Renée Bergland
Simmons College
Renée Bergland is Hazel Dick Leonard Research Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Simmons College in Boston. She wrote The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects and Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics. She edited Philosophies of Sex: Essays on Julia Ward Howe’s Hermaphrodite (with Gary Williams), and the forthcoming special issue of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Emily Dickinson and Others. She is at work on two gradually emerging books: one about Hawthorne, Melville, James, and the sexing of the novel, another on Dickinson’s planetary poetics.
The emergence of the "New Materialisms" as a research agenda within the humanities implies a break with the mechanical, anthropocentric materialisms of previous centuries. It opens up new vistas in regards to materiality,... [ view full abstract ]
The emergence of the "New Materialisms" as a research agenda within the humanities implies a break with the mechanical, anthropocentric materialisms of previous centuries. It opens up new vistas in regards to materiality, challenging easy divisions between materialism and idealism, agency and passivity, subject and object, even life and death. This panel asks how nineteenth-century American Studies transforms such investigations by introducing the premise that the new materialist break is not a unique event but an underground current stretching from the early modern period to the present. Each paper examines the way in which nineteenth-century U.S. literature participates in heretical materialisms, replacing truisms about the hard rock of the Real with strange models of materiality. Literary practices by Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Emily Dickinson, among others, materialize the ideal and the spiritual in organic and inorganic bodies. These practices suggest that scholars might do better to think materiality as a climate: a diffuse, yet consistent, medium of action; a plane of immanence irreducible to tangible objects. Finally, the papers on this panel constitute acts of speculation in their own right, wagering that the poetics of nineteenth-century materialism rhymes with our own times.
Bergland:
Although many scholars focus on the materiality of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts, few discuss Dickinson's own speculation on the material. This paper relates variants in "Because that you are going," and "Yesterday is History" to geological and biological materialism. Cristanne Miller designates both poems as "loose poems" because they were preserved separately. They are also compositionally and rhetorically loose: riddled with variants, syntactically ambiguous, insistently open, fluttering between affirmation and negation, materiality and mystery. "Fossil, Flutter" reads the overlooked tracks in "Because that you are going" as fossil footprints, arguing that the poem responds to the nineteenth-century entanglements of geology and theology by invoking the rhetoric of apophasis—not saying—in order to express theological apophasis—neoplatonic affirmation by negation. It also offers a reading of the "Flutter" that concludes "Yesterday is History," contending that Dickinson's "loose" poems flutter between the ideal and the material, formally enacting a planetary apophasis that emerges from the stone footprints that "Noah's Ravens" pressed through sedimentary layers of stone, from the fragile wings and racing heartbeats of bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and from the tattered fragments of paper that Dickinson half-heartedly preserved.
