once the novel had created this figure, readers returned the favor and understood themselves in terms of a developmental narrative aimed at producing a fully gratified and yet self-governing subject.
In laying out this tautology, How Novels Think emphasizes the degree to which the fantasy of individualism -as it took shape in novels by Defoe, Richardson, and Austen-was shaped in response to alternative models of subject formation. Usually dismissed as "romance" or "gothic," these other narrative possibilities were in fact many and various and saved the developmental narrative from the parochialism of being the only game in town. Although the novel, like the individual it brought into being, seemed ever on the defense against excessive forms of individualism, on the one hand, and forms of collectivity that would obliterate individual differences, on the other, both novel and individual came to depend rhetorically on overcoming such obstacles.
A new project provisionally titled Gothic Remains picks up where How Novels Think leaves off and consider gothic's long relationship with normative fiction as an indication they are in some way necessary to one another. The argument begins by reading Locke's individual as a defensive reaction to the mass body surviving in the print material from the 1665 plague that Defoe assembled in A Journal of the Plague Year. Throughout the modern period, this body continues to shape gothic literature, which serves as the bearer in phobic form to the contractual model of society as a collective of self-governing individuals. Gothic fiction collaborates with the mainstream novel to make residual thinking of this kind not only available to a modern readership but also unthinkable.