Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics

Participants in the “Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics” panel at MLA 2016, from left to right: Eliza Richards, Stephanie Youngblood, Jason Bell, Brian Yothers, and Karen Leona Anderson.

Photo courtesy of Maryse Jayasuriya.

The panel explores how androcentric traditions of literary criticism have limited our understanding of nineteenth-century poets’ experiments with the categories of body, form, and environment. The four papers suggest that Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville located authorial sovereignty at an indeterminate juncture between the human and the non-human. Though these poets are typically imagined to be experimental because they are “before their time” or “proto-modern,” these papers show how nineteenth-century poetics speak to contemporary anxieties surrounding materiality and the possibility of political subjectivity, challenging the parameters of individualized lyric expression. Starting from the premise that many extant critical frameworks obstruct an ability to engage with (or detect) nineteenth-century decentered or othered articulations of the self, the presenters go on to suggest that these articulations have a strong legacy in the twenty-first century. In conveying the possibilities of alternative configurations of sovereignty, they delineate a state of consciousness that eludes exceptionalist teleologies or totalizing representations of a lyric speaker. Through their poetic experiments, Melville and Dickinson ask us to question fully articulated contours of being and to think again about the coordinates of the self and its surroundings.

19th-Century Poetics in the 21st Century; or, What Melville and Dickinson Teach Us About 9/11
Stephanie Youngblood
Tulsa Community College

The relationship between testimony and literature is often understood through the framework of catastrophe or grief, but this emphasis on mourning encourages the perception that testimony is antithetical to politics. Nineteenth-century experimental poetics challenges that contention through indirect modes of response that facilitate political aesthetics. Specifically, lyric figures in Melville and Dickinson engage the so-called impossibility of representation that contemporary theorists, such as Jacques Rancière, say destroys the dissensus needed for politics. Lyric figures of voice, essential to traditional accounts of testimony, are central to the ways indirect aesthetic practices resist the normative bias that traditional testimony brings. Both Melville and Dickinson take up lyric through the figure of echo, which shifts lyric voice from a figure of connection with nature into a complex mixture of human and machine. Voice as echo is thus not simply a proto-modern fracturing of the self but instead points to the ways in which testimonial voice is always mediated by a mechanized reproduction; it is already a type of machine that challenges the equations we make between lyric voice and the figures of animation that seem to give it “life.” In Melville and Dickinson, echo both posits a Romantic notion of the origins of poetic voice and makes explicit the mechanistic means by which that voice—and testimonial response—emerge.

Melville, Dickinson, and Unspeakable Nature
Karen Leona Anderson
St. Mary’s College

From rhinoceros to mouse, from whale to insect: in this paper, I argue that the radical shifts in scale in Dickinson and Melville unmoor, sometimes violently and sometimes comically, a sense of scale predicated on human size and human understanding. Such unmooring challenges positivist forms of writing and reading. As alternatives, Dickinson offers the idealization of a language-less author and Melville offers an unreadable text. Human knowledge of other “things” is displaced by a form of sociable intersubjectivity between objects. Dickinson’s scale-shifting nonhuman personifications of a wordless “Nature” were likely informed both by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s omnipotent poet in Nature and by Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s feminized and child-centered natural theology in “The Sinless Child.” But if “Nature” functions for many nineteenth-century writers as a reassuring solution to the problem of the unmanageable scales of the nonhuman, Dickinson’s “Nature” tends to emphasize that unmanageability, correcting not the chaos of the nonhuman world but the solipsism of the exceptional human subject. I present Melville’s scale-shifting anthropomorphism as a central question of Moby-Dick, as its protagonists toggle between empathy for the nonhuman and its...