Towards a New Literary Humanism (review)

A return to the consideration of humanism is not only validated by current theoretical trends but, Mousley argues, it is also a way to defend a discipline that has always been entwined with humanistic concerns. With recent critical voices announcing our arrival "after theory," humanism may thus be due its share, even if it must resist the term's traditional assumptions by accounting for trends in post-humanism. What here results is a collection of twelve short essays that variously interrogate the status of both humanism and the human in an ambitious array of texts, including works of William Shakespeare, George Eliot, and Judith Butler as well as Horse-Whispering Writings, Nineteenth-Century British Socialist Periodicals, and the contemporary poetry of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The wide variety of texts and approaches also implies that one must take the titular "towards" seriously, as a particular open-endedness typifies this collection that is offered more in the spirit of conversation than as a group of essays mobilized under the banner of a consolidated methodological approach. Nonetheless, the thematic return to such pivotal questions begins to clear the ground for a new humanism even if its final character remains indistinct.

Mousley's Introduction provides a quick historical overview of the proposed new humanism alongside a suggested critical vocabulary. Against the optimistic Renaissance brand that celebrates the near divinity of man, the new humanism instead implies a critically self-aware and skeptical approach to literature as a "surrogate form of theology" (6). The point is thus that the new humanism is literary, focusing on the way in which books stage and mediate "selves'" experience of "meaning of meaning" questions (5). For instance (and in terms that belie the certain simplicity that marks the Introduction), literature provides a "form of emotional and sensuous immersion" that leads to "developing 'deep', rich and complex selves" (13; 14). Indeed, the critical lexicon Mousley provides oscillates, by his own admission, between essentialist and anti-essentialist tendencies, and this, at times, brings about a tacit dispute between introductory and substantial chapters. Indeed, most of the essays do not widely embrace the terminology here set forth and, as the caveat section attests, at least six either bristle against introductory assumptions or offer terms of their own. The volume, as Mousley puts it, is a "broad church, which allows for heresy" (17).

Essays are presented in three groups, each with an introduction that offers a rationale and summaries. The first section is primarily concerned with the literary exploration of "relationality" and the border of the human. Styler's analysis of Anne Brontë's poetry argues for the primacy of the literary in the poet's emotional needs—here seen through the lens of Christian existentialism—as well as a modified transcendence that allows for identification "with the collective" (39). Using the model of vitalism, Martin's analysis of Woolf thoughtfully extends these considerations to the "edge of sympathetic transcendence" by focusing on the alienating effect of emotion common to all (47). Thus, against the rationalist assumptions of humanism, we are instead offered a relational model based on attunement and intuition, which is broadened to include inter-species relationships in Graham's work on Horse-Whispering narratives. Drawing on the work of Levinas, and Deleuze and Guattari, Graham highlights a de-centered model of humanness in which "the animal, the intuitive, the fully relational can be recognized as an aspect of our embodiment as humans" (76). Arteel, by focusing on the affective force of language, confronts Butler's association with anti-humanism by tracking the subtle development of the "catechretic human" who, through literary experience, is able to rethink the very category of the human.

The second group of essays, however, is more broadly skeptical of humanism. Drawing on the work of Žižek, Chamberlain provides a fascinating consideration of the figure of the "refuser" in Shakespeare who, he argues, demonstrates a radical resistance to not only the symbolic but also the communitarian ideal implicit in both literary humanism and anti-humanism...